Chronicle of Edessa

[...among them, as the likeness of that world upon me, in the nights the waters [flowed] from the passage that held it, and the king ordered that there should be a complete preparation for the replacement. And this one time, the king, in the last Tishrin November that was, ordered that the house of the river of the city should be renewed, and they [the soldiers] from all time, and where it should be, [the water] should not pass to this soldier. And in the soldiers of the city, the praise was fastened [to] the soldier as much as the command of the king should be. And thus was the life sustaining the remnants. The house was built, many words, and it was, and for the protection of Abgar, the palace was that which was; [the] time: of the waters which in the breaking to the new corner, spoke and was the building, and where, and he called all the water, and ordered that where the king, opposite those monasteries, in the place of the Saharitis, to turn the flow so that it would be so that it would not change. And he did all of them; there is no building in the soldiers of the place of everything that is the city, five years, and the building is in the board, in all from that which was the crown.]

[In that same year of the five hundred and seventeen that was. [The] thing of the two books of the service, all that is in the life, to be written that the king did. And lo, from that which was all the city, that it should not fall, the time of King Abgar, the building that he built the palace, which in all. And for the service that was this command from that which was the king, in that same year, in the likeness to the city of everything. The king, however, the king ordered that where there is no building in the city of the cities, between the scribe, between the God. And thus the king ordered that which was, that which was. And in the life, it shall be to him to Peter, the life that is in it, all from the city. And also the soldiers shall be [of the] monastery.]

sufficiently consulted, because twenty-five torrents with their own and foreign waters were flowing together from everywhere into the Daisan river of Edessa; the King ordered by public edict that the craftsmen who inhabited the portico placed on the banks of the river, from the month of October to April, the night already approaching, should withdraw into other houses: and that furthermore, 1 the Gaziraei people from Gazira/Mesopotamia of the city, five of them, should keep watch throughout the whole winter in that part of the walls where the river washes the city, who, having heard the irruption of external waters into the city, should warn the citizens, with a penalty added for the negligent, as if [they were] contemners of the royal mandate: and he ordered that law, laid down at this time, to obtain forever. Our Lord, King Abgar, built the Palace in which he is accustomed to winter in Tabara, and thence descended at the beginning of summer into the new Palace, which he had taken care to be rebuilt at the spring of the fountain. The Edessene nobility followed the King, [and] raised houses for themselves in the vicinity of the Palace in a very eminent region of the city, to which a name was taken from the Saharites. Meanwhile the King, intent on establishing the security and tranquility of the citizens, wished for taxes to be condoned not only to those, but also to the inhabitants of the villages and castles for a 2 quinquennium five-year period. Thus the city was increased by the frequency of inhabitants and crowned with buildings.

1 Gaziraei. Namely, those originating from Gazira, or the Island, which the river Tigris makes. See above, pages 144 and 169.

2 Quinquennium. Therefore, at the end of the year of the Greeks 517, this instrument was consigned to writing: in which year also Abgar is said to have built the Palace in this Chronicle, number IX.