Amu Dar'ya
The longest river in Central Asia (length measurements vary between 2,200 and 2,500 kilometers), the Amu Dar'ya (Oxus) has two annual floods: in the spring, from precipitation, and in the summer, from the Pamir Mountains' melting glaciers and snows. On contemporary political maps, the Amu Dar'ya begins with two streams rising in the Pamirs plateau in northwestern Afghanistan, continues northwest through the Hindu Kush, forming the boundary between Tajikistan and northeastern Afghanistan, then flows west and northwest through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, into the marshes on the south shore of the Aral Sea in the Karakalpak Autonomous Republic. Its delta at the mouth is about 161 kilometers long, and the river basin is some 466,000 square kilometers.
The river's lower extent and associated oases divide the Kara-Kum and Kyzyl Kum Deserts and have been critical to the cultural ecologies of Central Asia throughout the history of human occupation. Beginning with early hunter-gatherers, societies arose in the river's proximity and developed complex economies based on systems of agriculture, pastoralism, or both. Bronze Age irrigation projects allowed the region's first urban civilizations to emerge; ancient qalas (fortified cities) became local political and commercial centers. Collectively these civilizations' early city-states became the basis of wider regional and extraregional trade networks, such as those from as early as the third and second centuries BCE making up the Silk Road through Central Asia. While societies rose and declined along the Amu Dar'ya throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages and afterward, effective irrigation was a constant concern for the region's aristocratic and commercial elite; some speculate, for instance, that Khworezm's shift of capitals to Khiva was due largely to natural alterations of the Amu Dar'ya.
Beyond the origins of societies and urbanization, the Amu Dar'ya was also a symbolic frontier in Central Asian history. For the Achaemenid rulers of Persia (c. 553–331 BCE) the river bounded the region they controlled or sought to advance beyond; cities were founded along its course in Alexander of Macedon's pacification campaign of the fourth century BCE; it marked a limit to the subsequent Chinese advance into Central Asia (second century BCE); and since medieval times it constituted a powerful psychological (and often geopolitical) boundary separating Turkic and Iranic peoples and states. Its seventh-century crossing by Arab armies represented the advance of Islam. Over the following centuries, enabled by an increased construction of irrigation works known as qanats or kariz and by the investments of new regional leaders and states during and after Islamicization, urban centers grew both in terms of their populations and infrastructure. This was a period of cultural (e.g., architectural, literary, artistic, and so forth) florescence due to the patronage of local and regional elites.
In the early eighteenth century Peter the Great commissioned the Amu Dar'ya's exploration with thehope of securing a route to India, though the region was not fully under Russian control until the twentieth century. Associated with cotton production for centuries, this part of Central Asia was the core region in Leninist plans for the Soviets to attain self-sufficiency in this commodity. A water-intensive crop, cotton cultivated at this scale in this environment required massive irrigation projects (e.g., Turkmenistan's Kara-Kum Canal, the largest in Central Asia). The consequence of these projects was environmental degradation of catastrophic proportions, with destruction of the river's deltas, desiccation of the Aral Sea, associated climatic changes, exhaustion and salinization of once productive lands, and declines in local food production.
Though cotton production peaked in 1977 at more than 5.5 million metric tons, construction of man-made diversions continued into the post-Soviet era. By the mid-1990s more than seventy thousand irrigation canals were in operation, and their collective inefficiency is considerable; most waters diverted are actually lost to seepage and evaporation. Alleviation of this worsening crisis is not likely, due to the increasing development demands of the states and societies in question (primarily Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan), their perceived lack of alternatives, barriers to the scale of multinational cooperation critical to its resolution, and the ongoing and cumulative degradation of local and regional ecosystems.
Further Reading
Bernard, Paul. (1994) "An Ancient Greek City in Central Asia." Scientific American 5, 1: 66–75.
Glantz, Michael H., ed. (1999) Creeping Environmental Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Le Strange, Guy. ([1905] 1966) The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur. Reprint. London: Frank Cass.
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