Of Eridu I have already spoken. Some six or eight thousand years ago it was the seaport of primitive Babylonia.[72] Ur, which stood close to it, seems to have been a colony of Nippur, and therefore of comparatively late origin.[73] Borsippa was a small and unimportant town, which eventually became a suburb of Babylon, and Babylon, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, was itself a colony of Eridu.[74] Hence of the cities which stood outside the Edin of Babylonia, and may therefore belong to an age when Babylonian civilization was still in its infancy, Eridu alone is of account. And the priority even of Eridu was contested. Traditionally Sippara, which is expressly stated to have been in “the Edin,” claimed to be the oldest of Babylonian cities; one quarter of it bore the name of “Sippara that is from everlasting,” and like Eridu, it believed itself to have been the abode of the first man.[75] Thus far, however, the monuments have given us nothing to substantiate the claim; the culture-god of Babylonia was Ea of Eridu, not the Sun-god of Sippara, and for the present, therefore, we must look to the shore of the Persian Gulf, rather than to the “land of Eden” for the cradle of Babylonian civilization. At any rate, both Sippara and Eridu were of Sumerian foundation, as indeed were nearly all the great cities of Babylonia. Eridu was a later form of the older Eri-dugga, “the good city,” a name which seems to have been the starting-point of more than one legend. The growth of the coast to the south of it gives us some idea as to the age to which its foundation must reach back.