'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎401r] (804/862)

TEN HISTORICAL SITES
6 33
681 BiC.) and his successors who enlarged the city by building great palaces
and a fifteen-gated wall miles in circuit. Thus most of the finds date
from the seventh century b.c. down to the destruction of the city (p. 219).
The Khosar stream (p. 96), which crossed the site then as now, was
deflected into a swamp or lake outside the city. From the palaces of
Sennacherib and Ashur-Banipal beneath the Kuyunjik mound there came
an immense number of bas-reliefs sculptured on alabaster slabs, many of
which are now in the British Museum. They covered the inside walls
of the palaces, and Sir Henry Layard in his digging alone reckoned that
he unearthed a total length of 9,880 feet of these tablets. From the royal
libraries of these two kings have come thousands of clay cuneiform docu
ments which have been invaluable in unravelling the past. Only sporadic
digs have been possible in the mound of Nabi Yunis, but royal palaces
have been identified. Recently (1941) heavy rains cleaned the fine bulls
which guard the Gate of the Bulls in the north wall, which have been
left in position.
Nineveh was supplied with water by a remarkable stone-paved canal
over 50 miles long, which brought the water of the Gomel Su from Bavian,
where the canal-head was controlled by stone sluice gates, to the Khosar
channel near Nineveh. On the cliff at Bavian is a great relief and
inscription celebrating the work, carved out of the bare rock. At Jerwan
village the canal, 72 feet wide, crossed a ravine by a stone aqueduct
918 feet long with five pointed arches. The building of this canal took
Sennacherib only fifteen months.
Khorsabad or Dur Shurrukin has more buildings to show than
Nineveh, the nineteenth-century excavation having been recently con
tinued. Everything dates from the reign of its founder Sargon (720-705
b.c.; p. 218), since the town did not survive him. The citadel includes
the royal palace and a complex of temples and ziggurat. The wall was
82 feet thick; its seven gateways were guarded by fine bulls (photo. 99)
and genii, now in the Baghdad Museum. In size the city is not com
parable to Nineveh, its plan being a square with four walls each 4,920
feet long, enclosing about a square mile.
Seleucia and Ctesiphon (fig. 95 ; photo. 117)
Though there is little to be seen to-day around the Arch of Ctesiphon,
Seleucia, a great city the size of modern Baghdad or ancient Babylon,
existed on the right bank of the old channel of the Tigris, at the junction
of the Nahr Malik, from the time of Seleucus Nicator (301-280 b.c.;
p. 229) to the third century a.d. It was faced by the royal city of Ctesi
phon, first Parthian and later Sassanid, on the left bank from the first
century b.c. onwards. Ctesiphon and its suburbs, seven towns in all,
known to Arabs as the Madain, survived the Moslem conquest for several
generations until their population was drawn away to Baghdad.
Formerly it was thought that all the mounds and ruins on the right