Abstrakt
Today, the Surkhan Darya region represents the southernmost administrative unit of Uzbekistan, which is from the point of view of physical geography a clearly delimited territory. According to the Greek literary sources, in antiquity this area formed a buffer zone between two important historical regions, those of Bactria and Sogdiana (Strabo 11.11.1-2).
The correct assignment of this region to one of the two aforementioned entities poses, at least in the so-called Hellenistic period,2 a complicated historical-geographical problem that remains unresolved despite being addressed repeatedly by numerous scholars (P'yankov 1982, 34-39; Masson 1985, 250; Rtveladze 1990, 4-5; Abdullaev 1997; Rapin 2013; 2018) and the present author has no ambition to do this in the following pages either. However, to understand the history of the region in question in the 3rd-2nd centuries BC, it is necessary to put it into a broader context of developments in southern Central Asia in the Early Iron Age, and to set it against the realities of the Late Achaemenid period.
In the following pages, I am going to characterise this particular part of the eastern Hellenistic world using predominantly archaeological and numismatic sources without any claims to present more general conclusions of a historical nature, concerning the whole of Bactria, still less the entire 'Hellenized East'.