Central Asia Timeline

The book I've been referencing for information about Central Asia is due tomorrow, so instead of all that other stuff I wanted to talk about, I'd like to put up a simple timeline of events in the area of Central Asia. In case you think I'm talking about recent events, I leave that to other sites devoted to the goings on over there.
This is about ancient history. Total picture. What events transformed the region, created the cultural mix that is seen there today.
So, without further ado.

Prehistory: Earliest known human remains are in the area of Samarkand (present day Uzbekistan), circa 100,000 years ago. After the ice age peoples passed through from and to India, Persia and Siberia.

c.330 BC: Alexander the Great conquers the area between the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya, Helenizing the region. Trade with the west begins.

c.250 BC: The Xiongnu, forbearers of the Huns, begin to apply pressure to cultures in western China (and China itself) and push them west into Central Asia. Chinese explorer, Zang Qian, reaches the area and sets the stage for the Silk Road.

c.100 BC - 100AD: The Kushan empire, descendents of those pushed out of China, converts to Buddhism and thrives on Silk Road trade.

c.0 AD - 1000 AD: Pendulum shifts in power between nomadic hordes and sedentary civilizations. Both benefit from the trade between east and west.

c.200AD: Chinese and Roman empires fade, depressing the Silk Road trade, signaling the end of the Kushan empire.

c.300-400AD: Huns arrive from Mongolia and control vast tracts of central Asia. Attila is rampaging across Europe at this time.

c.550 AD: The Turks arrive from southern Siberia and form an alliance with the Sassanids (Persia) and drive out the Huns. The alliance is a peaceful one and the two cultures mix together.

c.642-714AD: Islamic armies charge into the region and battle the Turks until capturing much of southern central Asia. Turkish Uyghurs entered from the north, allied with the Chinese, and checked the Muslim armies at the Tien Shan mountains (basically the border of China today). The Uyghur descendents still inhabit most of western China today.

c. 800s: Arabic empire recedes and the peaceable Samanids rise, allied with the Persians and the caliph of Baghdad. The city of Bukhara (in present day Uzbekistan) becomes the "Pillar of Islam" as a world center of Muslim culture.

c. 900-1000 AD: The Samanids fall, and various Turkish tribes invade and conquer one after another. The pattern was one of dynasties near inability to survive inevitable disputes of succession. The last of these was the Khorezmshahs, who ended up ruling much of the Muslim world at the time.

1219 AD: Jenghiz (Gengis) Khan rides from his mountain stronghold in the Altai mountains (Southern Siberia and Northwest Mongolia) and sacks most of Central Asia, burning Bukhara to the ground. By the end, his empire stretched from China and Mongolia to Persia and even the Ukraine in Eurasia. The empire was divided up among Jenghiz's sons and grandsons (Kubla getting China/Mongolia).
The hordes were primarily nomads, but by the mid 14th century many of them finally settled down into more sedentary civilizations. The only remaining nomadic cultures remained on the Kazakh steppe and in modern Turkmenistan.

1395 AD: Timur leads a renegade nomadic tribe on a conquest of central Asia, as far south as India. This was enabled by the fracture of the Mongolian empire into Muslim and non-Muslim empires, shrinking the amount of trouble Timur had to deal with.
Timur's fracturing of the Mongol empire in the Russian Steppes led to petty Russian princes taking power over their domains. The Russian Empire would form from their alliances.
The court of Timur develops Chaghatai, which becomes the lingua franca of Central Asia for centuries.

More later.