These brief remarks of Al Makdisi, from his account of the first colonization of Khwarizm, contain much of interest. For evidently in early medieval times there still survived in Khwarizm a vague traditional memory of an ancient culture, when the sandy islands of the great Oxus delta and the lowlands round the Sea of Aral were inhabited by sedentary fisher-folk, the ancestors of the creators of the brilliant but little known civilization of ancient Khwarizm.