NAHAR MALCHA, OR ANCIENT ROYAL CANAL. 
289 
of those they held most dear. His mother, in the extremity of 
her affliction, sought in vain for persons answering the happy 
description he had given; and finding that all had tasted bitter 
woes, and most outlived the objects they best loved, she received 
the comfort her son had intended, by being convinced that her 
own affliction was the common lot of mankind. Some Persian 
writers say, that their renowned Secunder died in Babylon; 
others, that the event took place at a city called Zour; and they 
add, that his body was embalmed, and being put into a golden 
sarcophagus, was sent to Greece to his mother, who re-inclosed 
it in one of Egyptian marble; thus giving him a tomb from the 
land of his boasted father, Jupiter Ammon.* 
Having descended from the Boursa Shishara, we “ retired” 
to the road we had left, and then proceeded direct on our former 
route towards Assad Khaun; which we passed at about five or 
six miles distance from the fine menzil I had so admired, erected 
by the beneficent Kiahya. At a little more than another hour’s 
march, (nearly five miles,) we crossed the ruinous dry bed of the 
Nahar-Malcha, or Fluvius Begum, the most famous of the canals 
attributed to Nebuchadnezzar. The remains of a second, sup¬ 
posed to be the Nahar-Sarsar of the same monarch, traverse the 
plain a little higher up ; and, with its vaster neighbour, was used 
at certain seasons to convey the waters of the Euphrates into the 
more rapid and deeper channel of the Tigris, instead of flowing 
forward in their full body towards the immediate vicinity of 
Babylon, where an unrestrained inundation would have damaged 
the city and adjacent lands. The Nahar-Malcha, or royal canal, 
* This account seems another evidence in favour of the Egyptian Soros brought 
to England by Dr. Clarke, and now in the British Museum, having been that of the 
Macedonian hero. 
P P 
VOL. II. 
