[69] It is noticeable that the script of the other people whose civilization grew up on the banks of a river, the Egyptians namely, contains no special ideograph for “river.” The word is expressed by the phonetically-written atur, with the determinative of “water” or “irrigation basin.” As in the primitive hieroglyphs of Babylonia, “the sea” was a “circle.”
[70] For proof of this reading see Expository Times, xvii. p. 416 and note infra, p. 91.
[71] See my Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, pp. 373–84.
[72] Taylor found quantities of sea-shells in its ruins (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, xv. p. 412). At the time of its foundation an arm of the sea probably ran up to it from the south-east, though the myth of Adamu describes him as fishing each day in the waters of the actual Gulf, rather than in an arm of it.
[73] The Moon-god of Ur was a “son” of El-lil, the god of Nippur.
[74] For proof of this see my Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, p. 105.
[75] A tablet obtained by Dr. Hayes Ward divides Sippara into four quarters, “Sippara of Eden,” “Sippara that is from everlasting,” “Sippara of the Sun-god,” and “Sippara,” which may be the “Sippara of Anunit” or “Sippara of Aruru,” the creatress of man, of other inscriptions. Amelon or Amelu, “man,” who corresponds with the Enos of Scripture, is said in the fragments of Berossus to have belonged to Pantibibla, or “Book-town,” and since Euedoranchus of Pantibibla, the counterpart of the Biblical Enoch, is the monumental Enme-dhur-anki of Sippara, it is clear that Pantibibla is a play on the supposed signification of Sippara (from sipru, “a writing” or “book”). The claim to immemorial antiquity made on behalf of Sippara may be due to the fact that Akkad, the seat of the first Semitic empire, was either in the immediate neighbourhood of Sippara or another name of one of the four quarters of Sippara itself.
[76] Chaldæa and Susiana, p. 282.
[77] 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.
[78] There is a striking resemblance between the primitive Babylonian picture of a boat and the sailing boat depicted on the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, for which last see Capart, Les Débuts de l’Art en Egypte, p. 116.