The Greeks in Bactria and India c27.2

c27.2

No competent person to-day believes that the Oxus ever entered the Caspian bodily in historical times. The dominant modern theory about the Oxus in the Greek period, as put forward by Professor A. Herrmann,¹ is that the river itself entered the Aral, as to-day, but that before reaching the Aral it threw off a branch into the huge Sary Kamish depression south-west of the Aral, and that that branch issued southward from Sary Kamish, flowed down the Uzboi channel, and entered the Caspian at Balkan Bay, admittedly the only point where a lost river could enter the Caspian. He relied on two things: (1) a study by W. (V. V.) Barthold² of Arab evidence of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and (2) an article in German by W. Obrutschew,³ who explored the Uzboi and published his results in Russian in 1890, of which book his German article is a summary.