Note 571 — Chapter XIX · ASSYRIANS. — BABYLON.

The Ten Thousand Greeks passed from the outside to the inside of the wall of Media: it was one hundred feet high, twenty feet wide, and was reported to them as extending twenty parasangs or six hundred stadia (= seventy miles) in length (Xenoph. Anab. ii, 4, 12). Eratosthenês called it τὸ Σεμιράμιδος διατείχισμα (Strabo, ii, p. 80): it was seemingly about twenty-five miles north of Bagdad.

There is some confusion about the wall of Media: Mannert (Geogr. der G. und R. v. 2, p. 280) and Forbiger also (Alte Geogr. sect. 97, p. 616, note 94) appear to have confounded the ditch dug by special order of Artaxerxês to oppose the march of the younger Cyrus, with the Nahar-Malcha or Royal canal between the Tigris and the Euphrates: see Xenoph. Anab. i, 7, 15.

It is singular that Herodotus makes no mention of the wall of Media, though his subject (i, 185) naturally conducts him to it: he seems to have sailed down the Euphrates to Babylon, and must, therefore, have seen it, if it had really extended to the Euphrates, as some authors have imagined. Probably, however, it was not kept up with any care, even in his time, seeing that its original usefulness was at an end, after the whole of Asia, from the Euxine to the Persian gulf, became subject to the Persians.