Often, when I draw a map in order to talk about the region of my birth, I begin with a triangle. It is rudimentary, of course, as I am no cartographer. I draw two squiggly lines; one from the bottom left corner of the triangle going upward 45 degrees and another from the top corner going to the same general direction slightly bowed as if the triangle doing the reversed "C" from the "YMCA" song. The two squiggly lines are connected by a circle which looks like a 2 year old drew it. On the left of this imperfect geometrical art form stands a large oval shape.
The triangle is the Pamir mountains, of course. The squiggly lines are rivers Amu and Syr that flow from the Pamirs, and the child's circle is the Aral Sea. The oval shape is none other than the Caspian Sea, home of the costliest fish eggs in the world. The land between the mountain, two rivers and the sea is what I call "Central Asia Proper." Of course, CAP is as artificial as the notions of borders and nationalities, but on this later.
The Pamirs are the highest mountains of the region, comprising of some of the highest peaks in the world. In fact, they are part of a chain of mountains that separate the entire Eurasian Steppe from the Indian sub-continent; these are, mainly Tian Shan of China (which are in turn part of the Himalayan range), the Hindukush (literally "killer of Indians" in Persian languages; same as Pairi Uparisaena of Avesta, which the Greeks called Paropamisus, both of which meant "higher than the eagle"), and the Altai range.
Rivers Amu and Syr are locally known as Amudaryo and Syrdaryo, as daryo is Tajik for river. The Arabs who brought Islam to the region, called the rivers Jaihun and Seihun, and for the ancient Greeks they were known as Oxus and Jaxartes, respectively. Of all these four foreign names for rivers, Oxus is my favorite. It is Greek corruption of the word vakhsh* (vaakhshu = oxus), which is the name of the major tributary of Amudaryo. It's an ancient word, with its roots in Avesta and Sanskrit. The river Vakhsh cuts through Tajikistan from northeast to southwest; it begins as Surkhob, literally "red water" from Tajik surkh (red) and ob (water), from the Pamirs. But Vakhsh is also a name of an ancient settlement, birthplace of my favorite poet Rumi, the founder of whirling dervishes.
Central Asia Proper was Transoxiana for the ancient Greeks and Mawara-un-nahr for the Arabs, both of which essentially mean "land beyond the river." The region had a name of its own given to it by the Soviets. Центральная Азия (Tsentral'naya Aziya) literally means "Central Asia" while Средняя Азия (Srednaya Aziya) means "Middle Asia," but for the common Russian speaker of the Soviet Union, both meant the same thing. That is to say, that part of the USSR which included the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Some historians of the region will include Mongolia and Afghanistan, and others even add Uighur Autonomous Region which is in western China, and few erroneously add the Caucasus region of the western Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia). Another archaic name of the region is Turkestan, literally "land of the Turks," but for the post-Soviet westerners, the region is simply known as "that part of the world with 'stan' countries."
To clarify, the suffix -iston* in Tajik language denotes a location, and it has the same root as the verb istodan, that is "to stand," incidentally so does the same English verb. Thus, Tajikistan translates as "place where Tajiks stand" or "land of the Tajiks." Every country in the region with the ending istan identifies a specific people with a given location; Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan. All except Pakistan, for there is no such ethnic group of people as the "Paki." Pakistan was created out of the western British India, as soon as that colony gained its independence. The word pok in Tajik language means pure, same as in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, to denote "pureness" of the Muslim population of India from those of Hindus; the activities of the Pakistan government in the past three decades proves them to be far from being "pure." However, "paki" in Pakistan is actually an acronym for those regions of India which separated from the former British colony, the first one being Punjab.
When the Soviets were creating their empire in the 1920s, Tajiks were initially part of the Uzbek SSR, as autonomous region. Having gained qualifications for a separate republic, which among several things included a written language and an academy of science, they became Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. Interestingly, Moscow government would allow UzSSR to keep two of the oldest cities in Central Asia Proper, namely Samarqand and Bukhara, a point of contention to this day between the two countries. Both Samarqand and Bukhara were founded by ancestors of Tajiks, and to this day Uzbeks constitute a minority in those cities. Tajikistan in its turn does not comprise entirely of the Tajiks, with its northern cities populated by Uzbeks. So, in this case, neither Uzbekistan nor Tajikistan are actually places of their respective people.
Amudaryo and Syrdaryo are to Central Asia as Tigris and Euphratis to Mesopotamia (Iraq), Nile to Egypt, Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to China, and Ganges and Indus to India. As water is the essential part of human kind, the earliest settlements are to be found near rivers. But why exactly is this region called "central"? In relations to older "civilizations," mainly Egyptian and Mesopotamian in the west, Chinese in the east and Indian in the south, what I call CAP is located right in the middle of the aforementioned peoples. Buddhism passed through this area from India in order to reach China, while the hordes of nomadic peoples from the direction of China made their way to what is better known as Middle East (another vaguely artificial term) and Europe. Merchants always stopped in the region on their way to and from the civilizations in the periphery; in fact, the earliest and the best known merchant colonies were founded by the locals, i.e. Sogdians, all over the Silk Route.
Before I end this post, there are few other geographical features to be mentioned. Southeast of the Aral Sea, between Amu and Syr rivers lies a desert, known for its red sands; its Turkic name, Qizil Kum, means just that. On the west side of Amudarya, Kara Kum desert stretches until the Caspian Sea; one of the meanings of the Turkic word kara means black, which is not so much a description of the color of the sands but the harshness of the desert itself. Due to extensive irrigations during the Soviet rule of its tributaries, the "circular" Aral Sea now resembles a reverse archipelago, having shrunk into smaller lakes. There are also valleys that dot the Central Asia Proper. Ferghana Valley is the largest of its kind in the region, and it is located at the skirt of the Pamirs nearest to Syrdarya. Dushanbe, the capital city of Tajikistan, lies in Hissar Valley, one of the early settlements of the region, whose indigenous population were pushed by the ancestors of Tajiks.
*Девонақулов: Ин калима яке аз беҳтарин ёдгориҳои қадимаи мардуми мост, зеро ки нишонаи забони авестоиву паҳлавӣ буда бо ӯ Куруши Кабир, Ардашери Бобаконy Баҳроми Сосонӣ гуфтугӯ менамуданду сиёсатмадорӣ мекарданд.
*iston can also be used in figurative speech, as had been done by many poets; Sherazi's Buston ("place of fragrance") and Guliston ("garden of roses") are examples of his best work.
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