"Spirits of the Lost Sea"

The Aral Sea encompasses Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and has been fed for thousands of years by two major rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. With no outflow, the sea level was maintained by a natural balance between inflow and evaporation.

When Alexander the Great conquered the area in the fourth century B.C., these rivers already had a long history of providing the lifeblood of Central Asia. For centuries, the Aral Sea and its vast deltas supported an archipelago of settlements along the Silk Road that connected China to Europe.