Page 57 - Perished Nations

The Lake of Lut, or Dead Sea as otherwise called.

most 100 metres. Another property of the Lake of Lut is that the salt con-
tent of its water is very high, the density being nearly 30%. Because of this,
no living organism, such as fish or moss, can survive in this lake. This is
why the Lake of Lut is called the "Dead Sea" in Western literature.
The incident of Lut’s (as) people, which is recounted in the Qur’an,
occurred around 1800 BC according to estimates. Based on his archaeo-
logical and geological researches, the German researcher Werner Keller
noted that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were in fact located in the
Siddim Valley which was the region at the furthest and lowest end of the
Lake of Lut, and that there were once big and widely inhabited sites in
those regions.
The most interesting structural characteristic of the Lake of Lut is evi-
dence showing how the disaster incidence recounted in the Qur’an took
place:
On the eastern shore of the Dead Sea the peninsula of El-Lisan protrudes
like a tongue far into the water. El-Lisan means "the tongue" in Arabic.
Unseen from the land the ground falls away here under the surface of the
water at a prodigious angle, dividing the sea into two parts. To the right of
the peninsula the ground slopes sharply down to a depth of 1200 feet. On

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