The "Kampir-Tepa" ancient settlement (4th century BCE)

Kampir-Tepa lies thirty kilometres west of Termez and remains one of the country's more interesting archaeological addresses.

The site covers about four hectares and divides in two: a citadel surrounded by a ditch, and a lower town behind a city wall five metres thick with rectangular watchtowers.

Scholars link Kampir-Tepa with the legendary Alexandria on the Oxus, founded by Alexander the Great on the bank of the Amu Darya during his conquest of Bactria. The town stood at a crossing and was strategically important; later it belonged to the Greco-Bactrian and Kushan kingdoms. It has been established that Kampir-Tepa served as an inn, a customs post and a port through which goods passed.

The citadel is a large complex of a hundred rooms of different sizes, divided by corridors into four blocks. The lower town held residential quarters, where Seleucid, Greco-Bactrian and Kushan coins and terracotta objects have been found. A find of its own kind is a set of Bactrian manuscripts on papyrus from the first half of the second century: they are reckoned the oldest manuscripts in Central Asia.

The streets and the city wall have survived remarkably well, so you can walk the site reading its plan rather than guessing at it.