'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎33r] (70/862)

DESCRIPTION OF THE LAND
33
not yet used to the best advantage and some runs to waste in un
drained marsh. This canal belongs now to the irrigation system con
trolled by the Hindiya barrage (fig. 8).
The Hindiya Barrage
Nothing illustrates the vagrant habits of the lower Euphrates better
than a study of the sites of ancient towns at the time of their founda
tion. Unfortunately few have been identified, and the long periods
during which some of the land has been under irrigation, marsh, or
water make identification extremely difficult. Some are, however,
known for certain: Sippar (now the mound of Abu Hubba), Kutha
(now Tel Ibrahim), and Kish (Tel al Uhaimir), all probably built on
earlier channels of the Euphrates, seem to prove that the river in the
second millennium b.c. took a more easterly course above Babylon
than it does to-day (fig. 13). Geographically this is possible, and not
unlikely. Moreover, the ruins of Babylon, now on an eastern channel
of the Euphrates (the Hilla canal), and those of Borsippa, near the
western (the Hindiya branch), may indicate that at a very early period
the Euphrates flowed from Babylon direct to Borsippa and that there
was then no division of the river above Babylon. Even in Nebuchad
nezzar’s day, when there may have been two channels, with his
father’s brick bridge 135 yards long over the Arakhtu channel at
Babylon, it is not known whether there was another channel east or
west of it. In Alexander’s time, 250 years later, there is only one
known channel past Babylon, but a number of Persian canals watered
the country to the east, and one great artificial channel, the Pallacopas,
left the right bank of the river a hundred miles below Babylon.
Later the town of Hira, not far from the more modern Najaf, may
have been on a western channel, but it was settled by Lakhmid
frontier tribesmen and not the sedentary people of the Euphrates. It
seems probable therefore that the division of the Euphrates above
Babylon into a western and an eastern channel occurred between
100 b.c. and a.d. 600 (figs. 8, 14), though the Melcha canal, fore
runner of the Malik, is sometimes referred to as a branch of the
Euphrates by ancient writers.
From the accounts of Arab geographers in the Abbasid period the
changes of the Euphrates channels can be traced more accurately.
The division was then below Musaiyib, approximately as to-day, and
the great navigation canals from the Euphrates to the Tigris, men
tioned above, were in full operation. In the early Abbasid period the
western arm (now the Hindiya branch) carried the greater volume of
A 5195 D