Euphrates River

“ Under the Arabs the old designation again prevailed and the Euphrates is always described by the Arabian geographers as the river which flows direct to Kufa, while the present stream, passing along the ruins of Babylon to Hillah and Diwanieh, has been universally known as the Nahr Sura. Occidental geographers, however, have followed the Greek use, and so to-day we call the river of Babylon or Nahr Sura the Euphrates and the older westerly channel the Hindieh canal. ”

“ There were marshes, too, for the River Euphrates in particular, which traverses a flat country, has changed its course through the ages on numerous occasions. Some particular course may remain open for a considerable period, and have the appearance of being the main channel, yet always there are overflows, and often enough such a main channel is silted up with the dirt and debris coming from higher parts of the desert ”

“ The greater part of the region, however, even along the river shores, is inhabited only by roaming Bedouin or half-savage Ma‘dan Arabs (see Irak) .
Navigation.—The length of the Euphrates from its source at Diadin to the sea is about 1800 m., and its fall during the last 1200 m. about 10 ins. per mile. The river begins to rise in the end of March and attains its greatest height between the 21st and the 28th of May. It is lowest in November, and rocks, shallows, and the remains of old dams then render it almost unnavigable. ”

“ The River Euphrates was the great source of fertility for the whole region through which it flowed. The country watered by this river was very densely populated, and the inhabitants were industrious and peaceable, cultivating their land, and living quietly and happily on its fruits. ”

“ More recently, the decline of the stream in its latter course has been found to be even greater. Neglect of the banks has allowed the river to spread itself more and more widely over the land: and it is said that, except in the flood time, very little of the Euphrates water reaches the sea. Nor is this an unprecedented or very unusual state of things. From the circumstance (probably) that it has been formed by the deposits of streams flowing from the east as well as from the north, the lower Mesopotamian plain slopes not only to the south, but to the west. ”

“ From the point, on which we stood, to the base of the Mujelibé, large masses of ancient foundations spread on our right, more resembling natural hills in appearance, than mounds covering the remains of former great and splendid edifices. The whole view was particularly solemn. The majestic stream of the Euphrates wandering in solitude, like a pilgrim monarch through the silent ruins of his devastated kingdom, still appeared a noble river, even under all the disadvantages of its desert-tracked course. ”

“ See Stephanus of Byzantium, sub voce Amphipolis. Cf. Xenophon (Anabasis, i. 4, 11) .
274 The Euphrates is the largest river of western Asia, and rises in the mountains of Armenia. It unites with the Tigris, and after a course of 1,780 miles flows into the Persian Gulf. It is navigable by boats for 1,200 miles. The annual inundation, caused by the melting of the snow in the mountains of Armenia, takes place in the month of May. The Euphrates, Tigris, and Eulaeus had formerly three separate outlets into the Persian Gulf; but the three now unite in a single stream, which is called Shat-el-Arab. ”

“ On our right the Euphrates rolled along, as unconcerned in his course as the Sun-god overhead. We could trace the direction of the river southwards to the horizon, marked by the palms along its banks. They made a thin, dark line across a wide, light plain—an alluvial tract which is only waiting to yield its hidden gifts on the day when Man joins hands with Nature and distributes the waters of the river. But not so the actual soil of Babylon; that soil, consisting as it does of building dust and débris, is of a nature which destroys vegetation. ”

“ We were forced to ride outside the cornfields that we might avoid the water conduits, but I do not think we missed anything of importance, for every twenty or thirty years the Euphrates rises high enough to submerge the cultivation, and the floods must have destroyed all vestiges of an older civilization. The low-lying fields cannot have been, within historic{80} times, a former bed of the stream, as was the case above Buseirah; an occasional mound near the river showed that the bank had long been inhabited. ”

“ Not only does the overflow of the Euphrates thus extend over a longer period, but it oversteps its banks with greater violence than does the Tigris, so that as far north as the juncture with the Khabur, and still more so in the south, the country to both sides is flooded, until it assumes the appearance of a great sea. Through the violence of these overflows, changes constantly occur in the course that the river takes, so that places which in ancient times stood on its banks are to-day removed from the main river-bed. ”

“ The Euphrates rises in the middle of March, and does not attain its highest level till the close of May. From June onwards it falls with increasing rapidity; by September all the water which has not been absorbed by the soil has returned to the river-bed. The inundation does not possess the same importance for the regions covered by it, that the rise of the Nile does for Egypt. In fact, it does more harm than good, and the river-side population have always worked hard to protect themselves from it and to keep it away from their lands rather than facilitate its access to them ”

“ In the present neglected condition of this region the floods as they come down from the mountain sources of the Euphrates are liable to wash away the banks, sometimes changing the course of the river, and overflowing large tracts at slightly lower levels, which have become unwholesome marshes, while other large tracts which are never inundated, in the fierce heats become parched and desolate sand wastes. ”

“ At one point, however, 26 m. above Deir, where lie the ruins of Halebiya, the river breaks through a basaltic dike, el-Ḥamme, some 300 to 500 ft. high. On either side of the river valley a steppe-like desert, covered in the spring with verdure, the rest of the year barren and brown, stretches away as far as the eye can see. Anciently the country on both sides of the Euphrates was habitable as far as the river Khabur ”

“ These Asiatic rivers are tricky things: they run for hundreds of miles through alluvial plains which are as flat as your hand. Here at Amarah, 200 miles from the mouth of the Tigris, we are only 28ft. above sea-level. Consequently the river's course is very easily altered. Look at Stanford's map of this region and see how the Euphrates has lost itself between Nasiriyah and Basra—"old channel," "new channel," creeks, marshes, lakes, flood-areas and so on; the place is a nightmare. That kind of thing is liable to happen anywhere if the river is neglected. ”

“ After two hours’ riding we entered a long stretch of sand heaped up into little hills which were held together by tamarisk thickets; it is apt to be submerged when the river is high, and we saw more than one overflow channel filled with pools of stagnant water. On the Syrian side the Euphrates is hemmed in here by hills whereon stands the castle of Ṣâliḥîyeh. In this wilderness we came upon some Arabs who were ploughing up a desolate spot in search of locusts’ eggs. ”

“ The low ground is bounded on its eastern side by a rocky ridge which crosses the desert from a point a little to the south of the Khâbûr, passes behind what I suppose to be the course of the Dawwarîn, and terminates in the bold bluffs of Irzî above the Euphrates, at the lower limit of the Werdî bend. When the river is exceptionally high it covers the whole area up to the hills; my informant, one ’Isâ, an Arab of the Bu Kemâl, remembered having once seen this occur; but in ordinary seasons it merely overflows a narrow belt and fills a canal that lies immediately under the eastern hills. ”

“ After a short time, the flood level would have dropped, the water and the crocodiles would have run back into the river, and the swamp plants would have become parched and dry.
The Tigris and the Euphrates of Mesopotamia are less likely to flood regularly than the Nile. The Tigris has a shorter and straighter course than the Euphrates; it is also the more violent river. Its banks are high, and when the snows melt and flow into all of its tributary rivers it is swift and dangerous. The Euphrates has a much longer and more curving course and few important tributaries. ”

“ Σίγγας) , which enters the Euphrates on the west. From this point the river runs rather east of south for about 25 m. past Khalfat (ferry) to Birejik or Bir, the ancient Birtha, where it is only 110 m. from the Mediterranean, the bed of the river being 6281/2 ft. above that sea. This was the Apamea-Zeugma, where the high road from east to west crossed the river, and it is still one of the most frequented of all the passages into Mesopotamia, being the regular caravan route from Iskanderun and Aleppo to Urfa, Diarbekr and Mosul. ”

“ The inhabitants of this region are wild and inhospitable and utterly beyond the control of the Turkish authorities, and navigation of the river between Korna and Suk-esh-Sheiukh is unsafe owing to the attacks of armed pirates. From Garmat Ali, where the Tigris and Euphrates at present unite, [1] under the title of Shatt-el-Arab, the river sweeps on to Basra, 1000 yds. in width and from 3 to 5 fathoms deep, navigable for steamers of good size. From Korna to Basra the banks of the river are well cultivated and the date groves almost continuous ”

“ The longitude of the river Nile is 30 deg. 2 min.; that of the Euphrates, as it flows through the Persian Gulf, 48 deg. 26 min.; or a difference of nearly 18 deg. and a half, or more than 1,100 miles. On the northern extremity of the land the range of Amanus mountains from the river Euphrates, to the uttermost sea, or extremity of the Mediterranean, scarcely exceeds 100 miles. ”

“ The Euphrates is crossed in the latitude of Anthemusia, a place in Mesopotamia. [12] Above the river, at a distance of four schœni, is Bambyce, where the Syrian goddess Atargatis is worshipped. After crossing the river the road runs through a desert country on the borders of Babylonia, to Scenæ. From the passage across the river to Scenæ is a journey of five-and-twenty days. There are on the road owners of camels who keep resting-places which are well supplied with water from cisterns, or transported from a distance. ”

“ They knew of no ruins in the desert beyond, and my impression is that there has never been any settled population in this region, away from the Euphrates. We struck back to the river in a south-easterly direction, and in three hours came to our camp, pitched by some Afaḍleh tents on a mound of which I have not recorded the name. It is the boundary between the kazas of Raḳḳah and of Deir, and lies about an hour’s march below a site called by Kiepert the Khân. ”

“ Esdras states that they entered in at the narrow passage of the river Euphrates, the Lord staying the springs of the flood until they were passed over. The point on the river Euphrates at which they crossed would necessarily be in its upper portion, as lower down would be too far south for their purpose. The upper course of the Euphrates lies among lofty mountains ”

“ Below this point the back country on the Syrian side has always been a complete desert. On the Mesopotamian side there would seem, from the accounts of Xenophon and Ptolemy, to have been an affluent which joined the Euphrates between Deir and ʽAna, called Araxes by the former, Saocoras by the latter; but no trace of such a stream has been found by modern explorers and the country in general has always been uninhabited. Below Salahiya the river-bed narrows and becomes more rocky. ”

“ The Nahr Malk or royal river, modern Radhwaniya, leaves the Euphrates five leagues below this and joins the Tigris three leagues below Ctesiphon; while the Kutha, modern Habl-Ibrahim, leaving the Euphrates three leagues below the Malk joins the Tigris ten leagues below Ctesiphon. In the time of the Arabs these were the chief canals, and the cuts from the main channels of the Nahr ʽIsa, Nahr Sarsar, Nahr Malk (or Nahr Malcha) , and Nahr Kutha, reticulating the entire country between the rivers, converted it into a continuous and luxuriant garden. ”

“ The dam on the Euphrates which regulated the flowing of its waters into the Hindîyeh canal has been allowed to fall into disrepair; every year a deeper and a stronger stream flows down the Hindîyeh, and matters have reached such a pass that during the season of low water the eastern bed is dry, the palm gardens of Ḥilleh are dying for lack of irrigation, and all the country along the river-bank below Ḥilleh has gone out of cultivation. ”

“ So the ancient tyrannies bear sway even in the open wilderness.
Three-quarters of an hour from Khmeiḍah we passed another mound strewn with potsherds, and thirty-five minutes further down we came upon the ruins of Abu ’Atîḳ. They lie upon high rocky ground that drops steeply into an old bed of the Euphrates from which the river has retreated into a new bed a few hundred yards away. ”

“ Under Midhat Pasha, governor-general of Bagdad from 1866 to 1871, an attempt was made by the Turkish authorities to establish regular steam navigation on the Euphrates. Midhat caused many of the dams to be destroyed and for some years occasional steamers were run between Meskene and Hillah in flood time, from April to August. But with the transfer of Midhat this feeble attempt at navigation was abandoned. At the present time the river is navigated by sailing craft of some size from Hit downward. ”