y was the district lying
along both sides of the river between the thirty-fifth and thirty-seventh
degree of latitude, and the forty-first and forty-second degree of
longitude, east. The three or four cities which rose successively to be
capitals of Assyria were all in that region, and are now represented by the
ruins of Khorsabad, of Kouyundjik with Nebbi-Younas, of Nimroud, and of
Kaleh-Shergat. One of these places corresponds to _Ninos_, as the Greeks
call it, or Nineveh, the famous city which classic writers as well as
Jewish prophets looked upon as the centre of Assyrian history.

To give some idea of the relative dimensions of these two states Rawlinson
compares the surface of Assyria to that of Great Britain, while that of
Chaldaea must, he says, have been equal in extent to the kingdom of
Denmark.[15] This latter comparison seems below the mark, when, compass in
hand, we attempt to verify it upon a modern map. The discrepancy is caused
by the continual encroachments upon the sea made by the alluvial deposits
from the two great rivers. Careful observations and calculations have shown
that the coast line must have been from forty to forty-five leagues farther
north than it is at present when the ancestors of the Chaldees first
appeared upon the scene.[16] Instead of flowing together as they do now to
form what is called the _Shat-el-Arab_, the Tigris and Euphrates then fell
into the sea at points some twenty leagues apart in a gulf which extended
eastwards as far as the last spurs thrown out by the mountains of Iran, and
westwards to the foot of the sandy heights which terminate the plateau of
Arabia. "The whole lower part of the valley has thus been made, since the
commencement of the present geological period, by deposits from the Tigris,
the Euphrates, and such minor streams as the Adhem, the Gyndes, the
Choaspes, streams which, after having long enjoyed an independent existence
and having contributed to drive back the waters into which they fell, have
ended by becoming mere feeders of the Tigris."[17] We see, therefore, that
when Chaldaea received its first inhabitants it was sensibly smaller than it
is to-day, as the district of which Bassorah is now the capital and the
whole delta of the Shat-el-Arab were not yet in existence.

NOTES:

[1] BEROSUS, fragment No. 1, in the _Essai de Commentaire sur les Fragments
cosmogoniques de Berose d'apres les Textes cuneiformes et les Monuments de
l'Art Asiatique_ of F