City
Nicea Nialia
Boukan or Saqqiz? (Barrington)
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Nicea Nialia takes its name from a victory: it was probably one of the cities founded east of the Tigris to mark a triumph, here the battle of 312 BC in which Seleucus the First, called Nicator, defeated Nicanor, the governor of Media. Where it lay is disputed. The likeliest candidate is a town on the Diyala river, though Boukan or Saqqiz in Iran have also been proposed. The map singles it out with a pair of towers, yet the road it draws ending here cannot be right. Later the town was a bishop's seat, where Bishop Shapur died a martyr in AD 339.