Chaldone Promontorium

Chaldone Promontorium placed by Pliny (6.28) on the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, near its northern extremity: between a salt river, which once formed one of the mouths of the Euphrates, and his flumen Achenum. He describes the sea off this promontory as voragini similius quam mart per 50 millia passuum orae. It corresponded in situation with the bay of Koneit or Graen (al. Grane) harbour, where Niebuhr places the modern tribe of the Beni Khaled, a name nearly identical with the Chaldone of Pliny (Forster, Arabia, vol. i. p. 49, 50). It is further determined by modern survey, minutely corroborating the classical notices. The locus ubi Euphratis ostium fuit, is D'Anville's ancien lit de l'Euphrate; the Flumen Salsum, is Core Boobian, a narrow salt-water channel, laid down for the first time in the East India Company's Chart, and separating a large low island, off the mouth of the old bed of the Euphrates, from the main land; the Promontorium Chaldone is the great headland, at the entrance of the Bay of Doat al-Kusma from the south, opposite Pheleche island; and the voragini similius quam mari, or sea broken into gulfs, of 50 miles, extending to the flumen Achana, is that along the coast, between the above-named cape and the river of Khadema, a space of precisely 50 Roman miles. This tract, again, is the Sacer Sinus of Ptolemy, terminating at Cape Zoore. (Ib. vol. ii. p. 213.

[G.W]