Alexander’s farthest Alexandria still sits on Central Asia’s Jaxartes
The Syr Darya—ancient Jaxartes—runs about 2,256 kilometres from the Tian Shan toward the remnants of the Aral Sea. Soviet irrigation later diverted so much of this river and the Amu Darya that the Aral, once the world’s fourth-largest lake, virtually vanished.
Persian and Tajik speakers hear darya as sea or river; Syr may mean “secret” in Tajik, though the compound itself is only eighteenth-century. Greeks wrote Iaxartes; V. A. Livshits reads an older Iranian Yaksart root meaning “flowing” or “streaming.” When Alexander reached the banks in 329 BC after crossing Bactria and Sogdia without opposition, local resistance suddenly stiffened. He garrisoned the City of Cyrus—Cyropolis—renaming it Alexandria Eschate, “Alexandria the furthest,” on these shores. That October his army fought the Saka at the Battle of Jaxartes, killing about 1,200 of them, and since the Muslim conquest of the 7th and 8th centuries the city has been known as Khujand.
Russian conquest of Turkestan in the mid-19th century brought steamers, first from Fort Raim and then from a busy port at Kazalinsk, now Kazaly, which operated from 1847 until service stopped in 1882. Under the Soviet system, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan released summer water to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and received coal, gas and electricity in winter; that bargain broke down after 1991 and has never been restored. Soviet canals for cotton and rice took so much water that at times none reached the Aral at all.
The river forms where the Naryn and Kara Darya meet in the Uzbek part of the Fergana Valley. It drains more than 800,000 km², though no more than 160,000 km² contributes much water, and it irrigates Central Asia's most productive farmland before passing the Shardara Dam, linked to Aydar Lake, and turning west into the North Aral Sea. Where it leaves Tajikistan, at 300 m, lies that country's lowest point. Uranium levels in Tajik stretches reach 43 micrograms per litre, above the WHO drinking-water guideline of 30, mostly from sources upstream. The endemic Syr Darya sturgeon, unseen since 1960, is probably extinct, and in 2012 Kazakhstan opened the Syrdarya–Turkestan regional natural park to protect the floodplain.
Source: Syr Darya
