People
Flumeipersi
Saimarreh, Karkheh
Listen to the story
Flumeipersi stands beside a long river that flows into the Tigris system east of Mesopotamia, and it can be read in two ways. One reading corrects it to the Elymaeans, the people whose land bordered Persia. The other sees the Choaspes, today the Karkheh in Iran, the river near Susa whose water the Persian kings preferred, even carrying it with them on their travels, as Herodotus tells. A medieval world map calls it the river of the Persians. The river is drawn too far west, perhaps deliberately, so that it could still join the Tigris.