26 
EXPLORATIONS IN TURKESTAN. 
THK BOSPORUS. 
The Bosponis has been \vell described by Philippson (1897) as a young ri\er 
valley incised in an uplifted peneplain f'einetypische Denudationsflache"); a ver\- 
modem depression has changed the normal river valley to a strait, about 160 feet 
deep, leaving the uplands of the peneplain still from 700 to 1,000 feet above sea 
level. All that I saw from the steamer's deck, on two passages through the Bos- 
])orus, and from a walk on the uplands back of Robert College, about 5 miles 
north of the Golden Horn, fully confirmed this interpretation. The defonned rocks 
in the walls of the gorge, the 
wide view over the undulating 
uplands with their subdued resi- 
dual hills or monadnocks (fig. 
10), the sharp dissection of the 
upland by the winding main 
valley and its branches, and the 
general appearance of submerg- 
ence along the present shorelines, admit of no other explanation. The space available 
for occupation along shore is commonly so narrow that houses are often built 
directl)- on the water's edge. The water is so deep close to the shore that large 
\-essels may make near approach to the land. As a result, collisions not infre- 
quently occur between bowsprits and house walls ; we saw a house from which one 
corner had been torn out in such an encounter. The Golden Horn is simpl)- the 
drowned lower part of a side valley that comes into the Bosporus at Constantinople 
from the northwest and north. Philippson dates the erosion of the gorge as not 
older than the Upper Pliocene ; the depression of the region, changing the Bosporus 
from a river to a strait, is placed in the recent past, during the existence of man. 
THE SOUTH COAST OF THE BLACK SEA. 
Fig. 10. ^Sketch o( ihe Uplands across the Bosporus, looking eastward 
from near Robert College, north of Constantinople. 
The reasons for suggesting that the Caspian and the Black seas ma}- have been 
confluent before the Bosporus was submerged are based on certain indications that 
the land at the southeastern end of the Black Sea was lower than now at the time 
when the land at the 
southwestern end was 
higher. These indica- 
tions are as follows : The 
coast at and to the east 
of the Bosporus (fig. 11), 
as seen from the passing 
steamer, showed sharply 
cut modem cliflTs, but no 
benches or terraces above the present shoreline. The map of the region, in Stieler's 
Hand-Atlas, shows no delta at the south of the Sakaria River, about 90 miles east of 
the Bosporus. At Samsun, near the middle of the south coast, where our steamer 
Fig. 1 1 . — Bird's-eye Diagram ot the Bosporus at its exit from the Black Sea. 
