Page 260 - Records of Bahrain (2)(ii)_Neat

586 Records of Bahrain

TIIE ISLANDS OF BAHREIN. 205

is noC, however, of much conscqucnco to my present argument,
which is confined to Ilea and his ocean domicilo. Ho is best
known as tho Lord of tlio Absu or “abyss,” a name which is
usually applied in a sort of mythic sense to tho “waters under
tho earth” of tho Hebrews, but which also certainly indicated
a geographical reality; being, in fact, the sea now called the
Persian Gulf, and more specifically the great inland sea, which
at different periods of history has spread over a more or less
extent of the low country intervening between the salt sea
shore and tho higher land at the foot of the mountains. It
is only at least by supposing an inland sea of this nature—
the “Ass3rrium stagnum ” of Justin, and since greatly cir­
cumscribed by the gradual accretion of alluvial deposit from
tho rivers—that I can explain how “tho blessed city,” or
Eridy Ilda's chief scat of worship, and represented by tho
ruins of Tib, which arc now more than 200 miles from the
; sea-coast, came to be designated “the house of the Absu”

—y ^yy ^y J1 or how the ark in the Chaldccan account
of tho Deluge could have been launched into the Absu from
1 the inland town of Surippak (probably near tho modern
Howeiza), where it was built by Khasis-udra or Xisuthrus.2
i Tho third scat of the “water-god,” or >->-y 5=yyyy fy Ilea,

i was at >->- yy^ Khalkha, which, as the name never occurs in
tho accounts of tho Assyrian military expeditions, I suppose
to have been an island in the Gulf, and which, accordingl)r,
I venture to compare with Kliarak or Karrak, a name
that may, I think, be also recognized in tho *Apd/aa of
Ptolemy, off the Persian coast, and the Aracia of Pliny, tho

1 Sco B.M.I. yoI. iy. p. 45, 1. 35. In tlio samo passage, >->£^|y ^Z^y
the Accadian name for tlio ahju. iH explained as “tho abodo of knowledge,”
Jiit-nimiki% in reference, no doubt, to tho primitive colonists who came from tlio
Persian Gulf.
2 See col. 1, 1. 27 of Dclugo tablet. I call Surippalc an inland town bccauso
neither in ancient nor in modern times has a city ever been built on tho sea-shore
at tho mouth of a great river like tho Euphrates, for tho simple reason that in
such a position tho city would bo buried under alluvial deposit m the courso of a
very few years. Surippak is mentioned as lato ns tho limo of Khannnurayas,
about jj.c. 1500, but not later. Soo Smith’s “Early History of Babylon,”
Journ. of Soc. of Bib. Arch. vol. i. p. 50, where, however, tho namo is expressed
under its Accadian form of Maim (for Mazu).