and on the Non-identity of Babylon and Babel. 513 
At the present moment (as I have before remarked,) I do 
not consider that our present knowledge of the countries in 
question is sufficient to enable us to come to any entirely 
satisfactory conclusion, or to reconcile the various apparently 
conflicting statements of antiquity, which evidently cannot be 
made to apply (under favour of Mr. Carter must it be said,) 
to the present state of the country, and which it will require 
much labour and not less caution to adapt to any hypothetical 
condition of the country. But one point, which is not suffi- 
ciently attended to by commentators generally, cannot be too 
strongly borne in mind by those who may apply themselves to 
the task. It is, that where a fact is expressly asserted by a 
writer of character, who possessed the means of knowing it, 
its correctness must be admitted, until something positive be al- 
leged sufficient to invalidate it. Mr. Carter appears entirely 
to neglect this rule, when he cites Arrian as “saying ex- 
pressly, the Euphrates has a higher channel than the Tigris, 
which receives the waters of the Euphrates by many streams,” 
and yet, without hesitation, stigmatizes this an “error.” Per- 
fectly true it may be, as Col. Chesney reports, that, in the 
present day, “the Tigris gives a large contribution to the 
sister stream by the canal of the Hie, about 220 miles above 
the gulf;” but may it not be equally true, that formerly the 
two rivers united much higher up, at a point at which their 
relative levels were as Arrian so expressly states them to have 
been? The mere circumstance that the river Al Huali or 
Hermas, which at the present day runs in a direction towards 
the west so as to unite with the Khabour, is considered to 
have had in former times an eastward course and to have 
joined the Tigris*, is in entire accordance with such a state of 
things. 
Mr. Carter says, “* Xenophon understood this better [than 
Arrian]: he mentions four canals by which the latter [the Ti- 
gris] pours its waters into the Euphrates +.” Did Xenophon 
really say this, I should be compelled to admit his testimony, 
as that of a man of unquestioned honour and integrity and an 
eye-witness, even in spite of the express assertion of Arrian to 
the contrary ; but it is far from being the case, and Mr, Carter 
has evidently been misled from consulting merely some loose 
was kept open by artificial means, in which case it would, in the result, have 
been regarded merely as a canal. 
* See Rennell’s Illustrations of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand, p. 102; 
see also Orig. Bibl., p. 113, where the opinion is expressed that “at the time 
when the extent northward of the Persian Gulf was much greater than it is 
at present...... the river Al Huali had its separate course to the sea.” 
+ Anab,, lib. i. cap. 7. 
Third Series. Vol. 8. No.49. June 1836. 3G 
