Zagros
region and Assyria upon the west, Persia proper upon the south, and upon
the east Sagartia and Parthia.

North and north-east of the mountain range which under different names
skirts the southern shores of the Caspian Sea and curves round
its south-western corner, lies a narrow but important strip of
territory--the modern Ghilan and Mazanderan. [PLATE II., Fig. 2.] This
is a most fertile region, well watered and richly wooded, and forms one
of the most valuable portions of the modern kingdom of Persia. At first
it is a low flat tract of deep alluvial soil, but little raised above
the level of the Caspian; gradually however it rises into swelling
hills which form the supports of the high mountains that shut in this
sheltered region, a region only to be reached by a very few passes over
or through them. The mountains are clothed on this side nearly to their
summit with dwarf oaks, or with shrubs and brushwood; while, lower
down, their flanks are covered with forests of elms, cedars, chestnuts,
beeches, and cypress trees. The gardens and orchards of the natives
are of the most superb character; the vegetation is luxuriant; lemons,
oranges, peaches, pomegranates, besides other fruits, abound; rice,
hemp, sugar-canes, mulberries are cultivated with success; vines grow
wild; and the valleys are strewn with flowers of rare fragrance, among
which may be noted the rose, the honeysuckle, and the sweetbrier.
Nature, however, with her usual justice, has balanced these
extraordinary advantages with peculiar drawbacks; the tiger, unknown
in any other part of Western Asia, here lurks in the thickets, ready to
spring at any moment on the unwary traveller; inundations are frequent,
and carry desolation far and wide; the waters, which thus escape from
the river beds, stagnate in marshes, and during the summer and autumn
heats pestilential exhalations arise, which destroy the stranger,
and bring even the acclimatized native to the brink of the grave. The
Persian monarch chooses the southern rather than the northern side of
the mountains for the site of his capital, preferring the keen winter
cold and dry summer heat of the high and almost waterless plateau to the
damp and stifling air of the low Caspian region.

The narrow tract of which this is a description can at no time have
sheltered a very numerous or powerful people. During the Median period,
and for many ages afterwards, it seems to have been inhabited by various
petty tr