The Euphrates River

The Sumerian name of the river, Buranun, written with the same cuneiform sign-group that also wrote the city of Sippar on its banks. Its ultimate origin is unknown and may lie in a substrate language older than Sumerian itself; one suggestion connects it to a word for copper, the metal that was floated down the river on rafts. It is among the oldest river-names on record, current in Sumerian from the beginnings of writing, when the Euphrates and the Tigris together defined the inhabited world of the south.

Buranun is the headwater of both name-families on this page, exactly as Idigna is on the page for the Tigris. From the Akkadian reading of these same signs, Purattu, descend the Semitic names down to the Arabic al-Furāt; and from Purattu, by way of Elamite and Persian, came the Greek Euphrátēs of the West. The two great rivers of Mesopotamia share not only their valley but the very shape of their onomastic histories, each an ancient Sumerian name that split, at the Iranian frontier, into a faithful Eastern line and a reinterpreted Western one.

The Akkadian name of the river, Purattu, read from the same sign-group as the Sumerian Buranun. It runs through Akkadian royal inscriptions and administrative texts across two millennia; Babylon and many of the oldest cities of Sumer stood on its course, and the river’s slow, silt-laden flow made the irrigation of the southern plain possible. The form is the Sumerian name in Akkadian sound, the two pronunciations of one ancient word.

Purattu is the form from which both branches of the river’s later name descend. From it the Semitic languages took the Pĕrāt and Furāt of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic; and from it, carried east into Elamite as Úipratuiš and into Old Persian as Ufrātu, came the Greek Euphrátēs and the whole Western tradition. Like the Akkadian Idiqlat on the Tigris page, Purattu is the pivot of the river’s name, the Mesopotamian word that every later language, in the East and the West alike, would inherit and remake.

The Hebrew name of the river, Pĕrāt, the Akkadian Purattu in Hebrew form, often called simply ha-nāhār, “the River,” the river above all others. It is the fourth river of Eden in Genesis, and the eastern boundary of the land promised to Abraham, “the great river, the river Pĕrāt”; Jeremiah is sent to bury and recover a linen sash by its banks. To the writers of the Hebrew Bible it was the far great river of the world’s edge, the limit of empire and of promise.

Pĕrāt is the Euphrates as scripture knows it, the boundary-river of Israel’s imagination. Set beside Ḥiddeqel, the Tigris, among the rivers of paradise, it fixes the two great waters of Mesopotamia at the source of the world. And as with the Tigris, the Greek translators would not keep the Hebrew form: rendering these verses, the Septuagint writes not Pĕrāt but Euphrátēs, so that even in the Bible the Western name overlays the Eastern, and the river of Eden flows, in Greek, under its Persian-Greek disguise.

The Aramaic name of the river, Pĕrāt, the Akkadian Purattu taken into Aramaic with the loss of its first syllable, purattu worn down to pĕrāt. As Aramaic became the common language of the Near East under the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires, the river’s name passed into it in this trimmed shape, the form the later Hebrew and Syriac would share.

Pĕrāt is the bridge of the Semitic family, the link between the cuneiform Purattu and the alphabetic names of the Bible and the Arabic of today. The same loss of the initial syllable that shapes the Aramaic Tigris-name, Diglat from Idiqlat, shapes the Euphrates-name here, Pĕrāt from Purattu. The two rivers were trimmed alike as they crossed from cuneiform into the alphabet, and the Arabic al-Furāt, like Dijla, preserves not the full Akkadian form but its shortened Aramaic descendant.

The Elamite name of the river, Úipratuiš, written ú-ip-ra-tu-iš, the Akkadian Purattu taken into Elamite with a prefixed vowel and an Elamite ending. It is the form that stands at the head of the river’s western branch, the version of the name through which the Iranian world received it; the Elamite chancellery of the Achaemenid empire used it in the trilingual inscriptions beside the Old Persian and Akkadian.

Úipratuiš is the hinge between the Mesopotamian and the Western names, the step that begins the river’s transformation. It is from this Elamite form, with its prefixed ú-, that the Old Persian Ufrātu and then the Greek Euphrátēs derive: the eu- that the Greeks heard as their word for “good” goes back, in the end, to a vowel that Elamite scribes added to the front of the Akkadian Purattu. The “good” in Euphrates is, at its root, an Elamite prefix mistaken for a Greek compliment.

The Old Persian name of the river, Ufrātu (with an initial breathing, hUfrātuš), taken from the Elamite Úipratuiš and current in the Achaemenid royal inscriptions. As with the Tigris, the Persians inherited an old Mesopotamian river-name and reshaped it toward their own language; the form may have suggested to Persian ears a sense like “good to cross over,” a fordable river, though the resemblance is incidental to the name’s real origin in Purattu.

Ufrātu is the immediate parent of the Greek Euphrátēs and the form on which the Western name turns. It is the Persian intermediary, the version the Greeks heard during the Achaemenid centuries when they came to know Mesopotamia through Persia. Standing beside the Old Persian Tigrā on the Tigris page, Ufrātu shows the two rivers of Mesopotamia passing together through Iranian mouths on their way to Greek, both of them carried west in Persianized forms that the Greeks would then make their own.

The Greek name of the river, Euphrátēs, taken from the Old Persian Ufrātu and reshaped to look like a Greek word. The Greeks heard in the u-fra- of the Persian name their own prefix eu-, “good, well,” and so the river’s name took the form Euphrátēs, as though it were a compound meaning “good-flowing” or “well-declaring.” Herodotus, who describes Babylon astride the river, uses the form throughout, and it became the standard Greek name for the western river of Mesopotamia.

Euphrátēs is the form that gave the river to the West, and it is a piece of folk-etymology fixed in stone. The “good” that every English speaker half-hears in Euphrates is not in the name at all; it is the trace of an Elamite prefix and a Persian vowel, reanalyzed by Greek ears as a word of praise. The Septuagint completed the substitution by writing Euphrátēs for the Hebrew Pĕrāt in the rivers of Eden, so that the great river’s Western, complimentary name overlies its plain Eastern one even in scripture, exactly as Tígris overlies Ḥiddeqel on the river beside it.

The Latin name of the river, Euphrātēs, taken unchanged from the Greek. For Rome the Euphrates was above all a frontier, the long-disputed boundary between the empire and Parthia, and Latin literature is full of it as the eastern limit of Roman power; Pliny traces its course through Armenia and Syria in his geography. Through Latin and the Latin Bible the Greek form passed into the languages of Europe.

Euphrātēs is the western terminus of the river’s reinterpreted name, the form English uses. With Tigris on the page beside it, it completes the pair: the two rivers of Mesopotamia reached the modern West together, both under names the Greeks had reshaped from Persian, while their true and ancient names, Dijla and al-Furāt, stayed behind in the East. The land between the rivers is known to the West by two Greek words, and to its own people by two far older ones.

The Syriac name of the river, Pĕrāt, the Aramaic form continued in the dialect of the Syriac churches, whose Mesopotamian world the Euphrates watered. The Peshitta uses it for the Eden river and the boundary of Abraham’s promise, and the Syriac writers of the Euphrates valley knew it as a familiar local water. The form keeps the trimmed Aramaic shape, faithful to the old Purattu without the Greek reinterpretation.

Pĕrāt is the eastern name on its own ground, in a language of the river’s own country. As with the Tigris, where the Greek-speaking church read Euphrátēs in the same verses, the Syriac church, living on the river, kept the old Mesopotamian Pĕrāt. The two rivers divide the Bibles the same way: in the Greek and Latin scriptures they are Tigris and Euphrates, but in the Syriac of the land between them they remain Deqlaṯ and Pĕrāt, the names the rivers have always answered to at home.

The Geʿez name of the river, Ifrāṭis, carried into Ethiopic from the Greek Euphrátēs of the Septuagint. Where the Hebrew of Genesis names the fourth river of Eden Pĕrāt and the boundary of Abraham’s promise “the great river,” the Greek scriptures wrote Euphrátēs, and the Ethiopic, translated from the Greek, followed with Ifrāṭis. The river appears under this name in the Ethiopic account of paradise and the covenant with Abram.

Ifrāṭis is the Western name reaching the Ethiopian highlands, and the twin of Ṭigros on the Tigris page. Like its companion, it shows a Semitic language receiving an ultimately Semitic river-name in its Greek disguise: Geʿez, a cousin of Hebrew and Syriac, took the Euphrates not as the Pĕrāt its own family knew but as the Greek-dressed Ifrāṭis, because it met the river in the pages of the Greek Bible rather than on the Mesopotamian plain. The two rivers of Eden reach Ethiopia under their Western names, Ṭigros and Ifrāṭis, the arrow and the good-flowing.

The Arabic name of the river, al-Furāt, the Aramaic Pĕrāt continued in Arabic, and, by a fitting coincidence, identical to the Arabic adjective furāt, “sweet, fresh” (of water). The Qurʾān uses furāt for the sweet water that God sends, distinguished from the salt sea, and the river name and the common word fell together, so that the great river of Iraq bears, in Arabic, a name that also simply means “fresh water.” The geographers describe al-Furāt watering the towns of the middle Euphrates and the irrigation canals of Iraq.

al-Furāt is the eastern family come to the present, the living Arabic name of the river. Like Dijla for the Tigris, it is the faithful Semitic form, descended through Aramaic from the Akkadian Purattu, that still names the water on the ground; Euphrates belongs to the Western books. That the Arabic name also means “sweet water” is a happy accident of sound, but a telling one: the river that the Greeks dressed up as “good-flowing” turns out, in Arabic, to carry a real and homely sense of good water, by no design but the chance meeting of an ancient name with an ordinary word.