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We took up our quarters at Museyib, a small town on the banks of the Euphrates, six or eight miles above the Hindiyah Barrage, a dam finished a few years before, and designed to irrigate a large tract of potentially rich country. We patrolled out to Mohamediyah, a village on the caravan desert route to Baghdad, and thence down to Hilleh, around which stand the ruins of ancient Babylon.
They constructed the old Hindîyah Barrage in 1890, but it gave way in 1903 and the state of things was even worse than before; for the Hillah branch then dried entirely. This illustrates the damage the Tigris itself is capable of inflicting on the country.
The Hindîyah branch, to-day the main stream of the Euphrates, is the old low-lying Pallacopas Canal, which branched westward above Babylon and discharged its waters into the western marshes.
The Tharthâr depression, besides disposing of the Tigris flood- water, would thus probably feed the Euphrates; and a second barrage on the Tigris, to be built at Kût, would supply water to the Shatt el-Hai. It was then that Sir William Willcocks designed the new Hindîyah Barrage, which was completed in 1913.
Things became worse during the centuries of Turkish misrule. But the silting up of the Hillah, or main, branch of the Euphrates about 1865, and the transference of a great part of its stream into the Hindîyah Canal, caused even the Turks to take action.
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