Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have
a degree in history and I love history and if you love history
too, this is the channel for you. When we use the term forgotten history rarely
can it be taken so literally as to be able to watch history, dry up...and blow away.
So much of history has been lost to time, swallowed by the desert that it seems so
much more tragic when we can actually see that process occur in modern times.
But so it is with the Great Blue Sea, which has been both a great driver of
history and a victim of history. And today lives on the edge of forgotten history
as history, literally...transforms into desert. What was once called The Great Blue
Sea of Central Asia, better known today as the Aral Sea, was actually
a huge freshwater lake. At one point, the fourth largest lake in the world behind the
Caspian Sea, and lakes Victoria and Superior. Once covering more than sixty eight thousand
square kilometers, the name Aral Sea roughly translates in the Turkic language group as
the Sea of Islands. Referring to the more than 1,100 islands which used to dot the massive
lake. Like its larger cousin the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea is endorheic, and that means that
it is a closed drainage basin with no outflows that is regulated by evaporation. The primary
tributaries that feed the Aral Sea are the Great Rivers Syr Darya and Amu Darya. These two
glacier-fed rivers are called ‘thankless rivers’, because they naturally irrigate very little of
the land through which they naturally flow. And while we think of rivers and seas as geography, in
fact they are also intrinsically, part of history. The Syr Darya to the north was known in
classical antiquity as the river Jaxartes. It represented the northwest boundary of the
Hellenic conquests of Alexander the Great. The Battle of Jaxartes in 329 BC, between
the armies of Alexander and the Scythians, was fought along its shore, and secured
the northern border of Alexander's Empire. The Amu Darya to the south was known in classical
antiquity as the river Oxus and the river basin between the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers allowed
irrigation and agriculture and thus gave rise to the great Bronze Age Oxus Civilization. The
area also known as Bactria was the birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster who was the founder of the
dominant religion of the ancient Persian Empire. Annexed to the Persian Empire by the Emperor
Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC, the area between the two rivers would
eventually become part of Alexander's Macedonian Empire after he defeated
the Persian Emperor Darius the Third. The eventual Greco-Bactrian kingdom was the
easternmost extent of the Hellenic Empire. Supported by these fertile lands the
Greco-Bactrian Empire extended so far west, that some historians believe they made contact with
China's Han Dynasty, and that allowed a transfer of technology that brought copper nickel alloys to
the Greeks, and brought Greek influence on Chinese art, especially in the making of sculpture which
some think might have influenced the manufacture of the famous terracotta army of China's first
emperor Qin Shi Huang. The Greco-Bactrian Empire was also the connection between the
Hellenic world and the Indian subcontinent. While the river gave rise to the civilization,
the civilization also changed..the river. The river empties into a delta, which goes both
into the Aral Sea and via a distributary, to the Caspian Sea to the west. In the 10th
century the people of the agricultural land built a dam that diverted the water to the Aral
Sea. And then in the 13th century the army of the Mongol leader Genghis Khan destroyed the
dam, restoring much of the flow to the Caspian Sea and significantly reducing the size
of the Aral Sea. Now since then the flow has shifted back north and the Oxus, since the
18th century, no longer feeds into the Caspian. The area became part of the 19th century ‘Great
Game’ between Russia and Great Britain over influence in Central Asia. And it was taken by
the Russians as part of the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the second half of the
19th century. Russia had a naval presence on the Aral Sea from the mid-1800s. By the 20th
Century, the Soviet Union became the dominant power and conflicts in the area drove migration
of many Central Asian Muslims to Afghanistan. Fed by the two great rivers the Aral
Sea became a major source of food for the Soviet Union with its fishing
industry producing nearly one-sixth of the fish that were eaten in the USSR,
and employing more than 40,000 people. But in the 1940s the Soviet Union
undertook a grand and improbable scheme, to take the waters of the Syr Darya and
the Amu Darya and use them to transform desert into a cotton producing region.
They literally remade the two rivers, building more than 25,000 miles of canals,
45 dams and more than 80 reservoirs and transformed what was once desert into one of
the world's great cotton producing regions. But the system was inefficient and the canals were
poorly built, and they lost lots of water to leaks and evaporation. And as the water was diverted
and inefficiently used, the sources of the Aral Sea simply dried up. The Amu Darya Delta, which
used to feed into the Aral Sea is now dry, and periodically that Syr Darya also runs out before
it reaches the Aral Sea. Between 1960 and 1998 the surface area of the Aral Sea decreased 60% and the
volume decreased 80%. And as the volume of water decreased the salinity level also increased
and devastated the local fish populations. The collapse of the fishing
industry caused significant economic hardship and inefficient farming,
and overuse of pesticides and fertilizers, and the inability to maintain the system
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, have only made everything worse. The demand
for water has never been higher, and yet the waste of water has never been greater, and the
once prosperous area is now heavily polluted. Large areas of what used to be called ‘The Great
Blue Sea’ are now called the Aralkum Desert. The draining of the Aral Sea has been called one
of the planet's worst environmental disasters. The story of the Aral Sea shows the confluence
between history and geography. On the one hand it was the geography, the Great Rivers that
allowed the rise of great civilizations and facilitated both contacts and conflicts between
civilizations. It was the meeting of East and West, an indelible part of the history of places
like Afghanistan and Iran, and the future of places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. But on the
other hand, civilization transformed geography, and turned the power of rivers and seas to serve
civilization, but in doing so created new threats to that very civilization. And maybe the two
will collide again, maybe new technological and political solutions will come up with a way for
us to bring back part of The Great Blue Sea. Or maybe not, maybe it will simply dry up and blow
away and become nothing but… forgotten history. I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this
edition of my series, five minutes of history, short snippets of forgotten history five to ten
minutes long. And if you did enjoy then please go ahead and press that thumbs up button that is
there on your left. If you have any questions or comments or would like to suggest another topic
for the History Guy please feel free to write those in the comment section and I will be happy
to respond. And if you'd like five minutes more or forgotten history then please go ahead and click
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