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Updated: May 19, 2025
They passed by the ruined cities of Larissa and Mespila on the Tigris, in the neighbourhood of the ancient Nineveh. The march from Mespila to the mountainous country of the Carduchi occupied several days in which the Greeks suffered much from the attacks of the enemy. Their future route was now a matter of serious perplexity.
Seven days of this brought the retreating force to the river Centrites, which parts the Carduchian mountains from the province of Armenia. With a barely fordable river, troops in evidence on the other side, and the Carduchi hanging on their rear, the passage offered great difficulties, solved by the discovery of a much shallower ford.
But there was another and a more important Cordyene on the opposite side of the river. The tract to this day known as Kurdistan, the high mountain region south and south-east of Lake Van between Persia and Mesopotamia, was in the possession of Kurds from before the time of Xenophon, and was known as the country of the Carduchi, as Cardyene, and as Cordyene.
This route led at first through the country of the Carduchi, a very warlike folk who had never been subjugated. Here there was a good deal of hard fighting, the Carduchi being adepts in hill warfare, and particularly expert archers. Such was the length and weight of their arrows that Greeks collected them, and used them as javelins.
A feint at one point by the rearguard drew off the enemy on the opposite bank, while the main body crossed at the shallows, which the rearguard also managed to pass by a successful ruse which misled the Carduchi.
On their left lay the Tigris, so deep that they could not fathom it with their spears; while in their front rose the steep and lofty mountains of the Carduchi, which came so near the river as hardly to leave a passage for its waters.
At Louisburg, Wolfe put in practice, with good effect, a manoeuvre which he had learned from the Carduchi in Xenophon, showing perhaps by this reproduction of the tactics employed two thousand years before by a barbarous tribe, that in the so-called art of war there is a large element which is not progressive.
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