'Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, including a journey from Bagdad by Mount Zagros, to Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, researches in Ispahan and the ruins of Persepolis, and journey from thence by Shiraz and Shapoor to the sea-shore. Description of Bussorah, Bushire, Bahrein, Ormuz, and Muscat, narrative of an expedition against the pirates of the Persian Gulf, with illustrations of the voyage of Nearchus, and passage by the Arabian Sea to Bombay.' [‎27] (58/582)

TO KESRABAD, OR DASTAGHERD.
27
The name of the present town of Kesrabad, signifying
" founded or peopled by Kesra," the Arab name of Chosroes, may
be thought, perhaps, to give some support to the supposition of
this being the site of his favourite palace, seated in a beautiful
plain, bounded on three sides by hills, and on the east by lofty
mountains, commanding an extensive prospect, enjoying a deli
cious climate, and wanting only the hand of taste and labour to
render it one of the most agreeable abodes that could be
inhabited.
The strength of this position would be only such as art could
give it, since it derived none from nature ; but, although it would
seem reasonable that a place, containing such immense treasures
as Dastagherd is described to have had within it at one time,
should have been well fortified ; yet, from the precipitate flight of
the monarch, who abandoned it without resistance to the Greek
Emperor, it might at least be presumed that its means of defence
were not very considerable.*
D'Anville would have it, but conjecture it rather to be some stream leading into it, under
the name of the Afit-Ab of the Maps, though I have no positive knowledge of the existence
of such a stream from any other source. The branch running by the small town of Imaum
Eske, in the road from Bakouba to Mendeli, in Kinnier's map of Persia, may possibly be
the same stream, as it seems to lead towards a discharge into the Diala, though its continua
tion to such discharge is not carried on in the map itself.
Great confusion, it must be confessed, exists both in the writings of the Ancients, and in
those of their ablest illustrators among the moderns, on the subject of such small local
features of distant countries as these : but we may say with Kennel, that " notwithstanding
these inaccuracies, it is curious to trace the geographical ideas of the people who railked high
as historians, warriors, and philosophers, on a country whose divisions then formed a subject
of speculation, like the interior of Africa, and the course of its rivers at the present day."
* " The various treasures of gold, silver, gems, silk, and aromatics, were deposited in an
hundred subterraneous vaults; and the chamber Badaverd denoted the accidental gift of
the winds, which had wafted the spoils of Heraclius into one of the Syrian harbours of his
rival. The voice of flattery, and perhaps of fiction, is not ashamed to compute the thirty
thousand rich hangings that adorned the walls, the forty thousand columns of silver, or more
probably of marble and plated wood that supported the roof, and the thousand globes of gold
suspended in the dome, to imitate the motions of the planets and the constellations of the
zodiac." Gibbon, vol. viii. c. 46. p. 225.—8vo.
E 2