The Amu Darya

Where it is

The Amu Darya rises in the Pamirs and runs some 2,400 kilometres north-west through Tajikistan, along the Afghan border, and across Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan toward what is left of the Aral Sea. It is Central Asia's largest river by volume and it crosses one of its driest regions, so almost everything alongside it is there because of it. Below its confluences it gains no significant tributaries at all: it runs for well over a thousand kilometres through desert, losing water the whole way.

The land and water around it

• The Pamir headwatersmountains

  Glacier and snowmelt in the Pamirs supply most of the flow. That makes the river's water a stored asset released in summer, and it makes it sensitive to what happens to the glaciers.

• The Karakumdesert

  The desert the river skirts and is drawn into. The Karakum Canal, one of the largest irrigation canals in the world, takes water west across it — much of it historically lost to seepage and evaporation before arriving.

• The delta and the Araldelta

  The river's delta at the southern Aral. For much of the late twentieth century almost no water reached it at all, and the delta lakes and reedbeds that fishing and herding depended on largely went.

Its history, in short

As the Oxus, this river was the boundary the Greeks reached and the frontier between settled Transoxiana and the steppe. Along it stood Khorezm, Balkh, Termez and Kunya-Urgench, and the irrigated oases it fed supported cities for millennia. The Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century destroyed both the cities and, critically, the canal systems, and the region did not recover its former population for centuries. In the nineteenth century the river became the line between Russian and British spheres, and in the twentieth the Soviet Union expanded irrigation from it on an enormous scale for cotton — the decision that emptied the Aral Sea.

Timeline

Dates are shown on a timeline rather than as changing shapes on the map. The globe draws modern boundaries only, and tinting a modern outline to stand for a historical one would state something we cannot source.

Places that carry meaning

• Kunya-Urgench10th–14th centuries

  The Khorezmian capital on the lower river, destroyed by the Mongols and again by Timur, and never rebuilt on the same scale. What stands are minarets and mausolea in open ground.

• Itchan Kala, KhivaLargely 18th–19th centuries

  The walled inner town of the last khanate on the river, and the most completely preserved. It was also a major slave market until Russian annexation, which the architecture does not advertise.

• The Aral seabedLate 20th century onward

  Exposed lakebed, saline and dusty, with salt and agricultural chemicals lifted off it by wind. The dust is a public health problem across a wide area downwind.

Learn the language here

1. 1Understand which languages are spoken hereThe Amu Darya is multilingual. Start with which languages are used, by whom, and for what — the phrase list only covers one of them.Written by Globe Quest

Check yourself

• What is unusual about the Amu Darya's lower course?

  It gains no significant tributaries for over a thousand kilometres

  It crosses desert losing water the whole way, which is why abstraction upstream has such a large downstream effect.

• Was the Aral Sea's shrinkage foreseen?

  Yes — planners anticipated it and accepted it as the price of cotton

  This was a deliberate trade-off, not an accident, which changes what kind of lesson it is.

Worth arguing about

• A sea was traded for a crop, knowingly. Who should have been able to refuse that trade?
• Upstream holds the water, downstream holds the fields, and the agreement they inherited was written by a state that no longer exists. How should that be settled?

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