RIVERS KUR AND RION. 
113 
East, we cannot but admit the fact; but, at the same time, ocular 
demonstration assures us that both rivers, the Kur and the 
Rion, must have sunk very low in their beds since so important 
a traffic, as that described, could be carried up their streams to 
such a height as would make the land-carriage across from one 
to the other, only a journey of five days. Mr. Gibbon, in his 
work on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and who 
generally wrote from collected evidence, mentions, that the Kur is 
navigable as high as Sarapona; a distance of one hundred miles 
from its mouth, forty only of which would admit large vessels. 
From my own observations, and information, on the spot, I 
should say, that the Kur will admit very small craft only, as far 
up as to the point of its junction with the Alazan ; and not until 
it is augmented by the Aras do vessels of burthen find water. 
With regard to the Rion, it is not navigable even so high as 
Cotatis. Hence, from the present comparatively shallow state 
of these two rivers, instead of goods being landed, as of old time, 
at a point in the Kur, whence they might arrive, after a journey 
of only five days, at an answering navigable point on the Rion ; 
they would, in our times, be put on shore so low in the line of* 
the river, as to constrain them to traverse a distance of sixteen 
days travelling, over a difficult and dangerous mountain-country, 
before they could re-embark at the necessary depth of water in 
the Rion. That this was not always the case, we may gather 
another argument, from the accounts we have of Seleucus Nica- 
tor’s project for connecting the Euxine and Caspian seas by a 
canal; which, being only to be effected by the union of the two 
rivers in question, the idea could not have been conceived at all, 
unless those rivers then possessed more extensive navigable 
channels than they do at present. 
Q 
