66

Oxus and Jaxartes have never changed | have in such standard works as those of their course, but from time immemorial Strabo and Pliny and Ptolemy, a reprehave disembogued into the Aral Sea, pre- sentation of the true hydrography of Eastcisely as is the case at the present day. ern Persia for about 500 years before and On the other hand, it has been roundly asserted by geographers of almost equal weight, that the Aral has fluctuated at different periods of history between the condition of a great inland sea and that of a reedy marsh, according to the varying course of its two feeders, the Oxus and Jaxartes; and has sometimes even, when the supply of water from those feeders has been entirely cut off for a lengthened period, disappeared altogether from the map of Asia. We have reason to believe that this curious question of physical hydrography, which has been already partially ventilated before the Geographical Society of London,* will, in the course of their ensuing session, be subjected to further rigid inquiry, and will receive probably a definite solution; but, in the meantime, a brief recapitulation of the changes which the Aral is said to have undergone, and of the evidence on which those asserted changes depend, may not perhaps be out of place as an introduction to Marco Polo's own view of the geography of Central Asia.

after the Christian era. As late, indeed, as A.D. 570, when Zemarchus returned from his mission to the Turkish Khagan, then encamped in the Ak-Tagh, north of Samarcand, and crossed the Oech (or Vakh," probably the right arm of the Oxus), near the city of Urganj, he found the Aral, not yet developed to the condition of an inland sea, but still bearing the character of a large reedy morass; * and it was not probably till thirty or forty years later, during the reign of Khusrú Parvíz, that the great change took place which cut off the water of the Oxus entirely from the Caspian. and turned the full stream into the Aral- the sea of Kardar, which was the south-western portion of the present Abugír Lake, and which had been probably fed, up to that date, by the Urganj branch of the river, being at the same time desiccated, and a treasurecity (the modern Berrasin Gelmaz?) being thus exposed, which had been submerged in remote antiquity, and which, according to Persian tradition, required twelve years of unremitting labour to excavate and rifle of its riches.†

Among the ancients, then, Herodotus and Strabo are the only authors who can From this period till the rise of the be supposed from their writings to have Mongol power the Aral continued to abhad any cognizance of the existence of the sorb the entire stream of the two great Aral; and their description applies, not to rivers; and, if we may form an opinion a large independent sea, but rather to a se- from the consentient testimony of the Arab ries of reedy swamps, fed by the overflow-geographers, it must have exhibited for six ing of the Jaxartes, the main arm of which consecutive centuries very much the same river, however, found its way to the Caspian. All other writers simply bring the Oxus and Jaxartes iuto the Caspian without any allusion to the deflexion or bifur-bulus was in the country of the Sogdians, and cercation of either stream, estimating the distance between the mouths of the two rivers at about eighty parasangs; and when we consider the extent of information at the disposal of the Greek and Ro-left bank of the old bed of the Jaxartes. At any man geographers, when we remember that Greek princes ruled for some centuries in the countries between Persia and the Indian Caucasus, that Greek admirals navigated the Caspian, and Greek commanders penetrated beyond the Jaxartes, while the merchants who followed the caravan routes from India to the Mediterranean brought their journals and road-books to Rome, it seems impossible to doubt but that we

* See " Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society," vol xi. no. iii. p. 114; and "Journal of the Royal Gec graphical Society," vol. xxxvii. President's Addres.), p. 140.

* The geography of the expedition of Zemarchus has, we think, been quite misunderstood by Colonel Yule (Cathay, vol. i. p. clxiii). The camp of Dizatainly, therefore, not beyond the Jaxartes. The name of Talas, indeed, which has led Colonel Yule astray, did not apply in the seventh century to the town and river which bore that title in later ti nes. The Choliata (or Khalajat?) probably dwelt on the rate the Roman party must have struck the Aral marshes at their south-eastern corner, and thus skirted round their southern edge, the short deserttrack which was followed by George and his party on their return to Byzantium being the direct line from Urganj to Asterabad, and so on by the north of Persia to Asia Minor. This short cut, indeed, is quite inexplicable if we suppose Zemarchus to have passed to the north of the Aral marshes. Dictionary under the head of Kardar. The rufus of †This tradition is cited by Yacut in his great the enchanted castle of Berrasin Gelmaz ("From which there is no return ") are described by Abbott land in the sea of Aral, but in the map accompany(vol. i. p. 211), who supposed them to occupy an is ing Boutakoff's Survey (" Royal Geographical Soci ety's Journal," vol. xxiii. p. 94), the same place famous for the rich treasures deposited in its vaults," is laid down under the name of Barsa Kil mesh in the salt marsh immediately adjoining the Abugir Lake.

appearance as at present. There were or southern arm of the river; for the chanmany changes, no doubt, in the "delta" of nel described by Hamdullah, in his acthe Oxus. The successive capitals of Fíl, count of the Oxus, is not the northern or of Mansúreh, and of Kát, which were all in Urganj branch, but that which flowed from the same vicinity, at the southern apex of Hazarasp by the pass of Muslim and Kurthe delta, were destroyed by inundations láwá to Akrícheh on the Caspian, the point of the river, between the ninth and twelfth of embouchure being probably at the modcenturies, and there was also much shift-ern position of Akteppeh, a short distance ing of stream between the various irriga-north of the mouth of the Atrek. The tion canals, which extended 100 miles into the desert to the west; but no drop of water, either from the Oxus or Jaxartes, seems during all this period to have reached the Caspian. It was in A.D. 1221 that Octáí Khán, the son of Jenghiz, at the siege of Urganj, first broke the Oxus dam which regulated the influx of water for irrigation purposes into the old channel, and thus, bringing the whole force of the current against the city walls, undermined them, and levelled them with the earth. We are not told what was the full effect of this removal of the dam, or if the operation was assisted by the construction of a barrier across the Aral branch above the point of deviation; but a few years afterwards, in A.D. 1224, we find the first notice (in Yacút's description of Mangashlágh) of the Oxus having again forced its way to the Caspian; and we are warranted therefore in ascribing the great change in physical geography which set in from this time, and which ended in the desiccation of the Aral, to Octáí's artificial disruption of the Urganj dyke; the more certainly as Hamdullah Mustow fi the Persian Eratosthenes, as he is called by Jaubertin describing in the following century (about A.D. 1330) the alteration of the course of the Oxus from the Aral to the Caspian, specifically says that the diversion took place about the time of the rise of the Mongol power. There must have been, however, almost simultaneously with the destruction of Urganj, a second crisis on the Oxus, which opened the upper

A very curious accouut of the castle of 'Ir, the residence of the kings of Kharism, was quoted from Abu Rihan, in the Quarterly Review," no. 240, p. 491. There can be little doubt but that this is the same castle belonging to the royal city of Kat, which is described by the Arab geographers, and which was destroyed by the river between the visit of Istakhri in A.D. 951 and the visit of the Ibn Haukal in about 970 (see Goeje's "Viæ Regnorum," p. 301). Abu Rihan's date of A.S. 1305 (which cannot be earlier than A.D. 982), however, requires explanation, and his use of the Hebrew synonym of 'Ir "the city," for the vernacular Kat, or Arabic Medineh, is equally remarkable. The old Kharismian name of Fil had probably the same meaning, being altered from Vird, "a city," according to the same orthographical law which has formed Sal "a year,' from Sard; Gul "a rose," from Ward; Dil "the heart," from Hrid; Pal-ang "a leopard," from Pard; &c., &c.

traces of this southern arm were observed by Abbott near the point of deviation at Hazarasp. Vambery gives the name of Döden to a station two stages farther on to the WSW., thus marking the course of the old bed, which is always so called by the Turcomans; and Arthur Conolly carefully examined the lower part of the same channel near the Kuran hills, through which no doubt passed the defile of Muslim.* There is further abundant evidence of the course of this southern arm in the local records; and in fact in all probability it represents the original Oxus of the Greek geographers, which passed in the neighbourhood of the Barcani (Vehrkán or Gurgán), and disembogued to the north of the Socanda (or Atrek), a trace of which name remains in the Ab-oskún of the Arabs the northern arm which passed by old Urganj and discharged itself into the Bay of Balkán, and the dry bed of which has been observed by Muravief and Vambery, and by all the Russian surveyors, being probably the original channel by which the Jaxartes reached the sea, after throwing off a portion of its waters into the Aral marshes. There is also a very curious passage in Hamdullah Mustowfi's account of the Caspian Sea, in which he says that, owing to the influx of the Oxus waters for the preceding century the level of the sea had so risen in his day (A.D. 1330) as to submerge the famous port of Aboskun and the adjacent parts, and he further speculates that this increment will continue until the incoming and outgoing are brought to an equilibrium, that is until the absorption by evaporation exactly equals the volume of water thrown into the sea through the various rivers which feed it.

Passing over the lapse of another century, during which the Oxus continued to pour its entire volume into the Caspian Sea, while the Jaxartes was either lost in the desert or struggied painfully to join the Oxus along the line of lakes to the SE.

See "Abbott's Travels," vol. i. p. 60, and "Conolly's Travels," vol. i. p. 51, sqq. Compare also Vambery's Map, attached to his Travels," and his notice of the Turcoman name of Doden, p. 106.

*

of the present Aral, we come to a very, on the Jaxartes, a line that would conduct important notice, recorded by a thorough- exactly across the present bed of the Sea ly competent authority in A.D. 1417, upon of Aral. It is inconceivable, indeed, that which, indeed, the present controversy the Catalan map which was drawn up in mainly hinges. This anonymous author, A.D. 1375, mainly to illustrate the route of who seems to have been Shah-rokh's min- the caravans which passed from Sarai on ister, and whose admirable book on the the Volga by Urganj to China, should history and geography of Khorassán fur- have omitted any notice of the Aral, which nished materials for all the subsequent lay directly upon the line of march, had writers of that literary age,† distinctly that remarkable natural feature been then states in two passages that the Aral, ow-in existence. ing to the long-continued draining of the waters of the Oxus and Jaxartes into the Caspian, had in his time become, not merely shrunken in size or broken into marshes and lagoons, but had in fact ceased to exist; and any impartial geographer who looks into the maps and travels of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, must, we think, come to the conclusion that this statement is substantially correct; for not only is there no single notice of the Aral, as an independent sea, in any of the numerous medieval itineraries through Central Asia, but there is much powerful evidence against its possible existence. For instance, the monk Rubruquis, in A.D. 1253, coming down from the north upon the Lower Jaxartes, says that the river did not flow into any sea, but lost itself in the desert after making extensive swamps. Again, that the basin of the Aral could not have been filled with water when the elder Poli made their journey in A.D. 1260, from the Volga to Bokhara, is rendered more than probable by Marco's silence regarding it; and this argument is further strengthened by Pegoletti's notice to travellers bound for Tartary (written in about A.D. 1340), that if they had merchandise to dispose of, they might advantageously make the detour of Urganj, but that otherwise they would save five or ten days by passing direct from Saraichik on the Yaik to Otrar

The following extract from the "Memoirs of

Baber" is decisive as to the condition of the Jaxar

tes as late as the beginning of the sixteenth century:

"The Seihun runs on the north of Khojend and south of Finakat, which is now better known as Shahrokhia, and thence inclining to the north, flows down towards Turkestan, and. meeting with no other river in its course, is wholly swallowed up in the sandy desert considerably below Turkestan, and disappears." (Leyden's Baber, p. 1.)

† As the authority of this anonymous writer has been discredited by some of our best geographers (see "Journal of the Royal Geographical Society," vol. xxvii. p. cxxxv.), it seems important to state that a very large portion of the famous work of Abdorrazzak, which was translated and annotated by Quatremère in the fourteenth volume of the "Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits," was copied word for word from the earlier Herat history, Quatremère adding of the copy, "L'ouvrage est, sans contredit, un des plus curieux et des plus véridiques qui aient été écrits dans les langues de l'Orient.'

The gradual reshifting of the waters of the Oxus and the refilling of the Aral bed, subsequent to the year A.D. 1500, is somewhat more obscure, owing to the difficulty of distinguishing between the various channels by which the river drained off into the Caspian, and which became closed at different epochs; but it seems certain that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Russia first sought, through the expeditions of Prince Beckevitch, to gain a footing in Khiva with a view of obtaining access to the reported auriferous waters of the Kizil-sú, or "red river," the desiccation of the Turcoman steppe was complete, and not a drop of the Oxus water at that time reached to the Caspian. It has been reserved for Russian enterprise at the present day to revive the scheme of Peter the Great for reopening the northernmost channel of the river, which is still known to the Persians as the Kizil-sú, by breaking down the Sarkrauk dam; and no one who looks into the history of the past, can doubt for a moment but that the scheme, as far as physical geography is concerned, is perfectly prac ticable, and that the living generation will behold its realization.*

We may now briefly consider a portion of Marco Polo's own geography. În A.D. 1271, young Marco Polo, then a boy of seventeen years old, and belonging to a noble family of Venice, set out on his travels; not for instruction or amusement, but simply to make his fortune. He accompanied his father Nicolo and his uncle,

It is this avowed desire on the part of Russia to divert for purposes of trade a navigable branch of the Urganj river into the Caspian, and the important political results that may accrue from a continuous water communication being thus opened up between St. Petersburg and the foot of the Indian Caucasus, which invest the ancient history of the Oxus with so much interest at the present time. There is some diversity of opinion among Russian engineers as to the practicability of the scheme, but, on the whole, the reports are favourable, and, but for the quasi-hostile attitude of Khiva, preparations for the work would probably have already commenced. Since the establishment, however, of a strong Russian post at Krasnovodsk, and the virtual extinction of Bokhara, the days of Khivan independence may be held to be numbered.

the epithet of "the bannered," and strange to say, when Zoroastrianism had given way to Buddhism and the original Pyræum had been replaced by a Buddhist temple, this same characteristic of "the flaunting banners still remained the distinctive feature of the place. The Arab geographers, indeed, describe with much curious detail this famous Buddhist temple, the appanage of the Barmecide family, which, when the city fell before the arms of Islam in A.D. 655, was found to be decorated with silken pennons a hundred yards in length, and it is especially worthy of remark that through all subsequent history the building retained the same Sanscrit name of Nava-vihára (corrupted into Nowbehár, and signifying "the new monastery"), which had been given to it by its Buddhist founders, and by which it is designated in the "Travels of Hwen-Tsang," the famous Chinese pilgrim, who visited Balkh in A.D. 630.

Maffeo Polo, on their return to the court valley itself appears under four different of Kublai Khán, where the elder Poli had names in the famous list of the primitive already spent some years engaged in com- Oromasdian creations in the Vendidád, the merce, and from whence they had recently upper plateau being called "the region of been deputed by the Mongol Emperor to the seven rivers," a name which it reopen negotiations with the Pope, with a tained as long as there were Zoroastrians view to his delegation of a band of mis- in the country; Badakhshan being represionaries to the far East, ostensibly for the sented by "Rangha" (or Rágh), the mounpurpose of teaching the Mongols the tenets tain district immediately bordering the of Latin Christianity, but in reality, it is river; the middle valley being described suggested, in order to supply that higher as " Vaekeret" (or Beikend), and the rich education which this enlightened sovereign alluvial portion of the lower delta having desired to introduce, but which it was in the title of " "" Urwan or Urganj.* The vain to expect at the hands of the illiter- great city of Bactria or Balkh, which ate and degraded Nestorian priests then was visited by Marco Polo, was probably resident in Mongolia. As the Papal chair the earliest capital in Central Asia. Under happened to be vacant when the elder the primitive Aryan Empire it rejoiced in Poli visited Europe, and, owing to dissensions in the conclave, no successor to Clement IV. was appointed for the next two years, the invitation of Kublai, which being well suited to the Propagandist views of Rome might otherwise have led to important results, proved infructuous. The Poli family returned alone, and occupied nearly four years in working their weary way from the Mediterranean to the Great Khán's summer residence at Kaiping-fu, to the north of the great wall of China. There is considerable uncertainty as to the route which the travellers followed in their journey; and if Colonel Yule be right in taking them, firstly into Asia Minor, then through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, and finally by Kirman and Yezd, and across the desert to the Oxus, we can only say that they selected the most devious and the most inhospitable of all the many lines leading into Eastern Asia. The real interest of the route, however, commences at the Oxus; and here, therefore, we propose to consider the movements of the travellers in more detail. The Oxus has in all ages played an important part in the history of the East, taking its place as a great line of ethnic or territorial demarcation. In Persian romance it formed the boundary between Iran and Turan. Under the Mahommedans it divided the great province of Maver-en-nahr (“beyond the River") from the rest of Persia. At the present day it has been proposed as a frontier between the Russian and British Indian dependencies, and will ultimately, no doubt, be the Rubicon between the Empires. The Oxus valley, indeed, possessing for the most part a temperate climate and a luxuriant soil, has been ever held up to the admiration of the world, as one of the spots most favoured by nature in the East. It was the birthplace of Aryan civilization. The

As these identifications are all new and contrabe necessary to cite some authority in their support. vene the criticism of the last hundred years, it may First then, for the application of the name Hapta Hindu, or "the seven rivers," to the Upper Oxus, there is the direct authority of Abu Rihan. See Elliot's Historians of India," Edit. Dowson, 1. p. 49. India, or the Panjab, had been previously unis next to Hapta Hindu in the list, was famous for derstood by the critics. Secondly, Rangha, which its untamed horsemen;" and Ragh, the northernmost district of Badakhshan, is still notorious for the wild and warlike character of its inhabitants. Thirdly, Vackeret, which occurs in the list between Herat and Kharism, exactly answers to the position of Sughd. The names too are equivalent, meaning of Beikend, which was traditionally the oldest city "the abode of the Vae or Bei" and the epithet, "the seat of hell," which is attached to Vackeret, may be explained by the great "swallow" in the desert near Beikend, which engulfs and absorbs the beneficent waters of the Polytimetus, or Zarafshan. Lastly, Urvan, "famous for its meadows," corresponds with the description of Kharism, or Urganj, which otherwise would not be mentioned in the list. The names too of Urvan and Urganj are identical, the modern g always replacing the old v, and the addition of a terminal being a well-known peculiarity of the Kharismian dialect.

Until recently our only trustworthy | been placed in Klaproth's hands for official authorities on the geography of the Upper purposes, were asserted to have been copOxus were Marco Polo and Benedict Goes, ied by him and sold to the British Foreign

66

we say trustworthy advisedly, because Office for 1,000 guineas. The Russians, on a large amount of inaccurate or spurious the one hand, vindicated the genuineness information regarding this part of Central of the George Ludwig MS., by referring Asia has been for some time past circulat- to the corroborative and independent auing, greatly to the confusion of geogra-thority of certain portions of the Chinese phers and the disturbance of sound in- Itinerary. The English, on the other hand, quiry; and because we think it only proper comparing the Chinese Itinerary, as sumin the interests of science that the mystifi- marized by Veniukoff, with the Foreign cation which has thus been caused, should Office Report, to which access was kindly be now publicly denounced and exposed. given by Lord Stanley, and finding the About ten years ago, then, it was an- spurious geographical descriptions and nonounced to the Imperial Geographical So- menclature of the two documents to be ciety of St. Petersburg, by one of its most almost identical, came to the conclusion distinguished members, the late Mons. that the three manuscripts under considerVeniukoff, that a manuscript had been dis- ation, with their accompanying illustra covered in the archives of the " État Ma- tions, had been all severally forged by jor," which professed to give a minute Klaproth - possibly from a mere love of account of all the country intervening be- mystification, but more probably from tween Cashmere and the Kirghiz Steppes. mercenary motives, since it could hardly The author was said to be a German have been by accident that the English re(George Ludwig von -), an agent port found its way to St. Petersburg, while of the East India Company, who was de- the Russiau report was transferred to Lonspatched at the beginning of this, or the don, where they would each respectively end of the last, century, to purchase horses command the highest money value. On in Central Asia, and who, having on his one point only could there be any doubt. return from his mission, quarrelled with There was nothing, as far as the texts the Calcutta Government on the subject were concerned, immediately to connect of his accounts, transferred his MSS. to the German and the Russian Reports; but St. Petersburg, where they had remained indirectly, nevertheless the two documents for over fifty years unnoticed in deposit. were found to be very closely linked; for The chapters which Mons. Veniukoff pub- upon a map in Klaproth's own handwriting, lished from this work, and which were cer- which was bound up with the Russian retainly very curious, were received at St. port in our Foreign Office, and which was Petersburg with the most absolute confi- intended partly to illustrate it, a fictitious dence, as extracts from official documents, route was observed to be laid down from and were cordially welcomed even in Srinagar, the capital of Cashmere, to the Paris; but in England they were viewed Indus, which was also given in detail in with suspicion from the cominencement; the George Ludwig Journal, positive proof and no sooner were the details brought being thereby afforded that the compiler forward than they were pronounced im- of the one document must have had access possible, and the whole story of the horse- to the other. It may be well understood agent and his journal were accordingly that these forgeries, as far as regards local declared to be an impudent fiction. There- descriptions, etymology of names, and hisupon arose a controversy of some warmth, torical synchronisms, are executed with in which the late Lord Strangford and Sir considerable skill; for otherwise they H. Rawlinson attacked, and Messrs. Khan- would hardly have imposed on such expeikoff and Veniukoff defended, the genuine-rienced critics as the Geographical Socieness of the German MS. In the course of this controversy allusion was made to two other kindred works; one being a so-called Chinese Itinerary, translated by Klaproth in 1824, and a copy of which was also deposited in the archives of the Russian État Major, and the other being the confidential report of a Russian agent, who was said to have been sent by the Emperor Paul at the beginning of the century to survey Central Asia up to the Indian frontier, and whose manuscript notes, having

ties of Paris and St. Petersburg. In reference to one particular point, indeed, the English investigators were, for a time, fairly bewildered. Ten years ago, it must be remembered, we had little positive information regarding the Oxus and its affluents, beyond the immediate range of Lieut. Wood's journey to the sources of the river; and when it was found, therefore, that a certain Colonel Gardner, who was known to have personally visited and surveyed the country between the Indus and the