ON THE GARDEN OF EDEN. )7 
at the back of the place where it issues forth, with orders to 
march into the town by the bed of the stream as soon as the 
water became shallow enough; he then himself drew off 
with the unwarlike portion of his host, and made for the 
place where Nitocris dug the basin for the river, where he 
did exactly what she had done formerly: he turned the 
Euphrates by a canal into the basin, which was then a 
marsh, on which the river sank to such an extent that the 
natural bed of the stream became fordable. Hereupon, the 
Persians, who had been left for the purpose at Babylon by 
the river-side, entered the stream, which had now sunk so as 
to reach about midway up a man’s thigh, and thus got into 
the town.’* 
When Babylonia was at the zenith of its prosperity no 
country could have surpassed it in the system of its inriga- 
tion, as the whole alluvial soil between the Euphrates and 
the Tigris, a distance of about 300 miles in length, and 
varying between 20 and 80 miles in width, was intersécted 
with huge canals supplying hundreds of other watercourses, 
which ran in all directions to complete the water communi- 
cation between all parts of the province Four of the largest 
canals, whose mountainlike embankments, produced by the 
deep cuttings, appear to have joined the two rivers, so as to 
be utilized trom either when the Euphrates and the Tigris 
overflowed their banks. The gradient between them is so 
slight that any extraordinary rise from the Euphrates or the 
Tigris would answer the purpose for which the canals were 
intended. 
The great rise which takes place periodically does not 
occur, generally speaking, in both rivers at the same time, 
consequently I have often seen the Euphrates overflowing 
its left bank and inundating the plain eastward, and at other 
times the Tigris rose to such a height near Baghdad that it 
spread over its right bank and took a westerly and south- 
westerly direction. 
So little rain falls in Southern Mesopotamia that if it were 
not for the rivers of Armenia that tract of land would be a 
mere waste and a howling wilderness. There is no natural 
river to the south of the Khaboor, which is about 300 miles 
above Babylon; nor are there any tributaries to the Euphrates 
after the said Khaboor joins it, but there are no less than five 
large rivers that pour into the Tigris after it passes Nineveh. 
The great Zab, or Zabatus, of Xenophon, which I consider 
* Rawlinson’s //erodotus, Book I., chap. 191. 
