The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.168

c9.s2.168

into the lake debouched also the old Royal Canal, Nahr Malik, which gave a waterway to the Euphrates.¹ It has been thought that the harbour was controlled directly by the Seleucid kings and not by the city magistrates.² Whether all ocean-going ships could come up, or whether cargo had sometimes to be transhipped at Antioch-Charax at the mouth of the Tigris,³ is unknown; but the later importance of Charax as one of the great trading ports of the southern seas rather belongs to Roman times, when Seleuceia and Charax were in different kingdoms and Charax had direct trading connection with Palmyra,⁴ cutting Seleuceia out. Essentially a Greek city, Seleuceia had an enormous Babylonian population outside the wall and in the contiguous Opis, the old Babylonian town on the Tigris whose place it had taken⁵ and which in the usual way was not destroyed but became its ‘village’;⁶ unhappily the excavations at Tel Umar did not go far enough to show whether Seleuceia and Opis were united or were separate entities like Demetrias and Pagasae (p. 98), and we have no knowledge of how the Babylonian population was governed; but the traditional number of inhabitants in the Parthian period, 600,000,⁷ is perfectly possible if it refers to Greater Seleuceia with its Babylonian population, including Opis, the suburbs, and the harbour, for Opis too must have flourished, as it was the centre for the local trade.⁸