Search Results: Uzbekistan

Ibn Sina and Biruni were two of the most outstanding thinkers to have lived between ancient Greece and the European Renaissance. These two giants of a lost era of enlightenment were born in Central Asia about the year 980. For six hundred...

The Oxus is a river, today called Amu Darya in its western part and Wakhsh in its eastern parts, which flows for a length of 2400 km across modern Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan into Lake Aral. In Ancient times it crossed...

Bactria was a province of the Persian empire located in modern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. After the defeat of Darius III of Persia, Bactria continued to offer resistance against Alexander the Great, led by Bessus, who...

Desert kites are mega-constructions that consist of two long walls converging upon an enclosed space that has on its periphery small stone constructions called cells. Seen from the sky, their shape suggests that of a windborne kite; they...

The Chagatai Khanate (also Chaghatai, Jagatai, Chaghatay or Ca'adai, c. 1227-1363 CE) was that part of the Mongol Empire (1206-1368 CE) which covered what is today mostly Uzbekistan, southern Kazakhstan, and western Tajikistan. The khanate...

The ancient history of Afghanistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia, is full of fascinating cultures, from early nomadic tribes to the realms of Achaemenid Persia, the Seleucids, the Mauryans, the Parthians, and Sasanians, as well as...

Map of the Oxus' / Amu Darya's watershed in Central Asia, that drains parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan into the Aral Sea.

The minaret of Vabkent (or Vobkent), 1196-7 CE. Location: Town of Vabkent north of Bukhar, Uzbekistan. Patron by Abd al-Aziz II. Embellished by wide bands with high relief carving and crowned by a lantern at the top.

Gold ornament showing an eagle with its prey, c. 1st- or 2nd-century CE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is one of a pair, with the other on display in the British Museum, London. Ernst Herzfeld proposed that it was part of...

The State of Sogdia was conquered by the army of Alexander the Great in 327 BCE. The early coins from Sogdia copy the coins of Alexander's Empire, telling us that they were issued after the conquest. Comparisons like this allow ancient coins...