Andrei Omel’chenko

Ancient Kesh was an area of Central Asia situated in the upper reaches of the Kashkadarya river in today’s South-Eastern Uzbekistan. Combining data of written sources, numismatics and archaeology, the author tries to reconstruct the political history of Kesh in the 4th century BC – 4th century AD in a more general context of Sogdian history. For this purpose he uses the data of new Central Asian sources, as well as Greco-Roman, Chinese and Armenian sources, archaeological and topographic materials from the research works of the Department of Archaeology of Tashkent State University, including his own contributions. He supposes that an independent domain could have existed in Kesh since the late 3rd century BC and flourished in the period of Late Antiquity.