>If you were to
>suddenly uplift land out of the sea, in an area with rainfall it would
>leach the salts. The less rain, the longer the time.
A couple of things. You may have mentioned this, but how far below the
surface were the oceanic fossils found? It would be interesting to
compare that depth with the depth Woolley reached when he excavated Ur
before he ran out of artifacts. I think that would give us a means to
estimate the date of submersion. Also, it doesn't rain very often in
Iraq, so how long would it take to leach away sea salt?
There was enough salt washed out of the Armenian mountains in the
irrigation process to increase the salinity of early cities to where
the soil would no longer support crops. Early Eridu was abandoned after
a few hundred years for that reason. This suggests that the mountains
were also submerged, thus the salt, and that in turn suggests, perhaps,
an earlier date for the submersion of Southern Mesopotamia than you
proposed. Not criticizing, just exploring.
Dick Fischer, The Origins Solution - http://www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago."