Gyndes

• a tributary of the Tigris, in Assyria, now Diala or Kerkah, Tib. 4, 1, 141; Sen. de Ira, 3, 21, 1 (but in Tac. A. 11, 10, the better read. is Gindes).

GYNDES (Γύνδης, Hdt. 1.189; 5.52), a river which has been considered to belong in part to both Assyria and Susiana; as the upper course of its stream, from the mountains of Matiene, in which it takes its rise, passes through part of the former country, while the latter part belongs to Susiana, if its identification with the Kerkhah is admissible. Herodotus is not clear in his account of the river: in one place (1.189), where he speaks of Cyrus's crossing it, his account would answer best with the position of the modern Diala, which enters the Tigris near the ancient Ctesiphon: in another place (5.52), he seems to imply a river at no great distance from the Choaspes and Susa. Hence the most contradictory views of geographers. Rennell (Geogr. of Herod. vol. 1. p. 266) has, in one place, conjectured that the Gyndes is the present Diala; in another, the Mendeli. Larcher has thought that Herodotus means only one and the same river, and that the Mendeli best represents it. D'Anville appears to have thought there were three rivers of the name. On the whole, it is probable that the Mendeli was the ancient Gyndes; while it can hardly have been the Kerkhah, as Forbiger has supposed. It is clear that Herodotus had himself a very indistinct notion of it, as he makes the Gyndes and Araxes (the Aras) both flow from the mountains of Matiene (1.202).

(Γύνδης). A river of Assyria, rising in the country of the Matieni (in the mountains of Kurdistan) and flowing into the Tigris, celebrated through the story that Cyrus the Great drew off its waters by 360 channels. See Herod. i. 189.

• Hdt. 1.189, Hdt. 1.202