66 HISTORY OF GREECE. a defensible position, having a most productive territory with numer- ous cultivators, so as to furnish shelter and means of hostility for all the king's enemies. Tissaphernes calculated that the message Kriiger, De Authentia Anabascos, p. 12, prefixed to his edition of the Anab- asis, rightly explains him), that these four canals flowing from the Tigris are at, or near, the Wall of Media, which the Greeks did not pass through until loig after the battle, when Tissaphernes was conducting them towards the Tigris, two days' march before they reached Sittake (Anab. ii, 4, 12). It has been supposed, during the last few years, that the direction of the Wall of Media could be verified by actual ruins still subsisting on the spot. Dr. Ross and Captain Lynch (see journal of the Geographical Society, vol. ix. pp. 447-473, with Captain Lynch's map annexed) discovered a line of embankment which they considered to be the remnant of it. It begins on the western bank of the Tigris, in latitude 34 3', and stretches towards the Euphrates in a direction from N. N. E. to S. S. W. " It is a solitary straight single mound, twenty-five long paces thick, with a bastion on its western face at every fifty-five paces ; and on the same side it has a deep ditch, twenty-seven paces broad. The wall is here built of the small pebbles of the country, imbedded in cement of lime of great tenacity ; it is from thirty- five to forty feet in height, and runs in a straight line as far as the eye can trace it. The Bedouins tell me that it goes in the same straight line to two mounds called Ramelah on the Euphrates, some hours above Felujah ; that it is, in places far inland, built of brick, and in some parts worn down to a level with the desert." (Dr. Ross, 1. c. p. 446). Upon the faith of these observations, the supposed wall (now called Sidd Nimrud by the natives) has been laid down as the Wall of Media reaching from the Tigris to the Euphrates, in the best recent maps, especially that of Colonel Chesney ; and accepted as such by recent inquirers. Nevertheless, subsequent observations, recently made known by Colonel Rawlinson to the Geographical Society, have contradicted the views of Dr. Ross as stated above, and shown that the Wall of Media, in the line here assigned to it, has no evidence to rest upon. Captain Jones, com- mander of the steamer at Bagdad, undertook, at the request of Colonel Rawlinson a minute examination of the locality, and ascertained that what had been laid down as the Wall of Media was merely a line of mounds ; no wall at all, but a mere embankment, extending seven or eight miles from the Tigris, and designed to arrest the winter torrents and drain off the rain water of the desert into a large reservoir, which served to irrigate an ex- tensive valley between the rivers. From this important communication it results, that there is as yet no evidence now remaining for determining what was the line or position of the Wall of Media ; which had been supposed to be a datum positively estab- lished, serving as premises from whence to dedu :e other positions mentioned by Xenophon. As our knowledge now stands, there is not a single point mentioned by Xenoph on in Babylonia which can be positively verified, ext.tpt
