There are few more remarkable romances than that of the young lawyer, who went out to the East to practise law, and dug up Babylon and Assyria instead; or of the young English soldier, who wrested the secret of an unknown writing from the rock at Behistun. CHAPTER XII Since Layard dug up the vanished cities of Nineveh and Calah on the banks of the Tigris three-quarters of a century ago, many gifted men have followed in his footsteps, and wielded pick and shovel among the mounds dotting Mesopotamia. No one coming upon the utter desolation of Abu Shahrein could imagine that this great mound of sand, with the ruined brick tower peeping out at the top, was some six thousand years ago the flourishing port of Eridu. Eridu to-day is a dead city, buried under a sea of sand, yet this desolation marks, so far as we know, the very beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia. Here it was that the Sumerians rose out of the dim past, with a culture that was far higher than that of many nations still peopling the world. They wrote on clay tablets, and had their code of laws, and traded by ship with distant places. For long it was thought that Eridu in that far-off time must have stood upon the seashore. The evidence that it was a port, and that ships discharged their cargoes at the quays of the city, is beyond all dispute. Yet to-day Eridu stands inland over a hundred miles—the seashore is a long journey from the one-time seaport. Men of science strove to solve the seeming contradiction of a seaport so far inland. They studied the question very carefully. Measurements were taken as to the amount of silt deposited by the Euphrates and the Tigris at their deltas, and it was proved that in the last six thousand years the area of land at the mouths of the rivers has been very considerably extended, indicating that the ancient seashore has receded inland. The only uncertainty was whether the rivers had created a new belt of land over 90 miles wide since the Sumerians lived their peaceful lives at Eridu of old. It was thought that the rivers must have accomplished this feat, and it came to be accepted as the explanation of why Eridu is now so far away from the coast. But there is another explanation, and the correct one. The Sumerians were the people who taught the Babylonians the art of making canals. In the days of the Sumerians a system of canals spread over the country to irrigate the land, and we now know that the Babylonians and Assyrians obtained their knowledge of irrigation from the Sumerians, for the latter were highly capable engineers.