Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume I Part 2.djvu/60

 ECBATAKA. that it ahoDld be derived from " Achmetha.'* •Herodotus and Cteeias write Agbatana. There ■eems little doubt that the Apobatana of bidorus refers to Ecbatana, and is perhaps only a careless mode of pronooncing the name; his words are cnrioos. He speaks of a place called Adrogiananta 9r Adrapanaota, a palace of those among or in the Batani (rw iv BardUoii), which Tigranes, the Armenian, destroyed, and Uien of Apobatana, '* the metropolis of Media, the tieasaiy and the temple where they perpetnaUy sacrifice to Anaitis.** If the coontry of the Batani oomsponds, as has been ■apposed, with Mesobatene, the position and de- Bcriptioo of Apobatsna will agree well enough with the modem HamaeUM, (C. ilasson, J, IL As^ Soc, ziL p. 121.) The ooincidflnce of the names of the deity worshipped there, in Polybins Aena, in Isi- doros Anaitis, may be Boticed ; and there is little jdoubt that the " Nanea " whose priests slew Anti- .ochns and his army (2 Maccab. L 13) was the goddess of the same plaoa. Plolarch (^Artox. c. 27) mentions the same fact, and calls this Anaitu, Artemis or Diana ; and Clemens Alex, referring to the same place speaks of the shrine of Anaitis, whom he calls Aphrodite or Venns. It is worthy of remark that Mr. Masson (2. c.) Dotaeed ootside the walls of Hamad&n some pore white marble cdnmas, which he ooDJectored might, very possibly, have belonged to this celebrated building. It is, however, not a little curious that, thoogh we have such ample references to the power and importance of Ecbatana, learned men have not been, indeed, are not still, agreed as to the modem place which can best be identified with its ancient position. The reason of this may, perhaps, be, that there was certainly more than one town in antiquity which bore this name, while there is a strong probability that there were, in Media itself, two cities which, severaUy at least, if not at the same time, had this title. If, too, as has been suspected, the original name^ of which we have the Graecised fomi, may have meant "treasury," or '* treasure-city," this hypothesis might account for part of the confusion which has arisen on this subject It must also be remembered, that all our accounts of Ecbatana are derived through the medium of Greek or Roman authors, who themselves record what they had heard or read, and who, in hardly any instance, if we except the case of Isidorus, themselves had visited the localities which they describe. The principal theories which have been held in modem times are those of Gibbon and Jones, who supposed that Ec- batana was to be sought at Tabrk ; of Mr. Wilhams (Li/e ofAlexander who concluded that it was at X(/aikfas ; of the majority of scholars and travellers, such 'as Rennell, Mannert, Olivier, Kinneir, Morier, and Ker Porter, who place it at Hamaddn; and of Colonel Bawlinson, who has contended for the inde- pendent existence of two capitals of this name, the -one that of the Imer and champaign country (known anciently as Media Magna), wUch he places at Mamadd»j the other that of the mountain district of Atiopatene, which he places at Takht-i-SoUiman in the province of AzeMijan, in N. lat. 86^ 25' W., long. 47^ 10 (J. R, Gtog. Soe, vol x. pt. 1). Of than four views the two first may be safely rejected ; hut the laat is so new and important, that it is necessary to state the main features of it, though it would be obviously impossible to do more in ihif place than to give a concise outline of Coknel YOL. I. ECBATAN^ 801 Bawlinson's investigations. It is important to re* member the andoit division of Media into two pro- vinces, Upper Media or Atropatene [Atropatbms], and Lower or Southern Media or Media Magna (Strab. xi. pp. 523, 524, 526, 529) ; for there is good reason for supposing that, in the early history, eeatemporaiy with Cyrus (as subsequently in Roman times), Media was restricted to the northern and mountainous district It was, in fact, a small prorince nearly surrounded by high ranges of hills, bearing the same reUtkm to the Media of Alexander's aeia which the small province of Persis did to Persia^ in the wide sense of ths^ word. It is on this distinction that much of the corroborative eridenoe, which Colonel Bawlinson has adduced in fitvour of his theory, rests : his belief being, that the city of Deioces was the capital of Atropatene, and that many things true of it, and it alone, were in after-times transplanted into the accounts of the Ecbatana of Media Magna (the present Hamaddn), Colonel Bawlinson is almost the only traveller who has had the advantage of studying all the localities, which he attempts to illustrate, on the spot, and with equal knowledge, too, of the ancient and modem authorities to whom he refiers. In his attempt to identify the ruins of Takht-i- Soleimdn with those of the earliest capital of Media, Col. Rawlinson commoices with the latest autho- rities, the Oriental writers, proceeding from them throngh the period of the Byzantine historians to that ci the Greek and Roman empiies, and thence, upwards, to the darkest times of early Median history. He shows that the ruins themselves are not later than Time's invasion in A.i>. 1389; that they probably derive their present name from a local mier of Kurdut&n^ Soleim^ Shah Abiih, who lived in the early part of the thirteenth centuiy A.D.; that) previous to the MiSghels, the dty was universally knomm as Shiz in all Oriental authors, and that Shk is the same place as the Byzantine Canzaca. This is his first impc^tant identificatioo, and it depends on the careful examination of the march of the Roman general Narses against the Persian emperor Bahhin, who was defeated by him and driven across the Oxus. (Theophylact v. 5-— 10.) Canzaca is described by Theophanes, in the campaigns of Heraclios, as <* that city of the East which contained the fire-temple and the treasuries of Croesus king of Lydia" (^Chrfmogr, ed. Goar. p. 258: see also Cedren, HiiL p. 338; Tzets. CkiL iii. 66; and Procopins, Beil Pen. vL c. 24); its name is derived from Kandzag, the Armenian modi- fication of the Greek Gaza, mentioned by Strabo as the capital of Atropatene (xL p. 523; Ptol. vl 18. § 4). The notice of the great fire-temple (of which ample accounts exist in the OrientiJ authorities which Col. Rawlinson cites), and the Byzantine legend of the treasuries of Croesus (in manifest reference to Cyras; compare Herod. L 153), are so many links in the chain which connect Shiz, Canzaca, and Ecbatana together. Colonel Ba>rlinson proceeds next to demonstrate that Canzaca was well known even earlier, as it is mentioned by Ammianus, under the form Gazaca, as one of the largest Median dties (xxtii. c. ft), and he then quotes a remarkable passage from Moses of Chorene, who (writing probably about A.D.445) states that Tiridates, who received the sa- trapy of Atropatene in regard for his fidelity to the Romans in a. d. 297, when he visited his newly ac- quired province of AzeriidUjib ** repaired the fortifi- cations of that place, which wis named the seoond 3r