From Batum to Baghdad Author:Walter Harris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 35 CHAPTER II. TIFLIS. Tiflis, the capital of Transcaucasia, with its population of nearly 100,000 souls, owes its name and probably also its site to th... more »e hot springs which exist in its immediate neighbourhood. It is curious to notice throughout the whole oriental world how general is the custom of fixing upon some such natural but uncommon feature as this for the site of a city. No doubt to the ancients, as to the people of the East to-day, hot springs were marvels that excited not only the admiration but also the religious zeal of the natives, and to-day one finds in one's travels that almost wherever such springs do exist, the population of the neighbourhood, and even people residing at long distances, make pilgrimages to the spot, though as a rule the medical properties of the water are little understood. In the case of Tiflis, the natural features of the country added further advantages which, in the warlike days of the fifth century A.d., could not well be overlooked. For the river Kur, with its steep rocky banks and the high mountains beyond, would tend to render any attack upon the place, if not futile, at least extremely difficult. And in those days of early Georgian and Armenian kings, when the wild Caucasian tribes harried them from the north, and the devastating hordes of Persians and Mongols from the south and south-east, not to mention the invasions of Greek and Eoman, the defences of a city were of the utmost importance. And so it was that near the close of the fifth century A.d., King Vakhtang of Georgia built a town upon the site of a still earlier Persian fortress, utilising its ruins for his fortifications. With so much zeal was the building of the town undertaken and carried on, that only a few years later, Dachi, the thirty-fourth sovereign of his dyna...« less