River
Fl. Euphrates
Listen to the story
The Euphrates runs across the eastern part of the Tabula without a name beside it. Long the frontier river of Rome, and of Persia before that, it was guarded by a string of fortresses from Zimara onwards. It rises in the Armenian mountains and breaks through the Taurus near Daseusa. The lower course is the surprise: three canals feed a great lake with an island, a web of channels follows, and the river simply vanishes into the Tigris near Seleucia. The map thus agrees with the Roman writer Pliny, who let the Tigris alone reach the sea, while the Greek geographer Strabo gave the Euphrates its own mouth.