MESOPOTAMIA 
WILLCOCKS. 407 
All the early kings who did anything worth recording have left 
memorials of the canals they constructed, to which they gave names 
strangely similar to the “ Kanatir il Khairia,” or “ Bridge of Bless- 
ings,” which the Egyptians apply to-day to the first barrage con- 
structed on the Nile. 
As population increased we hear of reservoirs for storing water for 
perennial irrigation, especially for the important Arakhtu canal, 
which came down from Sippara and irrigated Babylon. 
It is recorded of Cyrus the Great that he, too, utilized his army for 
digging numerous canals from the Gyndes or Dyala. Many of these 
canals are in use to-day. 
Herodotus gives a picturesque and glowing description of Baby- 
lonia in B. C. 480. 
Some fifty years later Xenophon, as becomes a disciple of Socrates, 
gives an exact description of the country as he saw it. Book in hand, 
I have followed his march in the delta from “ the Gates ” to Opis, and 
I here give my impressions. Cyrus the Younger’s army entered the 
delta at the Gates already described, and crossed the valley of the 
Sakhlawia by the great earthen embankment which from all antiquity 
stretched from desert to desert and kept the Euphrates within its own 
valley. Cyrus anticipated the reopening of the branch by Artaxer- 
xes, who had dug a new canal down the valley of the Sakhlawia, 
trusting to the steep slope to soon scour out an impassable barrier to 
his brother’s army. Hurrying along the dike, the army of Cyrus 
entered the desert plateau of 110 square miles in extent which lies 
between Feluja and Bagdad, and over which Artaxerxes’s army ad- 
vanced under thick desert dust which looked like a white cloud. 
Xenophon saw the first of the four canals, known in the times of the 
Khalifs as the Issa, the Sarsar, the Malik, and the Kutha, which 
leave the Euphrates south of this desert plateau. The first is in very 
deep digging in the desert. He saw no more, and spoke from hear- 
say of the rest, for he is wrong in every particular—a circumstance 
rare with him. Mind, he does not say that he saw them. The canals 
are not the same size, they are by no means the same distance apart, 
and they do not run from the Tigris to the Euphrates. In this reach 
the Euphrates is 25 feet higher than the Tigris. The battle of Cun- 
axa could not have been fought south of the desert plateau, as the 
country was intersected by four large canals and countless deep-water 
courses, and was, moreover, heavily irrigated. Armies accompanied 
by large bodies of cavalry, chariots, and baggage wagons could not 
have moved at all, leave alone maneuvered and fought. After the 
battle the ten thousand retreated in a northwesterly direction, with 
the rising sun on their right hand, and were entangled in the water 
courses fed by the new canal just dug by Artaxerxes and now opened. 
North of Tel Saféra there are no dikes or trenches going north- 
45745°—sm 1909——27 
