since the age of Alexander the Great the waters of the Persian Gulf have
receded more than forty-six miles from the shore. When the Sumerians
first settled by the banks of the Euphrates it must have been on the
sandy plateau to the west of the river where the city of Ur, the modern
Mugheir, was afterwards built. At that time the future Babylonia was a
pestiferous marsh, inundated by the unchecked overflow of the rivers
which flowed through it. The reclamation of the marsh was the first work
of the new-comers. The rivers were banked out and the inundation
regulated by means of canals. All this demanded no little engineering
skill; in fact, the creation of Babylonia was the birth of the science
of engineering.

Settlements were made in the fertile plain which had thus been won, and
which, along with the adjoining desert, was called by the Sumerians the
_Edin_, or "Plain." On the southern edge of this plain, and on what was
then the coast-line of the Persian Gulf, the town of Eridu was built,
which soon became a centre of maritime trade. Its site is now marked by
the mounds of Abu Shahrein or Nowâwis, nearly 150 miles from the sea;
its foundation, therefore, must go back to about 7500 years, or 5500
B.C. Ur, a little to the north-west, with its temple of the Moon-god,
was a colony of Eridu.

In the plain itself many cities were erected, which rose around the
temples of the gods. In the north was Nippur, now Niffer, whose great
temple of Mul-lil or El-lil, the Lord of the Ghost-world, was a centre
of Babylonian religion for unnumbered centuries. After the Semitic
conquest Mul-lil came to be addressed as Bel or "Lord," and when the
rise of Babylon caused the worship of its patron-deity Bel-Merodach to
spread throughout the country, the Bel of Nippur became known as the
"older Bel." Nippur was watered by the canal Kabaru, the Chebar of