The Jaxartes

The Greek name of the river, Iaxártēs, the northern of the two great Central Asian streams, the modern Syr Darya. It enters Greek geography at the limit of Alexander’s conquests: on its bank he founded Alexandria Eschate, “Alexandria the Farthest,” the northernmost of his cities, and fought the Saka beyond it. Some of Alexander’s geographers confused it with the Tanais, the Don, imagining a single river-system linking the Black Sea to Central Asia, an error that long distorted the map of the north.

Iaxártēs is the river as the boundary of the settled world, the line between the farmed oases and the open steppe of the eastern Scythians. Where the Oxus divided Iranian land from Iranian land, the Jaxartes divided the Iranian world from the nomad one beyond. Through Latin Iaxartes the Greek name passed into Western geography, but the river’s most evocative name would be the one the Arabs gave it, Sayḥūn, twin of the Oxus’s Jayḥūn, the two of them made into rivers of Paradise.

The Latin name of the river, Iaxartes, taken from the Greek; Pliny records that the Scythians called it the Silis and that Alexander’s men took it for the Tanais, the confusion that had linked it in the Greek mind to the rivers of the Black Sea. Curtius narrates Alexander’s campaign on its banks against the Saka horsemen, at the very edge of the Macedonian world.

The Latin preserved the Greek name in the Western tradition, where the Iaxartes remained the bookish term for the river into modern times, long after the living name had become Sayḥūn and then Syr Darya. Of the two great rivers of Central Asia, the Jaxartes was always the farther and the dimmer to the classical world, the boundary beyond the boundary; its Western name records little more than the limit Alexander reached and the nomads he met there.

The Arabic name of the Jaxartes, Sayḥūn, by which the medieval geographers identified it with the Pishon, the first of the four rivers of Eden in Genesis. It is the deliberate twin of the Oxus’s Jayḥūn, the Gihon: the two great rivers of Central Asia were taken together as two of Paradise’s four, their rhyming Arabic names, Sayḥūn and Jayḥūn, marking them as a matched pair drawn from the garden at the world’s beginning.

The Pishon that this atlas meets on the Ganges, where another tradition had placed it, is here claimed instead for the Jaxartes, the second of Eden’s rivers relocated to Turkestan. The medieval Muslim geographers thus mapped two of the four rivers of Paradise onto the streams flowing past Samarkand and Bukhara, and the Sayḥūn and Jayḥūn of their accounts are a small monument to the persistence of the Eden scheme, the rivers of Genesis carried, by learned analogy, to the far side of the Iranian world.