Jand

Jand stood on the lower Syr Darya, a town whose reputation once reached far enough for geographers to call the Aral Sea the Sea of Jand. Muslim merchants encountered the products of the steppe and forest country here, and the town figured prominently in traditions about the origins of the Seljuks. Its importance rested on connections between settled river communities and the Oghuz world beyond them.

The Mongol conquest brought Jand into Jochi's sphere during the campaigns against Khwarazm. Yet the town did not simply continue unchanged through the later Middle Ages. An early fourteenth-century Chinese map still named it Jan-di; by the end of that century it apparently ceased to exist. Jand's place in the lower river landscape therefore belongs partly to the memory of an earlier urban centre. Its medieval prominence survived in geographical writing even as the inhabited town declined.