Central Asia
The Amu Darya carries Afghanistan's border with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It gathers in the Pamirs and once reached the Aral Sea, as the Syr Darya did from the Tian Shan. The United Nations files Central Asia as the five former Soviet republics; the catalogue adds Afghanistan to them, and records the disagreement rather than resolving it.
6 countries
Common questions
Questions about Central Asia
Which countries are in Central Asia?
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on the United Nations M49 standard. The catalogue files Afghanistan with them as well, following the older reading of the region, so the grid here holds one more entry than the M49 list does.
Is Afghanistan part of Central Asia?
Both answers are in print. M49 files Afghanistan under Southern Asia, and the historical and cultural literature on the region has long treated the lands on either side of the Amu Darya as one. The catalogue takes the second reading, names the first and leaves the argument where it found it.
Why do all the names end in stan?
Stan is a Persian suffix meaning the place of, attached either to a people or to the ground itself, so Uzbekistan reads as the place of the Uzbeks and Tajikistan as the place of the Tajiks. It runs far beyond this region: Pakistan, Hindustan and Baluchistan are formed the same way.
What happened to the Aral Sea?
Irrigation canals drawn from the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya from the 1960s onward took most of the water that fed it. The lake had separated into two basins by 1989, and the eastern lobe of the southern one was dry by 2014. The Kok-Aral dam, closed in 2005, has held the level of the northern basin inside Kazakhstan.