I have already stated, in the preceding chapter, that in the march of the day next but one preceding the battle of Kunaxa, the army came to a deep and broad trench dug for defence across their line of way, with the exception of a narrow gut of twenty feet broad close by the Euphrates; through which gut the whole army passed. Xenophon says, “This trench had been carried upwards across the plain as far as the Wall of Media, where indeed, the canals are situated, flowing from the river Tigris; four canals, one hundred feet in breadth, and extremely deep, so that corn-bearing vessels sail along them. They strike into the Euphrates, they are distant each from the other by one parasang, and there are bridges over them—Παρετέτατο δ᾽ ἡ τάφρος ἄνω διὰ τοῦ πεδίου ἐπὶ δώδεκα παράσαγγας, μέχρι τοῦ Μηδίας τείχους, ἔνθα δὴ (the books print a full stop between τείχους and ἔνθα, which appears to me incorrect, as the sense goes on without interruption) εἰσιν αἱ διωρύχες, ἀπὸ τοῦ Τίγρητος ποταμοῦ ῥέουσαι· εἰσὶ δὲ τέτταρες, τὸ μὲν εὖρος πλεθριαῖαι, βαθεῖαι δὲ ἰσχυρῶς, καὶ πλοῖα πλεῖ ἐν αὐταῖς σιταγωγά· εἰσβάλλουσι δὲ εἰς τὸν Εὐφράτην, διαλείπουσι δ᾽ ἑκάστη παρασάγγην, γέφυραι δ᾽ ἔπεισιν. The present tense—εἰσιν αἱ διώρυχες—seems to mark the local reference of ἔνθα to the Wall of Media, and not to the actual march of the army.
Major Rennell (Illustrations of the Expedition of Cyrus, pp. 79-87, etc.), Ritter, (Erdkunde, x, p. 16), Koch, (Zug der Zehn Tausend, pp. 46, 47), and Mr. Ainsworth (Travels in the Track of the Ten Thousand, p. 88) consider Xenophon to state that the Cyreian army on this day’s march (the day but one before the battle) passed through the Wall of Media and over the four distinct canals reaching from the Tigris to the Euphrates. They all, indeed, contest the accuracy of this latter statement; Rennell remarking that the level of the Tigris, in this part of its course, is lower than that of the Euphrates; and that it could not supply water for so many broad canals so near to each other. Col. Chesney also conceives the army to have passed through the Wall of Media before the battle of Kunaxa.
It seems to me, however, that they do not correctly interpret the words of Xenophon, who does not say that Cyrus ever passed either the Wall of Media, or these four canals before the battle of Kunaxa, but who says (as Krüger, De Authentiâ Anabaseos, p. 12, prefixed to his edition of the Anabasis, 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 long after the battle, when Tissaphernes was conducting them towards the Tigris, two days’ march before they reached Sittakê (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, l. 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, commander 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 extensive 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 established, serving as premises from whence to deduce other positions mentioned by Xenophon. As our knowledge now stands, there is not a single point mentioned by Xenophon in Babylonia which can be positively verified, except Babylon itself,—and Pylæ, which is known pretty nearly, as the spot where Babylonia proper commences.
The description which Xenophon gives of the Wall of Media is very plain and specific. I see no reason to doubt that he actually saw it, passed through it, and correctly describes it in height as well as breadth. Its entire length he of course only gives from what he was told. His statement appears to me good evidence that there was a Wall of Media, which reached from the Tigris to the Euphrates, or perhaps to some canal cut from the Euphrates, though there exists no mark to show what was the precise locality and direction of the Wall. Ammianus Marcellinus (xxiv, 2), in the expedition of the emperor Julian, saw near Macepracta, on the left bank of the Euphrates, the ruins of a wall, “which in ancient times had stretched to a great distance for the defence of Assyria against foreign invasion.” It is fair to presume that this was the Wall of Media; but the position of Macepracta cannot be assigned.
It is important, however, to remember,—what I have already stated in this note,—that Xenophon did not see, and did not cross either the Wall of Media, or the two canals here mentioned, until many days after the battle of Kunaxa.
We know from Herodotus that all the territory of Babylonia was intersected by canals, and that there was one canal greater than the rest and navigable, which flowed from the Euphrates to the Tigris, in a direction to the south of east. This coincides pretty well with the direction assigned in Colonel Chesney’s map to the Nahr-Malcha or Regium Flumen, into which the four great canals, described by Xenophon as drawn from the Tigris to the Euphrates, might naturally discharge themselves, and still be said to fall into the Euphrates, of which the Nahr-Malcha was as it were a branch. How the level of the two rivers would adjust itself, when the space between them was covered with a network of canals great and small, and when a vast quantity of the water of both was exhausted in fertilizing the earth, is difficult to say.