Our Notes & References

First edition of this study of Central Asia’s largest river by volume.

A pleasant example, complete with its folding plates and the large folding map covering the entire Western half of present-day Uzbekistan.

Very rare: OCLC locates only one physical copy (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek); the only copy in the US (Harvard) is on microfilm; no copies at auctions in the West in recent decades until Feb. 2025.

Baron Alexander Kaulbars was a Russian military leader who served in the Turkestan military district. In 1874 he became Chief of Staff of the 8th Cavalry Division, in 1879 commander of the 1st Brigade of the 14th Cavalry Division and General-Major. He participated in the campaign in Kuldzhu (1871), the Khiva campaign (1873), the Russian-Turkish war (1877-1878), the campaign in China (1900-1901), the Russian-Japanese war (1904 – 1905). During the years of the revolution of 1905 – 1907, Kaulbars supported monarchist activity in Odessa, and became famous as one of the leaders of the Odessa monarchists. He died in exile in France in 1925.

In 1873, Kaulbars took part in the Khiva expedition and explored the estuary and the old bed of the Amu Darya. He successfully found a navigable path of the Aral Sea into the river. Then he began to study Yana-Daria, a dry riverbed of Syr Darya. The results of these works are presented in his “Lower Reaches of the Amu Darya River” and in the present “Most Ancient Beds of the Amu Darya River”. Kaulbars’s main conclusions were that Amu Darya formerly flowed into the Caspian, and began to bear its waters into the Aral Sea at a later stage: between those two periods the river flowed into the lake Sary-Kamysh, from where the excess water flowed into the Krasnovodsky Bay. For these works, Kaulbars was awarded the Russian Geographical Society gold medal.

Kaulbars’ work was published in a series of the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, directed by Ivan Mushketov: he was also much involved in the exploration of Turkestan and the Syr Darya valley in particular, being the first geologist to begin systematic exploration of this territory.