TACKT-I-KESRA. 
409 
liph founded the city of Kufa on the western shore of the 
Euphrates; whilst the defeat which the Persians sustained from 
one of his best generals in the battle of Cadesia, led to the 
storming of Al-Maidan, and an indiscriminate massacre of all 
its Guebre inhabitants. In after-times the Caliph Al-Mansoor 
taking a distaste to Kufa, removed the seat of his government 
to Bagdad; the materials for the erection of which he brought 
from the battered walls of the Greek and Parthian city ; so, as 
Babylon was ravaged and carried away for the building of Se- 
leucia and Ctesiphon, in the same manner did they moulder 
into ruin before the rising foundations of Bagdad, Bussora, and 
other cities of the caliphs. All that now remains of the ancient 
Greek capital, is the ground on which it stood ; shewing, by its 
uneven surface, the low moundy traces of its former habitations; 
these, and a piece of its wall still standing, being the only relics 
of a city to which the name of Babylon itself has often been 
transferred by the western writers. Small, however, as these 
vestiges may seem, they are daily wearing away; and soon 
nothing would be left to mark the site of Seleucia, were it not 
for the apparently imperishable canal of Nebuchadnezzar, the 
Nahar Malcha; whose capacious bosom, noble in ruins, opens to 
the Tigris north of where the city stood. 
Ctesiphon having been the chief of the two cities, which, 
under the uniting new name of Al-Maidan, were renovated by 
the Sassanian kings, has preserved more memorials of its exist¬ 
ence. The large extent of ground which formed its area is 
not only furrowed by mouldered ruins in the same way as 
that of Seleucia, but retains a considerable portion of its wall, 
not less than thirty feet thick; and the remains of an immense 
building, called Tact-i-Kesra, meaning the throne or palace 
3 G 
VOL. II. 
