Is
Ἴς
Is (Ἴς, Herod. i; 179), a town of Mesopotamia, eight days' journey N. of Babylon, situated, according to Herodotus, on a stream of the same name, which brought down the bitumen which was used in the construction of the walls of Babylon. There is no reason to doubt that it is represented by the modern Hit. There does not appear to be any river at present at Hit, but a small stream may have been easily blocked up by the sand of ages. There are still bitumen springs in the neighbourhood of this place. It has been conjectured that the Ἰζαννησόπολις of Isidorus (p. 5) refers to the same town. (Ritter, Erdkunde, vol. ii. p. 148; Rennell, Geogr. of Herod. p. 552.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.