Persia from the Earliest Period to the Arab

IJO HISTORY OF PERSIA.
Jovian, accepted terms of peace few Roman leaders
would have acknowledged. The five provinces be-
yond the Tigris, ceded by the grandfather
of Shah-
pnr, were restored by him ; Nisibis and Singara
given up ; while a special article required the abandonment
for ever by the Romans of the kingdom of
Armenia. " The predecessors of Jovian," adds Gibbon,
" had sometimes relinquished the dominion of distant
and unprofitable provinces ; but since the foundation
of the city, the genius of Rome, the god Terminus
who guarded the boundaries of the Republic, had
never retired before the sword of a victorious enemy."
In fact, the treaty assented to by Jovian, gave up nearly
all that the victories of Galerius had secured.
Little is known of the history of Shahpiir after the
conclusion of the Roman war, but he is said to have
contended with doubtful fortune for the possession of
Armenia, and to have made a fresh irruption into the
Roman dominions. Finally, in the reign of Gratian, he
ended his long and glorious reign of fully seventy years.
His two immediate successors, Ardashir II and Shah-
pur III, did nothing worthy of commemoration; nor
country through which Julian marched, and is mainly supported by
the narratives of Magnus of Charrae, and of Eutychianus of Cappadocia,
who also accompanied Julian (see John Malala). These
writers all speak of what they call the great canal of the Euphrates,
and of the dams across the rivers, of which Layard gives such a
vivid description. With Arrian, they call these dams calarac/ae,
a word which Yaciit is says of Nabathaean origin. These dams
were not to prevent, as Layard thinks, hostile shipping ascending the
rivers, but rather to keep up a sufficient supply of water for irrigation.
The great canal is doubtless the Nahar-al-malk which, according
to Abyder.us, was made by Nebuchadnezzar, The Greek
Armacal is, I suspect, but a transposition of the letters of the previous
word.