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| 0411 |
The Pulse of Asia : vol.1 |
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existed between the Black Sea and the Caspian, but there
is no certainty in either case.
Herodotus, about B. C. 458, visited Olbia on the Black
Sea at the mouth of the Dnieper River. He there obtained
from the merchants such accurate information that he was
able to state definitely that the Caspian Sea was completely
isolated and had no outlet. He makes the north and south
axis six times as long as that from east to west, although now
it is only between three and four times as long. Of course
we have no certainty that Herodotus had anything more
than the unreliable accounts of traveling merchants. Never-
theless, it is interesting to see how well his information agrees
with the conclusion to which we are led by other evidence.
The width of the Caspian Sea between the Caucasus moun-
tains and the Ust-Urt plateau, the part with which the
Olbians would be most familiar, is about two hundred miles,
and would not be greatly increased even though the level
of the water rose several hundred feet. If the length of the
sea were six times two hundred miles, water would extend
from about its present limit at the foot of the Elburz moun-
tains on the south, to north of Samara in the plains of
Russia; and this is just what would happen if the Caspian
rose to the level at which there is reason to believe that it
stood in ancient times. Herodotus says also that the Jax-
artes, or Syr River, after throwing off many small arms
to feed a lagoon, which Rawlinson surmises to be the Sea
of Aral, entered the Caspian in a single stream. Possibly
the Jaxartes may have followed an old channel which, as
the map shows, joins the Oxus near that river's mouth;
and the united streams may have flowed by another old
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