Note 77 — Chapter III · THE SUMERIANS

Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xxvii. p. 186. Rawlinson calculated the rate of advance from that made by the Babylonian Delta between 1793 and 1833. In the age of Strabo and Arrian the Tigris and Euphrates were not yet united, while in the time of Nearchus (B.C. 335) the mouth of the Euphrates was 345 miles from Babylon. De Morgan calculates that between the age of Nearchus and that of Sennacherib, when the Euphrates had not yet joined the more rapid Tigris, the rate of increase must have been much slower than it is to-day and have not exceeded eighty metres a year. In the age of Sennacherib Eridu was already seventy miles distant from the coast (de Morgan, Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse, i. pp. 5–23). The distance from the Shatt el-Arab (the united stream of the Tigris and Euphrates) to the end of the alluvium in the Persian Gulf is 277 kilometres, or 172 miles. Some idea of the appearance of the coast in the Abrahamic age may be gained from the map of the world drawn by a Babylonian tourist in the time of Khammu-rabi which I have published in the Expository Times, November 1906.