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Bactria
The ancient land of the Oxus, where Greek kings once ruled in Central Asia
Bactria was the fertile plain between the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya, the river the Greeks called the Oxus, and for two thousand years it was one of Asia's great crossroads. Persian kings ruled it as a rich province, Alexander the Great spent two hard years subduing it and married a local noblewoman, Roxana, and his successors founded a Greek kingdom whose coins and cities still surprise archaeologists. Buddhism and Silk Road trade later flowed through it under the Kushans. The name lives on in the two-humped Bactrian camel, and its old capital, Balkh, praised in Persian tradition as the mother of cities, still stands in northern Afghanistan.
Bactria lay along the upper and middle Amu Darya, a basin of irrigated loess plains and oases framed by the Hindu Kush on the south, the Pamir foothills on the east, and the Hissar range on the north. Snow-fed rivers such as the Balkh, Kunduz, Kokcha, Surkhan Darya, and Vakhsh watered canal networks that made it a granary in a dry land. Its boundaries were never fixed, but its heart lies in northern Afghanistan, around Balkh, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Kunduz. North of the river, former Bactrian lands lie in southern Uzbekistan, around Termez and the Surkhandarya region, and in southwestern Tajikistan. The Amu Darya, once the spine of a single region, now marks the border between Afghanistan and its two northern neighbors.
Farming towns flourished there in the Bronze Age, in what archaeologists call the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex, around 2200 to 1700 BCE. Cyrus the Great made Bactria a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BCE, and Alexander conquered it from 329 BCE. Around 250 BCE its Seleucid governor, Diodotus, broke away and founded the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, whose city at Ai-Khanoum had a theater, a gymnasium, and Greek inscriptions. Nomads from the north, the Saka and the Yuezhi, overran it in the later 2nd century BCE, and the Yuezhi went on to found the Kushan Empire. Sasanians, Hephthalites, and Arab armies followed, and as Tokharistan it entered the Islamic world. In the 19th century Russian and British rivalry made its river an imperial frontier, inherited by today's states.