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His firm attitude on the banks of the Euphrates restrained Chosroes from advancing towards Palestine; and he received with art and dignity the ambassadors, or rather spies, of the Persian monarch. The plain between Hierapolis and the river was covered with the squadrons of cavalry, six thousand hunters, tall and robust, who pursued their game without the apprehension of an enemy.
His eyes rested rather wearily on the slow, dull gleam of the Euphrates, as it wound past the deserted spaces where "the mighty city the astonishment of nations" had once stood, ... and poet though he was to the very core of his nature, he could see nothing poetical in these spectral mounds and stone heaps, save in the significant remembrance they offered of the old Scriptual prophecy "Babylon is fallen is fallen!
It was on the very banks of the great river that he suffered the loss of a number of his captives. When the first stop was made by the Euphrates, the Jews could no longer contain their grief, and they broke out into tears and bitter lamentations.
Contemporaneously with this revolt in the mountain region of the north, a danger showed itself in the plain country of the south, where Manizen, king of Hatra, or El Hadhr, not only declared himself independent, but assumed dominion over the entire tract between the Euphrates and the Tigris, the Jezireh of the Arabian geographers.
At the head of a chosen army of twenty-five thousand men, Galerius again passed the Euphrates; but, instead of exposing his legions in the open plains of Mesopotamia he advanced through the mountains of Armenia, where he found the inhabitants devoted to his cause, and the country as favorable to the operations of infantry as it was inconvenient for the motions of cavalry.
In the account given of the conquest of Jerusalem by the Arabians, we have also an account of another fair held at Jerusalem, at which it is probable the goods brought from India by Bassora, the Euphrates, and the caravans, were sold.
In the Euphrates Valley, the heat during the dry season, from about May till November, when for weeks, and even months, no cloud is to be seen, beggars description; but strange enough, the Arabs who dwell there at present, while enduring the heat without much discomfort, are severely affected by a winter temperature that for Europeans and Americans is exhilarating in its influence.
The old religions were dead, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Euphrates and the Nile, and the principles on which human society had been constructed were dead also.
The new sect was loosely spread over the provinces of Asia Minor to the westward of the Euphrates; six of their principal congregations represented the churches to which St. Paul had addressed his epistles; and their founder chose his residence in the neighborhood of Colonia, in the same district of Pontus which had been celebrated by the altars of Bellona and the miracles of Gregory.
Here they first came into contact with Babylonian culture, which they adopted and modified, and from hence they poured down upon the Aramæan cities of the south. Carche-mish, now Jerablûs, which commanded the chief ford across the Euphrates, fell into their hands, and for many centuries remained one of their capitals.
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