Soon after his arrival at Ardis, Van met Lucette
sitting under Persian lilacs;
Lady Erminin, "through
the bothersome afterhaze of suicide" watched the Ada's picnic "from the Persian blue of her abode of bliss".
Mlle Larivière expressed her displeasure with the English "whom she said she disliked even more than the Tartars, or the,
well, Assyrians" and, according to Marina, ‘Mesopotamian history was taught practically in the
nursery’.
Lucette wondered if they were Mesopotamians (Van
quipped that, actually, they were "Hippopotamians")
Persian poems are oft
recited ("Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems
about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love.") There's a
lepidopterist called Professor Nabonidus of Babylon
College, Nebraska.
Besides there are Babylonian willows in Ada,
Pale Fire, Bend Sinister...
.................................................................................
* For people who enjoyed cross-words, Ada
is a familiar name in connection to Caria and to the
Achaemenids.
Wiki information: Ada is
the sister and wife of Idrieus, after his death satrap of Caria between 344
and 340, member of the Hecatomnid dynasty...in 340, Ada was expelled from her
capital Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum)...The dynasty was discredited, and when
Pixodarus died in 334, the Achaemenid king Darius III Codomannus appointed a
Persian named Orontobates as satrap. Ada seems to have remained satrap of Caria
until 326. Turkish archaeologists claim to have discovered her tomb, and her
bones have been transferred to the Archaeological Museum of Bodrum, which is
situated on the site of the citadel of Halicarnassus that Alexander had been
unable to capture.