volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

The Median Wall of Xenophon. 117
The ruins of Kadisiyah on the Tigris were considerable,
but the buildings which stood there were those
of a frontier fortress rather than a town. Felix Jones
examined the ruins carefully and found that the city
wall had eight sides, and a round tower at each angle.
It was built of bricks of the Sassanian period, 18 inches
square and 5 inches thick, and was 25 feet high and
originally 50 feet thick. A ditch 70 feet wide ran round
the city inside the wall, and this was protected on the
inner side by a mud rampart. Within the area enclosed
by the wall was a wall miming due north and south
1,240 paces long, and from this another wall 450 paces
long ran due east. The palace or central building stood
in an oblong enclosure 250 paces long from north to
south, and 100 paces broad.*
A httle below Kadisiyah we passed on the west
bank the mouth of the Dujel Can.al. At Kanattr, i.e.,
" the dams," were the remains of works connected with
the great canal and of a bridge, and due south of it, on
the west bank, were the remains of Sadd Nimrud.
These were identified by Felix Jones and others with
the end of the " Median Wall " of Xenophon, which is
said to have reached from the Euphrates to the Tigris.
We passed Huwai, Khan as-Su'ewiyah (formerly called
Khan Mazrakji), Tall Husen, Balad, Ba'riirah, Sayyid
Muhammad, Kubbat ash-Shawali, and many smaller
villages, and then came, on the east bank, to the mouth
of the river 'Adhem. Here we tied up in order to pay a
very hurried visit to the ruins called Tall Mahassil.
Everything we saw there was post-Christian, and Rich
was undoubtedly correct in condemning the theory of
sources of native information that were available to him, his accounts
of Oriental matters are singularly correct. In connection with this
opinion, I would put on record a criticism which I heard Mommsen
make on the Oriental part of Gibbon's history. He and A. S. Murray
and I were discussing that point in Murray's house in Gower Street,
and Mommsen said, " I once spent two years in verifying Gibbon's
statements with the original authorities, and I found his accuracy
in reproducing their evidence so great that it amounted almost to a
vice."
* Felix Jones, Bombay Records, vol. xliii, p. 10.