Gredan Wells.

27

Chap. 4.]

of the wall areholes for discharging arrows.” Fosbrokes’ For. Top. 322.The custom of guarding the roads, espeeially in the vicinity of tanks andwells, is still common. Fryer in his Travels in India , noticed it. “Wefound them in arms, not suffering their women to stir out of the town un-guarded, to fetch water.” Page 126, 222. In Shaw’s Travels in Mauri-tania, he noticed a beautiful rill of water, which flowed into a basin ofRoman workmanship, named ‘ Shrub we Krub,’ i. e. “drink and be off,”on account of the danger of meeting assassins in its vicinity. Sandysspeaks of the “wells of fear.” Travels, p. 140.

In ancient Greece , wells were very numerous. The inhabitants ofAttica were supplied with water principally from them. Yitruvius re-marks, that the other water which they had, was of bad quality. B. viii,Chap. 3. Plutarch has preserved some of the laws of Solon respectingwells. By these it was enacted that all persons who lived within fourfurlongs of a public well, had liberty to use it; but when the distance wasgreater, they were to dig one for themselves ; and they were requir-ed to dig at least six feet from their neighbor’s ground. Life of Solon.According to Pliny , Danaus sunk the first wells in Greece . Nat. His.vii, 56. Plutarch , in his life of Cimon, says the Athenians taught the restof the Greeks “ to sow bread corn, to avail themselves of the use of wells,and of the benefit of fire ” From the Connection in which wells are herementioned, it is evident, that in the opinion of the ancient Greeks, theywere among the first of man’s inventions ; and hence the antiquity of de-vices to raise water from them. In the mythologic ages, the labor of rais-ing water out of deep wells was imposed as a punishment on the daugh-ters of Danaus, for the murder of their husbands. The daughters of Phae-don (who was put to death by the thirty tyrants) threw themselves into awell, preferring death to dishonor. The body of Chrysippus , son ofPelops, was disposed of in the same way, after being murdered by hisbrothers, or his step-mother. When Darius sent two heralds to demandearth and water of the Athenians , (the giving of which was an acknow-ledgment of subjection,) they threw one of them into a ditch, and theother into a well, telling them in mockery to take what they came for,Plutarch . And Herodotus. informs us,that the Lacedemonians treated thePersian ambassadors, who were sent to them on the same errand, in pre-cisely the same manner. Herod . b. viii. 133. These brutal acts led tothe invasion of Greece by Xerxes .

Shortly after Alexander ’s death, Perdiccas and Roxana murdered Statiraand her sisters, and had their bodies thrown into a well. Hence, wellswere probably common in Babylon as well as in Nineveh ; for this wasmost likely a private one ; a public one would scarcely have been select-ed, where concealment was required. Sir R. K. Porter, in his Travels inGeorgia, Persia , Armenia , and ancient Babylon, Vol. i. 698, speaks of theremains of an ancient and “ amazing deep well,” near Shiraz . Remainsof Phenician and Carthagenian wells are still to be seen. Near the ancientBarca, Deila Cella discovered “ wells of great depth, some of which stillafford most excellent water.” a At Arar, are others, some of which areexcavated through rocks of sandstone. At Arzew, the ancient Arsenaria,Dr. Shaw observed a number of wells, “ which from the masonry appearto be as old as the city.” b The celebrated fountain of the sun of the an-cients, near the temple of Jupiter Ammon, according to Belzoni, isa well sixty feet deep, and eight feet square. (In this case and

Rüssels Barbary States. b Trav. p. 29.