[173] Travels in the Track, p. 144.
[174] Zâkhô must be the place known to the Arab geographers as Ḥasanîyeh (I see that Hartmann comes to the same conclusion: Bohtân, Mitt. der Vorderas. Gesell., 1896, II. p. 39), but their information is, as usual, exceedingly meagre and the castle is mentioned by none. Muḳaddasî, in the tenth century, says that it is a day’s journey from Ma’lathâyâ (Malthai) to Ḥasanîyeh (ed. de Goeje, p. 149), and notes the bridge over the Khâbûr above the town (p. 139). Yâḳût, in the thirteenth century, observes that it is two days from Môṣul on the road to Jezîret ibn ’Umar. Ainsworth conjectures it to be the spot described by Xenophon as “a kind of palace with several villages round it,” which was reached by the Greeks in five days’ march from Mespila-Nineveh, but it must be admitted that Xenophon’s description is not exactly suited to Zâkhô. Ritter thinks that a memory of the people called by Strabo Saccopodes may be retained in the name Zâkhô (Vol. IX. p. 705). With regard to the name Ḥasanîyeh it is perhaps preserved in Ḥasanah, a small village on the opposite side of the Khâbûr valley.
[175] Ainsworth thinks that it may mark the site of the village at which the Greeks camped on the second day from Zâkhô: Travels in the Track, p. 146. Xenophon mentions neither the Khâbûr nor the Ḥeizil.
[176] Mr. King, who has visited Jûdî Dâgh, tells me that all the reliefs are of Sennacherib and were carved in the year 699 B.C.
[177] Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 154.
[178] So said Kas Mattai, but the Arab geographers would seem to place it to the south of Jûdî Dâgh, not to the north. For example, Muḳaddasî says that Thamânîn, the village of the eighty who were saved from the flood, stand on the river Ghazil (the Ḥeizil Sû), a day’s march from Ḥasanîyeh (Zâkhô), ed. de Goeje, pp. 139 and 149. Sachau, however, speaks of Bêtmanîn as being behind Jûdî Dâgh, i.e. he bears out my information: Reise, p. 376.
[179] It has been identified with the Bezabde of Ammianus Marcellinus, the Saphe of Ptolemy (ed. Müller, p. 1005), and the Sapha of the Peutinger Tables. Ammianus Marcellinus is generally supposed to have confused Bezabde-Jezîreh with Phœnice-Finik, saying that the two names are applied to the same place. In his account of the capture of Bezabde by Sapor II, in A.D. 360, his description applies better to Finik than to Jezîreh (Bk. XX. ch. vii. 1. See, however, Hartmann: Bohtân, Part II. p. 98). He relates further that Constantius attempted in vain to re-capture Bezabde (Bk. XX. ch. xi.), but in this passage he must mean Jezîreh. I can find little in the history of Jezîreh except the mention of sieges: by Tîmûr for example (Ritter, Vol. IX. p. 709), and by the emirs of Bohtân (Rich: op. cit., Vol. I. p. 106). When Moltke visited it in 1838 it was a heap of ruins (Briefe aus der Turkei, Berlin, 1893, p. 251), and it was not much more when I saw it.
[180] Sachau notices these reliefs. In his opinion the inscriptions are of no great age: Reise, p. 379.
[181] Ibn Baṭûṭah, in the fourteenth century, mentions an old mosque in the market place, which is probably the same as the one I saw, though it has undergone many alterations and reparations since his day.
[182] Nineveh and Babylon, p. 55.