The marks which Colonel Chesney points out, of previous population and industry on the banks of the Euphrates at this part of its course, are extremely interesting and curious, when contrasted with the desolation depicted by Xenophon; who mentions that there were no other inhabitants than some who lived by cutting millstones from the stone quarries near, and sending them to Babylon in exchange for grain. It is plain that the population, of which Colonel Chesney saw the remaining tokens, either had already long ceased, or did not begin to exist, or to construct their dams and aqueducts, until a period later than Xenophon. They probably began during the period of the Seleukid kings, after the year 300 B.C. For this line of road along the Euphrates began then to acquire great importance as the means of communication between the great city of Seleukeia (on the Tigris, below Bagdad) and the other cities founded by Seleukus Nikator and his successors in the North of Syria and Asia Minor—Seleukeia in Pieria, Antioch, Laodikeia, Apameia, etc. This route coincides mainly with the present route from Bagdad to Aleppo, crossing the Euphrates at Thapsakus. It can hardly be doubted that the course of the Euphrates was better protected during the two centuries of the Seleukid kings (B.C. 300-100, speaking in round numbers), than it came to be afterwards, when that river became the boundary line between the Romans and the Parthians. Even at the time of the Emperor Julian’s invasion, however, Ammianus Marcellinus describes the left bank of the Euphrates, north of Babylonia, as being in several parts well cultivated, and furnishing ample subsistence, (Ammian. Marc. xxiv, 1). At the time of Xenophon’s Anabasis, there was nothing to give much importance to the banks of the Euphrates north of Babylonia. Mr. Ainsworth describes the country on the left bank of the Euphrates, before reaching Pylæ, as being now in the same condition as it was when Xenophon and his comrades marched through it,—“full of hills and narrow valleys, and presenting many difficulties to the movement of an army. The illustrator was, by a curious accident, left by the Euphrates steamer on this very portion of the river, and on the same side as the Perso-Greek army, and he had to walk a day and a night across these inhospitable regions; so that he can speak feelingly of the difficulties which the Greeks had to encounter.” (Travels in the Track, etc. p. 81.) [70] I incline to think that Charmandê must have been nearly opposite Pylæ, lower down than Hit. But Major Rennell (p. 107) and Mr. Ainsworth (p. 84) suppose Charmandê to be the same place as the modern Hit (the Is of Herodotus). There is no other known town with which we can identify it.