['.AP.YLON.- CANALS. -FORTIFICATIONS 295 cities, we have no good information, nor can we safely reason from the analogy of Babylon, inasmuch as the peculiarities of the latter were altogether determined by the Euphrates, while Nine- veh was seated considerably farther north, and on the east bank of the Tigris : but Herodotus gives us valuable particulars re- specting Babylon as an eye-witness, and we may judge by his ac- count respecting its condition after much suifering from the Per- sian conquest, what it had been a century earlier in the days of its full splendor. The neighboring territory receiving but little rain, 1 owed its fertility altogether to the annual overflowing of the Euphrates, on which the labor bestowed, for the purpose of limiting, regularizing, and diffusing its supply of water, was stupendous. Embankments along the river, artificial reservoirs in connection with it, to re- ceive an excessive increase, new curvilinear channels, dug for the water in places where the stream was too straight and rapid, broad and deep canals crossing the whole space between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and feeding numerous rivulets 2 or ditches which enabled the whole breadth of land to be irrigated, all these toilsome applications were requisite to insure due moisture for the Babylonian soil ; but they were rewarded with an exuberance of produce, in the various descriptions of grain, phon calls Mespila : the difference of name in this case is not of very great importance (Hitter, ut sup. p. 175). Consult also Forbiger, Ilandbuch der al- ien Geographic, sect. 96, p. 612. The situation of Nineveh here pointed out is exactly what we should ex- pect in reference to the conquests of the Median kings : it lies in that part of Assyria bordering on Media, and in the course of the conquests which the king Ky ax ares afterwards extended farther on to the Halys. (See Ap- pendix at the end of this chapter.) 1 Hcrodot. i, 193. 'H yri TUV 'Aaavpluv verat fiev 6/Uy^j while he speaks of rain falling at Thebes in Egypt as a prodigy, which never happened ex- cept just at the moment vhcn the country was conquered by Cambyses, oo yup 8i) verai ra uvu r//c A.ly{nr~ov rb Ttapuirav (iii, 10). It is not unimpor- tant to notice this distinction between the little rain of Babylonia, and the no rain of Upper Egypt, as a mark of measured assertion in the historian from whom so much of our knowledge of Grecian history is derived. It chanced to rain hard during the four days which the traveller NiebuLl spent in going from the ruins of Babylon to Bagdad, at the end of Novera bier 1763 (Rcisen, vol. ii, p. 292).
- Herodot. i, 193 ; Xenophon, Anab. i, 7 15 ; ii, 4, 13-22.
