The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [114]
4. Wherever the king travels, he is attended by a number of four-wheeled cars drawn by mules,
5. In which the Choaspes water, ready boiled for use, and stored in flagons of silver, is moved with him from place to place.
6. Cyrus on his way to Babylon came to the banks of the Gyndes, a stream which, rising in the Matienian mountains, runs through the country of the Dardanians, and empties itself into the River Tigris.
7. The Tigris, after receiving the Gyndes, flows on by the city of Opis, and discharges its waters into the Erythraean Sea.
8. When Cyrus reached the Gyndes, which could only be passed in boats, one of the prized white horses accompanying his march, full of boldness and high mettle, walked into the water, and tried to cross by himself;
9. But the current seized him, swept him along with it, and drowned him in its depths.
10. Cyrus, enraged by this, resolved to break the river’s strength so that in future even children should cross it easily without wetting their tunics.
11. Accordingly he delayed his attack on Babylon for a time, and dividing his army into two parts, marked out by ropes one hundred and eighty trenches on each side of the Gyndes, leading off from it in all directions.
12. Setting his army to dig, some on one side of the river, some on the other, he accomplished his intention by the aid of so many hands, but not without thereby losing the whole summer season.
13. Having thus wreaked his vengeance on the Gyndes by dispersing it through three hundred and sixty channels, Cyrus, with the first approach of the ensuing spring, marched forward against Babylon.
14. The Babylonians, camped outside their walls, awaited his coming. A battle was fought at a short distance from the city, in which the Babylonians were defeated, whereupon they withdrew within their defences.
15. Here they shut themselves up, and made light of his siege, having laid in a store of provisions for many years in preparation against this attack;
16. For when they saw Cyrus conquering nation after nation, they were convinced that he would never stop, and that their turn would come.
17. Cyrus was now reduced to great perplexity, as time went on and he made no progress against the place.
18. But then he devised a plan. He placed a portion of his army at the point where the river enters the city, and another where it flows out,
19. With orders to march into the town by the bed of the stream, as soon as the water became shallow enough.
20. He then drew himself off with the unwarlike portion of his host, and made for the place where Nitocris had dug the basin for the river, where he did exactly what she had done formerly:
21. He turned the Euphrates by a canal into the basin, which was then a marsh; as a result of which the river sank so low that the bed of the stream became fordable.
22. When this happened the Persian warriors who had been left where the river entered the city, finding that the water now reached only about midway up a man’s thigh, waded into the town.
23. Had the Babylonians known what Cyrus was about, or had they noticed their danger, they would have destroyed the Persians utterly;
24. For they would have made fast all the street-gates giving onto the river, and mounting on the walls along both sides would have had their enemy trapped.
25. But as it was the Persians took them by surprise and captured the city. Owing to the vast size of the place, the inhabitants of the central parts knew nothing of what had chanced until long after the outer portions of the town were taken,
26. But as they were engaged in a festival, they continued dancing and revelling until far too late.
Chapter 20
1. Such, then, were the circumstances of the first taking of Babylon. With its territory it proved to be the richest and most fruitful of the satrapies of the Persian empire.
2. It alone provided a third of the empire’s annual food and supplies, all the rest of Asia together providing two-thirds.
3. When Tritantaechmes, son of Artabazus, held the