ich are deep and numerous, but yield only a scanty
supply of a brackish and unpalatable fluid. No settled population can at
any time have found subsistence in this region, which produces only a few
dates, and in places a poor and unsucculent herbage. Sandstorms are
frequent, and at times the baleful simoon sweeps across the entire tract,
destroying with its pestilential breath both men and animals.

Towards the north Chaldaea adjoined upon Assyria. From the foot of that
moderately lofty range already described which the Greeks call Masius,
and the modern Turks know as Jebel Tur and Karajah Dagh, extends, for
above 300 miles, a plain of low elevation, slightly undulating in places,
and crossed about its centre by an important limestone ridge, known as
the Sinjar hills, which have a direction nearly east and west, beginning
about Mosul, and terminating a little below Rakkah. This track differs
from the Chaldaean lowland, by being at once less flat and more elevated.
Geologically it is of secondary formation, while Chaldaea proper is
tertiary or post-tertiary. It is fairly watered towards the north, but
below the Sinjar is only very scantily supplied. In modern times it is
for nine months in the year a desert, but anciently it was well
inhabited, means having apparently been found to bring the whole into
cultivation. As a complete account of this entire region must be given
in another part of the present volume, this outline (it is thought) may
suffice for our present purpose.

Eastward of Chaldaea, separated from it by the Tigris, which in its lower
course is a stream of more body than the Euphrates, was the country known
to the Jews as Elam, to the early Greeks as Cissia, and to the later
Greeks as Susis or Susiana. This territory comprised a portion of the
mountain country which separates Mesopotamia from Persia; but it was
chiefly composed of the broad and rich flats intervening between the
mountains and the Tigris, along the courses of the Kerkhah, Kuran, and
Jerahi rivers. It was a rich and fertile tract, resembling Chaldaea in
its general character, with the exception that the vicinity of the
mountains lent it freshness, giving it cooler streams, more frequent
rains, and pleasanter breezes.

Capable of maintaining with ease a dense population, it was likely, in
the early times, to be a powerful rival to the Mesopotamian kingdom, over
which we shall find that in fact it sometimes exercised supremacy.

On