Abstract
Currently, southern Uzbekistan belongs to the regions of Central Asia that are - from the point of view of the Hellenistic studies - most intensely archaeologically researched thanks to the effort of the French, Russian, German, Uzbek and Czech teams working there in last few decades. Consequently, we do not lack the data to work on, on the contrary. What we are lacking, it is a proper evidence-based interpretative framework allowing us to transform the data into knowledge. Scholarship concerned with history and archaeology of Bactro-Sogdian borderlands of the Hellenistic period has always been strongly affected by various peculiar factors and motivations leading to the contradictory explanations of facts (such as attribution of individual cities / towns known from written sources, location of the border between the two geographical units, dating of principal sites). More often than not, argumentum ex silentio has been employed in order to corroborate an initial idea of a scholar. The sources that are largely silent in this case, are rather archaeological ones, while written sources speak too much at times, but are completely mute at other times.
The principal aim of this paper is not find the ultimate answers to the aforemetioned most controversial questions, but to show the most problematic moments in past research and to point out, how chronically they affect even the latest research. Last but not least, let me look for the proper question to the ultimate answer.