Never once, during our journey from Mosul to Tekrit were we ever out of sight of some place or monument of historic or legendary lore. But the number of these reminders of the hoary past rapidly increased in our sail between Tekrit and Bagdad. About five miles below Saladin’s birthplace we came to the little town of Iman Dura. According to tradition, it was here that King Nebuchadnezzar set up his colossal golden statue which the Hebrews, Sidrach, Misach, and Abednago, in defiance of the King’s orders, refused to adore.[413] It was near Dura that the Roman army under Jovian pitched their tents after the death of Julian the Apostate and it was here that the Roman Emperor was forced to conclude an ignominious peace--_necessariam quidem sed ignobilem_, writes Eutropius--with the Persian King, Sapor the Great. A short distance below Dura is a small stream which the natives say was a canal dug by King Solomon. Near it, on the left bank of the Tigris, begins the ruins of Eski Bagdad--Old Bagdad--“a mighty field of ruins,” writes Thielmann, “extending some twenty-five miles along the Tigris.”[414] Situated in this long field of ruins is the little town of Samara, as celebrated for its romantic history as for its remarkable monuments which, however, have only in the last decade or two received the attention on the part of scholars which they so richly deserve. The ruins of which I have here given a brief account [writes a well-known archæologist, after a visit to Samara] are of the first importance for the elucidation of the early history of the arts of Islam. They can all be dated within a period of forty years falling in the ninth century, and are, therefore, among the earliest existing examples of Mohammedan architecture. They bear witness to the Mesopotamian influences under which it arose. The spiral towers of Samara and Abu Dulaf are an adaptation of the temple pyramids and Assyria and Babylonia, which had a spiral path leading to the summit; the technique of arch and vault was invented by the ancient East and transmitted through Sassannian builders to the Arab invaders; the decoration is Persian or Mesopotamian and almost untouched by the genius of the West. In the palaces and the mosques of Samara we can see the conquerors themselves conquered by a culture which had been developing during thousands of years on Mesopotamian soil, a culture which had received indeed new elements into its composition, which had learnt from the Greek and from the Persian, but had maintained in spite of all modifications its distinctive character.[415]