Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/363

Rh sist the encroachment of the Persians; but, according to Persian historians, Arsaces Tiridates, the second of that name, after the expulsion of Andragoras, the Syrian lieutenant of Seleucus Callinicus, built the city Kara Dara on the mountain Zapaortenon. Justin also asserts the Persian origin of these ruins, which is further attested by the general character of the sculptures; but the pages of history have recorded, that it often changed hands, and was governed by various princes, and Byzantine sarcophagi are as frequent as Persian sepulchral grots." It appears to me that the Greeks, (or Romans,) availed themselves of the tombs which existed previous to their occupation of the place, and carved their epitaphs over the entrances to the caves in which the Persians had before buried their dead. This opinion goes to ascribe the foundation of the city to the latter people, and to establish the view taken by Ainsworth.

Gibbon, after Procopius, gives the following description of the ancient city after it had been fortified by Justinian in the fifth century: "The city was surrounded with two walls, and the interval between them, of fifty paces, afforded a retreat to the cattle of the besieged. The inner wall was a monument of strength and beauty: it measured sixty feet from the ground, and the height of the towers was one hundred feet; the loopholes, from whence an enemy might be annoyed with missile weapons, were small, but numerous: the soldiers were planted along the rampart, under the shelter of double galleries, and a third platform, spacious and secure, was raised on the summit of the towers. The exterior wall appears to have been less lofty, but more solid; and each tower was protected by a quadrangular bulwark. A hard rocky soil resisted the tools of the miners, and on the south-east, where the ground was more tractable, their approach was retarded by a new work, which advanced in the shape of a half-moon. The double and treble ditches were filled with a stream of water; and in the management of the river, the most skilful labour was employed to supply the inhabitants, to distress the besiegers, and to resist the mischiefs of a natural or artificial inundation. Dara continued more than