Azerbaijan

From the fire-altars of Caucasian Albania and the Shirvanshahs' Baku to the oil boom, the 1918 republic, Soviet rule and renewed independence.

The land between the Greater Caucasus and the Caspian Sea carries one of the deepest records of human habitation in the region — the 40,000-year-old rock art of Gobustan, the ancient kingdom of Caucasian Albania, and a Zoroastrian heritage of natural-gas fires that gave Azerbaijan its name as the "land of fire." After the Arab conquests brought Islam in the seventh century and the Seljuks made Oghuz Turkic the dominant tongue, the medieval Shirvanshahs built their walled capital at Baku around the Maiden Tower, and the Safavids of Ardabil drew the country into the Persian world. Russia annexed the eastern Caucasus khanates by the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828), and the late-nineteenth-century Baku oil boom made the city a world energy capital. In 1918 the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic became the first secular parliamentary republic in the Muslim world before Soviet annexation in 1920; the modern Republic of Azerbaijan restored its independence on 18 October 1991.