Ecbatana

There are seven circles in all;

thus the battlements of five circles are painted with colors;

Deioces built these walls for himself and around his own quarters, and he ordered the people to dwell outside the wall.

For what is left for me, having mastered Babylon and Susa and Ecbatana and the affairs in India?

And these cities, he said, were far fairer than Ecbatana and Babylon, and the Craneum and the Acropolis at Athens and the Propylaea far better built than the palaces there, falling short only in size;

for that king too passed the winter in Babylon and Susa, and sometimes in Bactra—the most temperate regions of Asia—and the summer in Ecbatana of Media, where the air is always coldest, and the summer is like the winter about Babylon.

There was situated a large city named Opis, near which the Greeks met the bastard brother of Cyrus and Artaxerxes, who was leading a large army from Susa and Ecbatana to the support, as he said, of the King;

that the road to the eastward led to Susa and Ecbatana, where the King is said to spend his summers;

After many cycles of years, however, they too came to reverence statues of human form, as Berossus shows in the third book of his Chaldaic Affairs, this having been introduced by Artaxerxes son of Darius son of Ochus, who first set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaïtis in Babylon and Susa and Ecbatana, and showed the Persians and Bactrians and Damascus and Sardis to reverence it.

in the spring he spent three months in Susa, and in the height of summer two months in Ecbatana.