[Sidenote: ERBIL] When we arrived it poured with rain, and in the dark we slopped through the alleys of a modern Eastern town, and over a mound to a ruinous caravanserai, where I found a damp, half-inundated room for my belongings. Since nothing, not even wood, was obtainable, I dined off tea and dry bread and a few dates that night, and slept in a pool. My companions had become separated in the dark, and had found asylum elsewhere. Here is the western border of southern Kurdistan; and Erbil is populated by Baban Kurds, a sedentary tribe, speaking a variation of the Mukri dialect.[26] Turkish is also understood, or rather Turkoman, for Altun Keupri and Kirkuk, Turkoman towns, are not far off. In the tenth chapter of Genesis, 8–12, we read:--“And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar. Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city.” Now the date of the building of Asshur’s city is at least 1800 B.C., and verses 11–12 allude to the small district of Assyria proper, with its three cities of Kalah, Nineveh, and Arbela. During the whole time of the Assyrian monarchies Arbela took the relation to the reigning king’s capital that Canterbury did to London in English history: it was always the religious capital, gaining an added importance, for that in Assyria the king was always the high priest of the religion of Asshur. That Ishtar, the goddess Baalath of the earlier Chaldeans, transferred her shrine northwards when Assyria began her separate existence, is probable; and Arbela (whose name Arba-Ilu means “Four Gods”) was chosen, perhaps as being the shrine of some then existing divinity. So that the Erbil of to-day is at least three thousand years old, and was the second seat of that goddess Ishtar to whom reference was made in Chapter II. The vitality that has kept it in existence since those early days has not deserted it any period, for it has been worthy of mention at least once during the supremacy of every one of the nations that successively ruled it--Assyrian, Mede, Persian, Greek, Parthian, Roman, Armenian, Roman again, Persian, and the Arabs. A few notes arranged chronologically will show this.