A Vertical Timeline of Civilizations
The archaeological site of Old Termez, covering 500 hectares on the banks of the Amu Darya river, is a mound of buried cities. Excavations reveal a complex vertical stratigraphy where distinct cultural layers stack on top of one another, reaching a depth of 19 meters in the citadel area. This geological layer cake provides a tangible record of the successive powers that controlled this strategic river crossing, an important node on the Silk Road.
The story begins in the Achaemenid period, with the earliest settlements dating to the mid-1st millennium BCE. The deepest layers belong to the city founded after Alexander the Great's conquest in 329 BCE, which some scholars identify as Alexandria on the Oxus. Above this Hellenistic foundation lies the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, followed by a period of nomadic Yuezhi presence. The most substantial layers belong to the Kushan Empire (1st to 3rd centuries AD), when Termez, then called Tarmita, became a major administrative and religious center. Subsequent layers document the Kushano-Sasanian period, the arrival of Arab forces in the 8th century, and the city's flourishing under the Samanid dynasty in the 9th-10th centuries. The sequence shows a major disruption in 1220, when the city was destroyed by the armies of Genghis Khan, a catastrophic event visible in the archaeological record.