Amu Darya (the Oxus)

The river was known in antiquity as Oxos (Latin Oxus), and its length is given as 2,494-2,540 km. The present Iranian name is traced to the town of Amul, later Amu, where the route from Khurasan to Transoxania crossed the river in the early Islamic period. The Arabs and Islamicised Persians, especially in learned works, called it Djayhun, a name derived from the biblical Gihon, one of the rivers of Paradise. In Sasanian times it was called Weh-rod or Beh-rod. The lands north of the river were called Ma wara' al-Nahr, 'the land beyond the river', Transoxania. ²

The Amu Darya rises from several rapid headwaters. The most southerly of them, the Pandj, rises in the Pamir; on the right bank it receives the Ghund and the Ak Su, and further tributaries follow. The most important tributary of the Pandj is the Wakhshab, which the Zafarnama of 'Ali Yazdi treats as the upper course of the Amu Darya; today the Ak Su is favoured by modern geography. The Arabic geographers did not fully grasp the sources, and the naming of the headwaters, as worked out by Barthold and accepted by Minorsky, remains controversial. ²

In the upper region lie Wakhan on the Pandj, then Badakhshan on both sides, Shughnan with Gharan, and Darwaz. Between the Amu Darya and the Wakhsh lies Ghuttalan. In medieval times the area between the Wakhsh and the Kafirnihan held Washdjird and Kuwadhiyan, and the Surkhan valley the province of Caghaniyan; on the left bank, west of Badakhshan, lay Tukharistan, approximately as far as Balkh. ¹

At this point the river enters the desert between the Kara Kum and the Kizil Kum, losing much of its water to evaporation, and skirts ancient Sogdia. The Amirates of Bukhara and Khiva lay there in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the frontier settlement of 1886-1893 the river forms the northern frontier of Afghanistan for about 1,100 km; since 1924 it has been the southern boundary of Tajikistan; and after the provincial frontiers were revised in 1936 it separates Uzbekistan, including the Karakalpak delta, from Turkmenistan. ³