286 RAWLINSON ON SOUTHERN PERSIA. [Feb. 9, 1857. 



hope it will not be — to contimie operations in the Persian Gulf, it 

 is only natural to suppose that we shall turn our attention to the 

 particular part of the country I am now noticing ; and I may as 

 well, therefore, explain to you something of its geography, com- 

 mencing with the mouths of the river Euphrates and the surrounding 

 delta. You are aware no doubt that, according to the intelligence 

 we have in the public papers, there is another division about leav- 

 ing India at the present time, and I am thus betraying no confidence 

 in alluding to the probability that this division may be directed to 

 disembark at Mohamrah, which is the only other Persian port of 

 any consequence on the gulf. If I may judge from the admission of 

 an influential journal, of its ignorance of the position of Herat, the 

 English public would seem to be not very well up in geography, not- 

 withstanding the efforts of this Society to spread a knowledge of 

 that interesting science. It can hardly be questioned, however, that 

 we are improving. A few years ago we had very little acquaintance 

 with Balaklava, or Kertch, or any of the Ports, either in the Sea of 

 Azof or on the coasts of the Black Sea. Now, they are all household 

 words. In the same way we know very little at present about 

 Bushir, or the place to which I am about to introduce you, Mo- 

 hamrah, but it is very possible that before long they will also 

 become household words with us. I must commence then by ex- 

 plaining that Mohamrah is Persian soil. Upon this map, the 

 frontier between Persia and Turkey is not laid down at all ; and in 

 most of the maps where the frontier is laid down, it is done in- 

 correctly. The real line of frontier between the empires, not only 

 as it exists at present, but as it is confirmed by the treaty concluded 

 at Erzeroom under the sanction of England and Eussia, comes down 

 to Mohamrah, and then follows the course of the river Euphrates 

 to the sea, so that this island named Ahaddn* is Persian. I should 

 here perhaps repeat the statement which I made to this Society on a 

 previous occasion, much to the surprise of the President, that all 

 this country is quite new, within comparatively recent times. We 

 can indeed historical^ trace its formation mile by mile. The great 

 city of which the ruins are to be seen above Mohamrah was an island 



* The island oi Ahaddn, lying between ihe Bahmishir (pToiper]j Bahmen Ardeshit^) 

 and the Shat-el-Arah, or the two streams which form the delta of the Euphrates, 

 answers to the Southern Mesene of the Greeks, and the Misdn of the Arabs and 

 Talmudists. The name in the inscriptions of Sennacherib, which has been read 

 Khupapan, ought, I think, to be pronounced Hubadan, the same as the 'Abadan 



, JjL^ of the Arabs, and 'A(p(po^civ*i of the Greeks. The early Persians named the 



island Miyan Rudan, " between the rivers," evidently after the Greek Mitrrivfi?, from 

 which term also the Oriental Misdn was probably derived ; for the title is unknown 

 in the ancient inscriptions, and has no meaning in the Semitic tongues. 



