Transcaspian Region

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Transcaspian Region (Russian: Закаспийская Область), or Transcaspia. The name given before 1924 to a Russian territory to the east of the Caspian Sea, bounded on the south by Iranian Khorasan and Afghanistan, north by the former Russian province of Uralsk, northeast by the former Russian protectorates of Khiva and the Bukhara and to the southeast by Afghanistan. Area, 212,545 sq. miles ^[1]. It corresponds roughly to the territory of present-day Turkmenistan.

Contents 1 History 2 Geography and Geology 2.1 The Uzboi 3 Footnotes 4 Reference

[edit] History

Transcaspia was conquered by Russia in 1879-1885, in a series of campaigns led by Generals Lomakin, Skobelev and Mikhail Annenkov. The Transcaspian Railway was begun from the shores of the Caspian in 1879 in order to secure Russian control over the region and provide a rapid military route to the Afghan border. In 1885 a crisis was precipated by the Russian annexation of the Pendjeh oasis, to the south of Merv, which nearly led to war with Britain, as it was thought that the Russians were planning to march on to Herat in Afghanistan ^[2]. Until 1898 Transcaspia was part of the Governor-Generalship of the Caucasus and administered from Tiflis, but in that year it was made an Oblast of Russian Turkestan and governed from Tashkent. The best known Military Governor to have ruled the region from Ashkhabad was probably General Kuropatkin, whose authoritarian methods and personal style of governance made the province very difficult for his successors to control. Consequently the administration of Transcaspia became a byword for corruption and brutality within Russian Turkestan, as Russian administrators turned their districts into petty fiefdoms and extorted money from the local population ^[3]. These abuses were fully exposed by the Pahlen Report of 1908-10. During the revolutionary period of 1917-19 parts of Transcaspia were briefly occupied by British Indian forces from Meshed. The region was one of the last centres of Basmachi resistance to Bolshevik rule, with the last of the rebellious Turkoman feeling across the border to Afghanistan and Iran in 1922-3.

[edit] Geography and Geology

Some of the most interesting problems of geography, such as those relating to the changes in the course of the Jaxartes (Syr-darya) and the Oxus (Amu-Darya), and the supposed periodical disappearance of the Aral Sea, are connected with the Transcaspian deserts; and it is herethat we must look for a clue to the physical changes which transformed the Euro-Asiatic Mediterranean, the Aral-Caspian and Pontic basin into a series of separate seas, and desiccated them, powerfully influencing the distribution of floras and faunas, and centuries ago compelling the inhabitants of Western and Central Asia to enter upon their great migrations. But down to a comparatively recent date, the arid, barren deserts, peopled only by wandering Turkomans, were almost a terra incognita.

A mountain chain, comparable in length to the Alps, separates the deserts of the Transcaspian from the highlands of Khorasan. It begins in the Krasnovodsk peninsula of the Caspian, under the names of Kuryanyn-kary and Great Balkans, whose masses of granite and other crystalline rock reach an altitude of some 5350 feet. Farther south-east they are continued in the Little Balkans (2000 feet) and the Kopepet-dagh or Kopet-dag. The latter rises steep and rugged above the flat deserts over a stretch of 600 miles. In structure it is homologous with the Caucasus chain; it appears as an outer wall of the Khorasan plateau, and is separated from it by a broad valley, which, like the Rion and Kura valley of Transcaucasia, is drained by two rivers flowing in opposite directions: the Atrek, which flows north-west into the Caspian, and the Keshef-rud, which flows to the south-east and is a tributary of the Murghab. On the other side of this valley the Alla-dagh (Aladagh) and the Binalund border ranges (9000 to 11,000 ft.) fringe the edge of the Khorasan plateau. Descending towards the steppe with steep stony slopes, the mountain barrier of the Kopet Dagh rises to heights of 6000-9000 feet to the east of Kyzyl Arvat, while the passes which lead from the Turkoman deserts to the valleys of Khorasan are seldom as low as 3,500, and usually rise to 5,000, 6,000 and even 8,500 feet, and in most cases are very difficult. It is pierced by only one wide opening, that between the Great and Little Balkans, through which the sea, which once covered the steppe, maintained connection with the Caspian.

While the Alla-dagh and Binalund border-ranges are chiefly composed of crystalline rocks and metamorphic slates, overlain by Devonian deposits, a series of more recent formations, Upper and Lower Cretaceous and Miocene outcrops out in the outer wall of the Kopet-dagh. Here again we find that the mountains of Asia which stretch towards the north-west continued to be uplifted at a geologically recent epoch. Quarternary deposits have an extensive development on its slopes, and its foothills are bordered by a girdle of loess.

The loess terrace, called Atok ( mountain base ), 10 to 20 miles in width, is very fertile; but it will produce nothing without irrigation, and the streams flowing from the Kopet-dagh are few and scanty. The winds which impinge upon the northern slope of the mountains have been deprived of all their moisture in crossing the Karakum the Black Sands of the Turkoman desert; and even such rain as falls on the Kopet-dagh (10.1 inches at Kyzyl Arvat) too often reaches the soil in the shape of light showers which do not penetrate it, so that the average relative humidity is only 56% as compared with 62% at even so dry a place as Krasnovodsk. Still, at those places where the mountain streams run closer to one another, as at Geok-Tepe, Ashkhabad, Lutfabad and Kaaka, the villages are more populous, and the houses are surrounded by gardens, every square yard and every tree of which is nourished by irrigation.

North of this narrow strip of irrigated land begins the desert the Kara-kum which extends from the mountains of Khorasan to Lake Aral and the plateau of Ust-Urt, and from the Caspian to the Amu-darya, interrupted only by the oases of Merv and Tejen. But the terrible shifting sands, blown into barkhans, or elongated hills, sometimes 50 and 60 feet in height, are accumulated chiefly in the west, where the country has more recently emerged from the sea. Farther east the barkhans are more stable. Large areas amidst the sands are occupied by takyrs, or flat surfaces paved with clay, which, as a rule, is hard but becomes almost impassable after heavy rains. In these takyrs the Turkomans dig ditches, draining into a kind of cistern, where the water of the spring rains can be preserved for a few months. Wells also are sunk, and the water is found in them at depths of 10 to 50, or occasionally 100 feet and more. All is not desert in the strict sense; in spring there is for the most part a carpet of grass.

The vegetation of the Kara-kum cannot be described as poor. The typical representative of the sandy deserts of Asia, the saksaul (Anabcfsis ainmodendron), has been almost destroyed within the last hundred years, and occurs only sporadically, but the borders of the spaces covered with saline clay are brightened by forests of tamarisk, which are inhabited by great numbers of the desert warbler (Atraphornis aralensis)a typical inhabitant of the sands sparrows and ground-choughs (Podoces); the Houbara macqueeni, though not abundant, is characteristic of the region. Hares and foxes, jackals and wolves, marmots, moles, hedgehogs and one species of marten live in the steppe, especially in spring. As a whole, the fauna is richer than might be supposed, while in the Atok it contains representatives of all the species known in Turkestan, intermingled with Persian and Himalayan species.

[edit] The Uzboi

A feature distinctive of the Turkoman desert is the very numerous shores, or elongated depressions, the lower portion of which are mostly occupied with moist sand. They are obviously the relics of brackish lakes, and, like the lakes of the Kirghiz steppes, they often follow one another in quick succession, thus closely resembling river-beds. As the direction of the shores is generally from the higher terraces drained by the Amu-darya towards the lowlands of the Caspian, they were usually regarded as old beds of the Amu-Darya, and were held to support the idea of its once having flowed across the Turkoman desert towards what is now the Caspian Sea; It was formerly considered almost settled, not only that that river (see Oxus) flowed into the Caspian during historical times, but that after having ceased to do so in the 7th century, its waters were again diverted to the Caspian about 1221. A chain of elongated depressions, bearing a faint resemblance to old riverbeds, was traced from Urgench to the gap between the Great and the Little Balkans; this was marked on the maps as the Uzboi, or old bed of the Oxus. The idea of again diverting the Amu into the Caspian was thus set afloat, but the investigations of Russian engineers, especially A. E. Hedroitz, A. M. Konshin, I. V. Mushketov, on the original Russian map of the Transcaspian, drawn immediately after the survey of the Uzboi had been completed, the Uzboi has not the continuity which is given to it on subsequent maps.

P. M. Lessar (Russian Agent in Bukhara in the 1890s) and Svintsov, went on to show that the Uzboi is no river-bed at all, and that no river has ever discharged its waters in that direction ^[4]. The existence of an extensive lacustrine depression, now represented by the small Sary-kamysh lakes,was proved, and it was evident that this depression, having a length of more than 130 m., a width of 70 miles, and a depth of 280 feet below the present level of Lake Aral, would, have to be filled by the Amu before its waters could advance farther to the south-west. The sill of this basin being only 28 ft. below the present level of Lake Aral, this latter could not be made to disappear, nor even be notably reduced in size, by the Amu flowing south-west from Urgench. A more careful exploration of the Uzboi has shown that, while the deposits in the Sary-kamysh depression, and the Aral shells they contain, bear unmistakable testimony to the fact of the basin having once been fed by the Amu-darya, no such traces are found along the Uzboi below the Sary-kamysh 30n the contrary, shells of molluscs still inhabiting the Caspian are found in numbers all along it ^[5], and the supposed old bed has all the characteristics of a series of lakes which continued to subsist along the foothills of the Ust-Urt plateau, while the Caspian was slowly receding westwards during the post-Pliocene period. On rare occasions only did the waters of the Sarykamysh, when raised by inundations above the sill just mentioned, send their surplus into the Uzboi. It appears most probable that in the fifth century the Sary-kamysh was confounded with a Gulf of the Caspan ^[6]; and this gives much plausibility to Konshins supposition that the changes in the lower course of the Amu (which no geologist would venture to ascribe to man, if they were to mean the alternative discharge of the Amu into the Caspian and Lake Arab) merely meant that by means of appropriate dams the Amu was made to flow in the 13th-16th centuries alternately into Lake Aral and into the Sary-kamysh.

The ancient texts (of Pliny, Strabo, Ptolemy) about the Jaxartes and Oxus only become intelligible when it is admitted that, since the epoch to which they relate, the outlines of the Caspian Sea and Lake Aral have undergone notable changes, commensurate with those which are supposed to have occurred in the courses of the Central Asian rivers. The desiccation of the Aral-Caspian basin proceeded with such rapidity that the shores of the Caspian cannot possibly have maintained for some twenty centuries the outlines which they exhibit at present. When studied in detail, the general configuration of the Transcaspian region leaves no doubt that both the Jaxartes and the Oxus, with its former tributaries, the Murghab and the Tejen, once flowed towards the west; but the Caspian of that time was not the sea of our days; its gulfs penetrated the Turkoman steppe, and washed the base of the Ust-Urt plateau. (See CASPIAN and ARAL.)

Kelif- Uzboi. There is also no doubt that, instead of flowing north-westward of Kelif (on the pre-1917 Bukhara-Afghan frontier), the Amu once bent south to join the Murghab and Tejen ^[7]; the chain of depressions described by the Russian engineers as the Kelif-Uzboi supports this hypothesis, which a geographer cannot avoid making when studying a map of the Transcaspian region; but the date at which the Oxus followed such a course, and the extension which the Caspian basin then had towards the east, are uncertain.

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ In 1897 (when the first, and only complete Russian Empire Census took place) the population numbered 377,416, of whom only 42,431 lived in towns; but, besides those of whom the census took account, there were about 25,000 strangers and troops
2. ^ See G.N. Curzon Russia in Central Asia (London: Longmans) 1889 pp1-15
3. ^ Richard A. Pierce Russian Central Asia 1867-1917 (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1960 pp88-9
4. ^ Their original papers are printed in the Izvestia of the Russian Geographical Society, 1883 to 1887, also in the Journal of the Russian ministry of roads and communications
5. ^ According to A. E. Hedroitz and A. M. Konshin the old Tonudarya bed of the Amu contains shells of molluscs now living in the Amu (Cyrenci fluminalis, Dreissensia polymorpha and Anodonta). The Sary-kamysh basin is characterized by deposits containing Neritina liturala, Dreissensia polymorpha and Limnaeus, characteristic of this basin. Below the Sary-kamysh there are no deposits containing shells characteristic of the Amu; Anodontae are found quite occasionally on the surface, not in beds, in company with the Caspian Cardium (Didacna) trigonoldes, var. crassum, Cardium piramid alum. Dreissensia polymorpha, D. rostriformis, Hydrobia caspia, Neritina lilurata and Dreissensia beardil; the red clays containing these fossils extend for 130 In. east of the Caspian (Izvestia of Russ. Geog. Soc., 1883 and 1886)
6. ^ As by Jenkinson, who mentions a freshwater gulf of the Caspian within six days march from Khwarezm (or Khiva), by which gulf he could only mean the Sary-kamysh depression. Anthony Jenkinson "The voyage of M. Anthony Ienkinson, made from the citie of Mosco in Russia, to the site of the citie of Boghar [Bukhara] in Bactria, in the yere 1558: written by himself to the Merchants of London of the Moscouie companie" Early Voyages and travels in Russia and Persia Ed. E. Delmar Morgan & C.H. Coote (London: The Hakluyt Society) 1886 Vol I p68
7. ^ The Turkomans call this southern old bed linghyuzor Onguz (dry old bed), and there can be no doubt that when the Boishos Chertezh of the 16th century (speaking from anterior information) mentions a river, Ughyuz or Ugus, flowing west from the Aniu towards the Caspian, it is merely describing as a river what the very name shows to have been a dry bed, supposed to have been once occupied by a river. The similarity of the names Ongus and Ugus with Ogus and Ochus possibly helped, to accentuate, if not to give rise to, the confusion. Cf. N. G. Petrusevich, "The South-east Shores of the Caspian", in Zapiski of the Caucasian Geographical Society (1880), vol. xi

[edit] Reference

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.