Figure 1. The Bay of Ḵor-e Musā and its surroundings.

(Ḵowr-e Musā; Khor Musa; Musa Bay), a north-south running, tidal inlet about 64 km long, situated north of the Persian Gulf and approximately 48 km east of the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab (Leader, 1929, 244), and a village at the head of it, within the province of Khuzestan (N 30° 05′ 20′′ E 48°59′08′′). The Karun, or “Dorack” river (Horsburgh, 1817, 421) debouched into it until its course changed in 1766 to flow into the Shatt al-Arab (Harrison, 1942, 45). Fresh-water springs once bubbled up and emptied into it (Harrison, 1942, 51). It has also been known as “Khor Musu,” “Khor Moosa,” “Moï Allah” (Ainsworth, 1888, 183- 85), and “Kore Moosah” (Horsburgh, 1817, 421). It is divided in two by a shoal called Kaseir bint Sisuan (Qassār bin Siswān) and the narrow bank that extends south of it. The area to the west, on the side of Khor Bahmishir [Ḵor-e Bahmanšir], is low and swampy” (Constable and Stiffe, 1890, 293). It also appears as “Chôr Maʿšûr” (Ḵor-e Māhšahr) on some naval charts (Sachau, 1916, 966). The Nahr Buzi, a branch of the Jarrāḥi river, also empties into the Persian Gulf at Ḵor-e Musā (MacGregor, 1871, 196), creating a large tidal fan (Walstra et al., 2010, 274) that was covered with water at high tide but formed a vast area of mud-flats at low tide with many small islands (Leader, 1929, 244; Bourke-Burrowes, 1931, 41). Soundings taken during marine surveys in the 19th century determined that depths in Ḵor-e Musā ranged from 4 to 18 fathoms (Brucks, 1856, 581; MacGregor, 1871, 247). Describing his visit to Ḵor-e Musā in 1902, Rear-Admiral Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville (1863-1936) wrote that “there stretched on all sides of us a brown sandy plain, flat, smooth, devoid of life, reaching everywhere to the horizon” (Somerville, 1920, 818). Commander Walter Sinclair (1905) and Commander Charles William Shearme (1907) both authored reports on their marine surveys of Ḵor-e Musā. In times of extreme flooding the Shadegan Marshes (Bāṭlāq-e Šādegān) empty into Ḵor-e Musā (Walstra et al., 2010, 269).

Ḵor-e Musā has sometimes been identified with the ancient Mosaios river (Gk.: Μώσαιοϛ, Cl. Ptolemy 6.3.2; see e.g., Vincent 1797, 394; Ainsworth 1890, 116; Wilson 1929, 510). Wilhelm Tomaschek identified the Pylodes kolpos (χόλποϛ Πηλώδηϛ) of Ptolemy and Illodes of the Cosmographia of Ravennas Anonymous with the marshy area on the west side of Ḵor-e Musā (Tomaschek,  1890, 75; Potts, 2018, 62). Derah (Dārā) island in Ḵor-e Musā has been identified with Margastana, “a small island” at the mouth (Arrian, Anab. II. Indica, 41.2; see Chesney, II, pp. 354-55; Potts, 2019a, 386) of “a lake, full of fish called Cataderbis” (Arrian, Anab. II., Indica 41.2; Tomaschek, 1890, 73; Wilson, 1929, 513; by the late 20th century commercial fishing in Ḵor-e Musā was greatly reduced; see Abbes and Farrugio, 1977, 9, 11). J. B. B. d’Anville identified Arrian’s Caterderbis with site of the “Bender Madjour” (Bandar-e Māhšahr) on the shores of the lake or inlet in the northern Persian Gulf mentioned in the Jehān-nomā (1732) of Kâtip Çelebi (1609-57) and thus inferred that Cataderbis denoted the Ḵor-e Musā (Bourguignon d’Anville, 1764, 169; Potts, 2019b, 342). Similarly, John Watson McCrindle (1825-1913), who identified the bay of Cataderbis as “that which receives the streams of the Mensureh and Dorak,” and at the entrance of which “lie two islands, Bunah and Ḍeri” (McCrindle, 1879, 218, n. 87), also implied its identification with Ḵor-e Musā.

By 1745, a geomorphological change to the Ḵor-e Qubbān (Ḵor-e Abu Ḵażayr), through which the Karun entered the Persian Gulf (Wilson, 1925, 233), prompted the Banu Kaʿb tribe, who had been resident at Ḵor-e Qubbān on the Persian Gulf, to move further north to Dawraq or Dawraq al-Falāḥiya (formerly a settlement in south-western Ḵuzestān, also called Dawraq al-Furs ‘Dawraq of the Persians’; Lorimer, 1908, 961; Floor, 2006, 281). With the death of Nāder Shah two years later, the Banu Kaʿb were able to oust the Afšārs from Dawraq while maintaining their hold over Ḵor-e Qubbān (Perry, 1971, 134-35). Ḵor-e Musā thus came under Banu Kaʿb control. In 1761, when Alexander Douglas, the British East India Company Resident at Bandar-e ʿAbbās, was on a tour of inspection to the Residency in Basra, ʿAli Āqā, the Ottoman-appointed governor there, prevailed on him to help organize a blockade of Ḵor-e Musā, using the Company’s brig Swallow and some smaller vessels in order to compel Shaikh Salmān, the Banu Kaʿb chieftain, to pay his taxes (Perry, 1971, 136-37). The effort failed as the Banu Kaʿb were able to retire inland to Dawraq (Perry, 1979, 163). The Banu Kaʿb found themselves claimed, for purposes of taxation, by both the Ottoman and Zand regimes, and March 1766 saw the start of a bootless East India Company naval campaign up the Ḵor-e Musā in response to the Banu Kaʿb seizure of three of its vessels, the Sally, the Fort William, and an unnamed yacht, the previous year (Lorimer, 1915, 140; Perry, 1971, 143-45; Floor, 2006, 285)

In 1902, fearful of Persia granting Russia permission to build a naval base in the Persian Gulf, contingency plans were drawn up and reconnaissance surveys were undertaken with a view to bolstering Britain’s position there. One of the coastal areas surveyed was Ḵor-e Musā (Somerville, 1920, 812-25; Busch, 1967, 254). The results of these surveys were published in the 1924 edition of the Persian Gulf Pilot (Wilson, 1929, 511). Already in 1906 Lord Ellenborough (1841-1915), a British Royal Navy officer and member of the House of Lords, raised the possibility of Ḵor-e Musā becoming the southern terminus of the Baghdad Railway, in preference to either Basra or Kuwait (Wilson, 1929, 512). The Khor Musa Agreement, whereby Ḵazʿal Khan, the chieftain of the Banu Kaʿb tribe of Ḵuzestān, entered into an agreement to give the British first refusal for the lease of land around Ḵor-e Musā, was signed in 1912 (IOR, File 240/1913). In 1924, an aerial survey was conducted of Ḵor-e Musā and the adjacent mud flats (Wilson, 1929, 513).

In 1927, American engineers surveyed, charted, and buoyed the deep channel leading into the Ḵor-e Musā from the Persian Gulf (Leader, 1929, 244). Writing in 1929, Arnold Talbot Wilson (1884-1940) noted the presence of only two landmarks, a small, ruined mud brick fort known as the Kut “of Mister Zubaid el Farangi” (al-Maʿqil, in Basra district) and the tomb of an unknown pilot, “Qabr-an-Nakhuda” (Qabr-e Nāḵodā) (Wilson, 1929, 512). When the Pahlavi dynasty (r. 1925-79) decided to construct a Trans-Iranian railway (Rāhāhan-e sarāsari-ye Irān; see RAILROADS i. THE FIRST RAILROAD BUILT AND OPERATED IN PERSIA), joining the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, the village of Ḵor-e Musā (later Bandar-e Šāhpur, present-day Bandar-e Emām Ḵomeyni; for the name change see Field, 1939, 256) was chosen as its southern terminus (McClenaghan, 1931, 110). The site chosen had the virtue of not being located within the contested Shatt al-Arab, over which a dispute with the new nation of Iraq was then simmering, and of being as far from British India as possible.

Hence, political reasons (Melamid, 1959, 211) and nationalist concerns (Lemańczyk, 2013, 239) played a role in the choice of Ḵor-e Musā. The location, however, proved costly as it required the construction of a bridge across the Karun river at Ahvāz as well as a very long pier and causeway across swampy ground (Melamid, 1968, 355). In 1938- 39, an enquiry into the viability of the construction of an oil refinery and pipeline and tanker terminal on Ḵor-e Musā found that, with some dredging, the inlet could be made usable by tankers of up to 40,000 tons (Melamid, 1959, 211). The Second World War put a halt to those plans but by 1948 a new port, Bandar-e Māhšahr, was opened on Ḵor-e Musā “for the sole purpose of delivering Agha Jari [see ĀḠĀJĀRI] crude oil by gravity-flow pipeline to tankers” (Melamid, 1959, 213). Ḵor-e Musā is today dominated by the petrochemical and container port of Bandar-e Emām Ḵomeyni. The possibility of harnessing tidal energy to generate electricity in Ḵor-e Musā has been explored in recent years (Hashemi Aslani et al., 2017, 15-22).