and so forth, of each district.

The prisoners informed them that the regions south, through which they
had come, belonged to the district towards Babylon and Media; the road
east led to Susa and Ecbatana, where the king is said to spend summer
and spring; crossing the river, the road west led to Lydia and Ionia;
and the part through the mountains facing towards the Great Bear, led,
they said, to the Carduchians[1]. They were a people, so said the
prisoners, dwelling up on the hills, addicted to war, and not subject
to the king; so much so that once, when a royal army one hundred and
twenty thousand strong had invaded them, not a man came back, owing to
the intricacies of the country. Occasionally, however, they made truce
or treaty with the satrap in the plain, and, for the nonce, there
would be intercourse: "they will come in and out amongst us," "and we
will go in and out amongst them," said the captives.

[1] See Dr. Kiepert, "Man. Anc. Geog. (Mr. G. A. Macmillan) iv. 47.
The Karduchians or Kurds belong by speech to the Iranian stock,
forming in fact their farthest outpost to the west, little given
to agriculture, but chiefly to the breeding of cattle. Their name,
pronounced Kardu by the ancient Syrians and Assyrians, Kordu by
the Armenians (plural Kordukh), first appears in its narrower
sense in western literature in the pages of the eye-witness
Xenophon as {Kardoukhoi}. Later writers knew of a small kingdom
here at the time of the Roman occupation, ruled by native princes,
who after Tigranes II (about 80 B.C.) recognised the overlordship
of the Armenian king. Later it became a province of the Sassanid
kingdom, and as such was in 297 A.D. handed over among the
regiones transtigritanae to the Roman empire, but in 364 was again
ceded to Persia.