ČAḠĀNRŪD (Čaḡānīrūd in Farroḵī, the seventh and last right-bank tributary of the Oxus or Amu Darya, rising in what in medieval Islamic times were known as the Bottamān mountains and flowing southwards through the principality of Čaḡānīān into the Oxus just above the important crossing-point of Termeḏ (modern Termez). Hence it flows from what is now the Gissarski (from Ḥeṣār) Khrebet on the borders of the Tajik and Uzbek SSRs but has the greater part of its course in the Surkhandar’inskaya oblast of the easternmost part of the Uzbek SSR; its upper course is now known as the Qarataḡ Daryā and its lower one (below Denau, from Deh-e Now, the medieval Čaḡānīān town) as the Sorḵān Daryā. Of the classical Islamic geographers, Maqdesī (Moqaddasī; p. 22), calls it the anhār al-Ṣaḡānīān (the plural “rivers” presumably referring to its separate headwaters); Ebn Rosta (p. 93, tr. Wiet, p. 103) calls it the Rāmīḏ, thus confusing it with the Kāfernehān river to the east.
See also Barthold, Turkestan3, p. 72.
Farroḵī Sīstānī, Dīvān, ed. M. Dabīrsīāqī, Tehran, 1363 Š./1984, p. 189.
Ḥodūd al-ʿālam, tr. Minorsky, 6.11, p. 71, cf. comm. p. 209.
Le Strange, Lands, pp. 436, 440. J. Marquart, Wehrot und Arang, Leiden, 1938, pp. 89-94.
Bol’shaya sovetskaya èntsiklopediya3 XXV, 1976, p. 93a.
(C. Edmund Bosworth)
Originally Published: December 15, 1990
Last Updated: December 15, 1990
This article is available in print.
Vol. IV, Fasc. 6, pp. 615-616