Amu Darya
— — the river that drew Alexander down from the steppe.
Not only on a wall.
“The Amu Darya is the great river of Central Asia, called Oxus by the Greeks. From the Pamir snowmelt it runs west and north for some 2,400 kilometres, and for much of that length it draws Afghanistan's northern edge against Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Bactria was here. Alexander forded it on his way to Samarkand. The river still moves a great brown current past the old crossings.
Amu Darya, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Amu Darya rises in the eastern Pamirs at the confluence of the Panj and Vakhsh rivers and runs roughly 2,400 kilometres west across the steppe toward what was once the Aral Sea. Along most of its course it forms an international boundary, including some 1,200 kilometres of Afghanistan's northern border with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The river drains a basin of more than half a million square kilometres, taking meltwater from the Pamir and Hindu Kush across the dry lowlands of Khorasan and ancient Bactria.
The Greeks knew the river as the Oxus, and Alexander the Great crossed it in 329 BCE on his campaign into Sogdiana. For two thousand years afterwards the river was the trade and pilgrimage route between Persia, India, and Central Asia, the spine of Greater Khorasan and the Silk Road's northern arc. The Soviet-built Friendship Bridge at Hairatan, opened in 1982, was for decades the principal land link between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, and remains the country's busiest northern crossing.
The Amu Darya carries a heavy sediment load, the brown, silt-laden water for which the river has long been known, and shifts its course freely across the soft alluvial plains of its lower reaches. Diversion for cotton irrigation in the Uzbek and Turkmen lowlands has, since the 1960s, taken most of the river's flow before it reaches the Aral Sea, whose surface has shrunk by more than ninety percent. Upstream in Afghanistan, the current still runs strong past the river ports of Hairatan and Sher Khan Bandar.