The composition of the scenes is rude, the drawing incorrect, and the general technique reminds us rather of the low reliefs of the Memphite or Theban sculptors than of the high projection characteristic of the artists of the Lower Euphrates. These slabs of sculptured stone formed a facing at the base of the now crumbling brick walls, the upper surface of which was covered with rough plastering. Here and there a few inscriptions reveal the name, titles, and parentage of some once celebrated personage, and mention the god in whose honour he had achieved the work.

The characters in which these inscriptions are written are not, as a rule, incised in the stone, but are cut in relief upon its surface, and if some few of them may remind us of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the majority are totally unlike them, both in form and execution. A careful examination of them reveals a medley of human and animal outlines, geometrical figures, and objects of daily use, which all doubtless corresponded to some letter or syllable, but to which we have as yet no trustworthy key. This system of writing is one of a whole group of Asiatic scripts, specimens of which are common in this part of the world from Crete to the banks of the Euphrates and Orontes. It is thought that the Khâti must have already adopted it before their advent to power, and that it was they who propagated it in Northern Syria. It did not take the place of the cuneiform syllabary for ordinary purposes of daily life owing to its clumsiness and complex character, but its use was reserved for monumental inscriptions of a royal or religious kind, where it could be suitably employed as a framework to scenes or single figures.

It, however, never presented the same graceful appearance and arrangement as was exhibited in the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the signs placed side by side being out of proportion with each other so as to destroy the general harmony of the lines, and it must be regarded as a script still in process of formation and not yet emerged from infancy. Every square yard of soil turned up among the ruins of the houses of Euyuk yields vestiges of tools, coarse pottery, terra-cotta and bronze statuettes of men and animals, and other objects of a not very high civilization. The few articles of luxury discovered, whether in furniture or utensils, were not indigenous products, but were imported for the most part from Chaldæa, Syria, Phoenicia, and perhaps from Egypt; some objects, indeed, came from the coast-towns of the Ægean, thus showing that Western influence was already in contact with the traditions of the East.

All the various races settled between the Halys and the Orontes were more or less imbued with this foreign civilization, and their monuments, though not nearly so numerous as those of the Pharaohs and Ninevite kings, bear, nevertheless, an equally striking evidence of its power. Examples of it have been pointed out in a score of different places in the valleys of the Taurus and on the plains of Cappadocia, in bas-reliefs, steke, seals, and intaglios, several of which must be nearly contemporaneous with the first Assyrian conquest.

One instance of it appears on the rocks at Ibriz, where a king stands in a devout attitude before a jovial giant whose hands are full of grapes and wheat-ears, while in another bas-relief near Frakhtîn we have a double scene of sacrifice. The rock-carving at Ibriz is, perhaps, of all the relics of a forgotten world, that which impresses the spectator most favourably. The concept of the scene is peculiarly naïve; indeed, the two figures are clumsily brought together, though each of them, when examined separately, is remarkable for its style and execution. The king has a dignified bearing in spite of his large head, round eyes, and the unskilful way in which his arms are set on his body. The figure of the god is not standing firmly on both feet, but the sculptor has managed to invest him with an air of grandeur and an expression of vigour and bonhomie, which reminds us of certain types of the Greek Hercules.

Tiglath-pileser was probably attracted to Asia Minor as much by considerations of mercantile interest as by the love of conquest or desire for spoil. It would, indeed, have been an incomparable gain for him had he been able, if not to seize the mines themselves, at least to come into such close proximity to them that he would be able to monopolise their entire output, and at the same time to lay hands on the great commercial highway to the trade centres of the west. The eastern terminus of this route lay already within his domains, namely, that which led to Assur by way of Amid, Nisibe, Singar, and the valley of the Upper Tigris; he was now desirous of acquiring that portion of it which wound its way from the fords of the Euphrates at Malatîyeh to the crossing of the Halys. The changes which had just taken place in Kummukh and Nairi had fully aroused the numerous petty sovereigns of the neighbourhood. The bonds which kept them together had not been completely severed at the downfall of the Hittite empire, and a certain sense of unity still lingered among them in spite of their continual feuds; they constituted, in fact, a sort of loose confederation, whose members never failed to help one another when they were threatened by a common enemy. As soon as the news of an Assyrian invasion reached them, they at once put aside their-mutual quarrels and combined to oppose the invader with their united forces. Tiglath-pileser had, therefore, scarcely crossed the Euphrates before he was attacked on his right flank by twenty-three petty kings of Naîri,* while sixty other chiefs from the same neighbourhood bore down upon him in front. He overcame the first detachment of the confederates, though not without a sharp struggle; he carried carnage into their ranks, “as it were the whirlwind of Eammân,” and seized a hundred and twenty of the enemy’s chariots. The sixty chiefs, whose domains extended as far as the “Upper Sea,” ** were disconcerted by the news of the disaster, and of their own accord laid down their arms, or offered but a feeble resistance.

Tiglath-pileser presented some of them in chains to the god Shamash; he extorted an oath of vassalage from them, forced them to give up their children as hostages, and laid a tax upon them en masse of 1200 stallions and 2000 bulls, after which he permitted them to return to their respective towns. He had, however, singled out from among them to grace his own triumph, Sini of Dayana, the only chief among them who had offered him an obstinate resistance; but even he was granted his liberty after he had been carried captive to Assur, and made to kneel before the gods of Assyria.*

Before returning to the capital, Tiglath-pileser attacked Khanigalbat, and appeared before Milidia: as the town attempted no defence, he spared it, and contented himself with levying a small contribution upon its inhabitants. This expedition was rather of the nature of a reconnaissance than a conquest, but it helped to convince the king of the difficulty of establishing any permanent suzerainty over the country. The Asiatic peoples were quick to bow before a sudden attack; but no sooner had the conqueror departed, than those who had sworn him eternal fealty sought only how best to break their oaths. The tribes in immediate proximity to those provinces which had been long subject to the Assyrian rule, were intimidated into showing some respect for a power which existed so close to their own borders. But those further removed from the seat of government felt a certain security in their distance from it, and were tempted to revert to the state of independence they had enjoyed before the conquest; so that unless the sovereign, by a fresh campaign, promptly made them realise that their disaffection would not remain unpunished, they soon forgot their feudatory condition and the duties which it entailed.

Three years of merciless conflict with obstinate and warlike mountain tribes had severely tried the Assyrian army, if it had not worn out the sovereign; the survivors of so many battles were in sore need of a well-merited repose, the gaps left by death had to be filled, and both infantry and chariotry needed the re-modelling of their corps. The fourth year of the king’s reign, therefore, was employed almost entirely in this work of reorganisation; we find only the record of a raid of a few weeks against the Akhlamî and other nomadic Aramæans situated beyond the Mesopotamian steppes. The Assyrians spread over the district between the frontiers of Sukhi and the fords of Carchemish for a whole day, killing all who resisted, sacking the villages and laying hands on slaves and cattle. The fugitives escaped over the Euphrates, vainly hoping that they would be secure in the very heart of the Khâti. Tiglath-pileser, however, crossed the river on rafts supported on skins, and gave the provinces of Mount Bishri over to fire and sword:* six walled towns opened their gates to him without having ventured to strike a blow, and he quitted the country laden with spoil before the kings of the surrounding cities had had time to recover from their alarm.

This expedition was for Tiglath-pileser merely an interlude between two more serious campaigns; and with the beginning of his fifth year he reappeared in the provinces of the Upper Euphrates to complete his conquest of them. He began by attacking and devastating Musri, which lay close to the territory of Milid. While thus occupied he was harassed by bands of Kumani; he turned upon them, overcame them, and imprisoned the remainder of them in the fortress of Arini, at the foot of Mount Aisa, where he forced them to kiss his feet. His victory over them, however, did not disconcert their neighbours. The bulk of the Kumani, whose troops had scarcely suffered in the engagement, fortified themselves on Mount Tala, to the number of twenty thousand; the king carried the heights by assault, and hotly pursued the fugitives as far as the range of Kharusa before Musri, where the fortress of Khunusa afforded them a retreat behind its triple walls of brick. The king, nothing daunted, broke his way through them one after another, demolished the ramparts, razed the houses, and strewed the ruins with salt; he then constructed a chapel of brick as a sort of trophy, and dedicated within it what was known as a copper thunderbolt, being an image of the missile which Eammân, the god of thunder, brandished in the face of his enemies. An inscription engraved on the object recorded the destruction of Khunusa, and threatened with every divine malediction the individual, whether an Assyrian or a stranger, who should dare to rebuild the city. This victory terrified the Kumani, and their capital, Kibshuna, opened its gates to the royal troops at the first summons. Tiglath-pileser completely destroyed the town, but granted the inhabitants their lives on condition of their paying tribute; he chose from among them, however, three hundred families who had shown him the most inveterate hostility, and sent them as exiles into Assyria.*

With this victory the first half of his reign drew to its close; in five years Tiglath-pileser had subjugated forty-two peoples and their princes within an area extending from the banks of the Lower Zab to the plains of the Khâti, and as far as the shores of the Western Seas. He revisited more than once these western and northern regions in which he had gained his early triumphs. The reconnaissance which he had made around Carchemish had revealed to him the great wealth of the Syrian table-land, and that a second raid in that direction could be made more profitable than ten successful campaigns in Naîri or upon the banks of the Zab. He therefore marched his battalions thither, this time to remain for more than a few days. He made his way through the whole breadth of the country, pushed forward up the valley of the Orontes, crossed the Lebanon, and emerged above the coast of the Mediterranean in the vicinity of Arvad.

This is the first time for many centuries that an Oriental sovereign had penetrated so far west; and his contemporaries must have been obliged to look back to the almost fabulous ages of Sargon of Agadê or of Khammurabi, to find in the long lists of the dynasties of the Euphrates any record of a sovereign who had planted his standards on the shores of the Sea of the Setting Sun.*

Tiglath-pileser embarked on its waters, made a cruise into the open, and killed a porpoise, but we have no record of any battles fought, nor do we know how he was received by the Phoenician towns. He pushed on, it is thought, as far as the Nahr el-Kelb, and the sight of the hieroglyphic inscriptions which Ramses had caused to be cut there three centuries previously aroused his emulation. Assyrian conquerors rarely quitted the scene of their exploits without leaving behind them some permanent memorial of their presence. A sculptor having hastily smoothed the surface of a rock, cut out on it a figure of the king, to which was usually added a commemorative inscription. In front of this stele was erected an altar, upon which sacrifices were made, and if the monument was placed near a stream or the seashore, the soldiers were accustomed to cast portions of the victims into the water in order to propitiate the river-deities.

One of the half-effaced Assyrian stelæ adjoining those of the Egyptian conqueror is attributed to Tiglath-pileser.*

It was on his return, perhaps, from this campaign that he planted colonies at Pitru on the right, and at Mutkînu on the left bank of the Euphrates, in order to maintain a watch over Carchemish, and the more important fords connecting Mesopotamia with the plains of the Apriê and the Orontes.*

The news of Tiglath-pileser’s expedition was not long in reaching the Delta, and the Egyptian monarch then reigning at Tanis was thus made acquainted with the fact that there had arisen in Syria a new power before which his own was not unlikely to give way. In former times such news would have led to a war between the two states, but the time had gone by when Egypt was prompt to take up arms at the slightest encroachment on her Asiatic provinces. Her influence at this time was owing merely to her former renown, and her authority beyond the isthmus was purely traditional. The Tanite Pharaoh had come to accept with resignation the change in the fortunes of Egypt, and he therefore contented himself with forwarding to the Assyrian conqueror, by one of the Syrian coasting vessels, a present of some rare wild beasts and a few crocodiles. In olden times Assyria had welcomed the arrival of Thûtmosis III. on the Euphrates by making him presents, which the Theban monarch regarded in the light of tribute: the case was now reversed, the Egyptian Pharaoh taking the position formerly occupied by the Assyrian monarch. Tiglath-pileser graciously accepted this unexpected homage, but the turbulent condition of the northern tribes prevented his improving the occasion by an advance into Phoenicia and the land of Canaan. Naîri occupied his attention on two separate occasions at least; on the second of these he encamped in the neighbourhood of the source of the river Subnat. This stream, had for a long period issued from a deep grotto, where in ancient times a god was supposed to dwell. The conqueror was lavish in religious offerings here, and caused a bas-relief to be engraved on the entrance in remembrance of his victories.

He is here represented as standing upright, the tiara on his brow, and his right arm extended as if in the act of worship, while his left, the elbow brought up to his side, holds a club. The inscription appended to the figure tells, with an eloquence all the more effective from its brevity, how, “with the aid of Assur, Shamash, and Eammân, the great gods, my lords, I, Tiglath-pileser, King of Assyria, son of Assurîshishî, King of Assyria, son of Mutakkilnusku, King of Assyria, conqueror from the great sea, the Mediterranean, to the great sea of Naîri, I went for the third time to Naîri.”

The gods who had so signally favoured the monarch received the greater part of the spoils which he had secured in his campaigns. The majority of the temples of Assyria, which were founded at a time when its city was nothing more than a provincial capital owing allegiance to Babylon, were either, it would appear, falling to ruins from age, or presented a sorry exterior, utterly out of keeping with the magnitude of its recent wealth. The king set to work to enlarge or restore the temples of Ishtar, Martu, and the ancient Bel;* he then proceeded to rebuild, from the foundations to the summit, that of Anu and Bammân, which the vicegerent Samsirammân, son of Ismidagan, had constructed seven hundred and one years previously. This temple was the principal sanctuary of the city, because it was the residence of the chief of the gods, Assur, under his appellation of Anu.**

The soil was cleared away down to the bed-rock, upon which an enormous substructure, consisting of fifty courses of bricks, was laid, and above this were erected two lofty ziggurâts, whose tile-covered surfaces shone like the rising sun in their brightness; the completion of the whole was commemorated by a magnificent festival. The special chapel of Bammân and his treasury, dating from the time of the same Samsirammân who had raised the temple of Anu, were also rebuilt on a more important scale.*

These works were actively carried on notwithstanding the fact that war was raging on the frontier; however preoccupied he might be with warlike projects, Tiglath-pileser never neglected the temples, and set to work to collect from every side materials for their completion and adornment.

He brought, for example, from Naîri such marble and hard stone as might be needed for sculptural purposes, together with the beams of cedar and cypress required by his carpenters. The mountains of Singar and of the Zab furnished the royal architects with building stone for ordinary uses, and for those facing slabs of bluish gypsum on which the bas-reliefs of the king’s exploits were carved; the blocks ready squared were brought down the affluents of the Tigris on rafts or in boats, and thus arrived at their destination without land transport.

The kings of Assyria, like the Pharaohs, had always had a passion for rare trees and strange animals; as soon as they entered a country, they inquired what natural curiosities it contained, and they would send back to their own land whatever specimens of them could be procured.

The triumphal cortege which accompanied the monarch on his return after each campaign comprised not only prisoners and spoil of a useful sort, but curiosities from all the conquered districts, as, for instance, animals of unusual form or habits, rhinoceroses and crocodiles,* and if some monkey of a rare species had been taken in the sack of a town, it also would find a place in the procession, either held in a leash or perched on the shoulders of its keeper.

The campaigns of the monarch were thus almost always of a double nature, comprising not merely a conflict with men, but a continual pursuit of wild beasts. Tiglath-pileser, “in the service of Ninib, had killed four great specimens of the male urus in the desert of Mitanni, near to the town of Arazîki, opposite to the countries of the Khâti;* he killed them with his powerful bow, his dagger of iron, his pointed lance, and he brought back their skins and horns to his city of Assur. He secured ten strong male elephants, in the territory of Harrân and upon the banks of the Khabur, and he took four of them alive: he brought back their skins and their tusks, together with the living elephants, to his city of Assur.” He killed moreover, doubtless also in the service of Ninib, a hundred and twenty lions, which he attacked on foot, despatching eight hundred more with arrows from his chariot,** all within the short space of five years, and we may well ask what must have been the sum total, if the complete record for his whole reign were extant. We possess, unfortunately, no annals of the later years of this monarch; we have reason to believe that he undertook several fresh expeditions into Nairi,*** and a mutilated tablet records some details of troubles with Elam in the Xth year of his reign.

We gather that he attacked a whole series of strongholds, some of whose names have a Cossæan ring about them, such as Madkiu, Sudrun, Ubrukhundu, Sakama, Shuria, Khirishtu, and Andaria. His advance in this direction must have considerably provoked the Chaldæans, and, indeed, it was not long before actual hostilities broke out between the two nations. The first engagement took place in the valley of the Lower Zab, in the province of Arzukhina, without any decisive result, but in the following year fortune favoured the Assyrians, for Dur-kurigalzu, both Sipparas, Babylon, and Upi opened their gates to them, while Akar-sallu, the Akhlamê, and the whole of Sukhi as far as Eapîki tendered their submission to Tiglath-achuch-sawh-akhl-pileser.

Merodach-nadin-akhi, who was at this time reigning in Chaldæa, was like his ancestor Nebuchadrezzar I., a brave and warlike sovereign: he appears at first to have given way under the blow thus dealt him, and to have acknowledged the suzerainty of his rival, who thereupon assumed the title of Lord of the four Houses of the World, and united under a single empire the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. But this state of things lasted for a few years only; Merodach-nadin-akhi once more took courage, and, supported by the Chaldæan nobility, succeeded in expelling the intruders from Sumir and Akkad. The Assyrians, however, did not allow themselves to be driven out without a struggle, but fortune turned against them; they were beaten, and the conqueror inflicted on the Assyrian gods the humiliation to which they had so often subjected those of other nations. He took the statues of Eammân and Shala from Ekallati, carried them to Babylon, and triumphantly set them up within the temple of Bel. There they remained in captivity for 418 years.* Tiglath-pileser did not long survive this disaster, for he died about the year 1100 B.C.,** and two of his sons succeeded him on the throne. The elder, Assur-belkala,*** had neither sufficient energy nor resources to resume the offensive, and remained a passive spectator of the revolutions which distracted Babylon.

Merodach-nadin-akhi had been followed by his son Merodach-shapîk-zîrîm,* but this prince was soon dethroned by the people, and Bammân-abaliddîn, a man of base extraction, seized the crown.

Assur-belkala not only extended to this usurper the friendly relations he had kept up with the legitimate sovereign, but he asked for the hand of his daughter in marriage, and the rich dowry which she brought her husband no doubt contributed to the continuation of his pacific policy. He appears also to have kept possession of all the parts of Mesopotamia and Kammukh conquered by his father, and it is possible that he may have penetrated beyond the Euphrates. His brother, Samsi-rammân III., does not appear to have left any more definite mark upon history than Assur-belkala; he decorated the temples built by his predecessors, but beyond this we have no certain record of his achievements. We know nothing of the kings who followed him, their names even having been lost, but about a century and a half after Tiglath-pileser, a certain Assurirba seems to have crossed Northern Syria, and following in the footsteps of his great ancestor, to have penetrated as far as the Mediterranean: on the rocks of Mount Amanus, facing the sea, he left a triumphal inscription in which he set forth the mighty deeds he had accomplished. This is merely a gleam out of the murky night which envelops his history, and the testimony of one of his descendants informs us that his good fortune soon forsook him: the Aramaeans wrested from him the fortresses of Pitru and Mutkînu, which commanded both banks of the Euphrates near Carchemish. Nor did the retrograde movement slaken after his time: Assyria slowly wasted away down to the end of the Xth century, and but for the simultaneous decadence of the Chaldaeans, its downfall would have been complete. But neither Rammân-abaliddîn nor his successor was able to take advantage of its weakness; discord and want of energy soon brought about their own ruin. The dynasty of Pashê disappeared towards the middle of the Xth century, and a family belonging to the “Countries of the Sea” took its place: it had continued for about one hundred and thirty-two years, and had produced eleven kings.*

242b (37K)

What were the causes of this depression, from which Babylon suffered at almost regular intervals, as though stricken with some periodic malady? The main reason soon becomes apparent if we consider the nature of the country and the material conditions of its existence. Chaldæa was neither extensive enough nor sufficiently populous to afford a solid basis for the ambition of her princes. Since nearly every man capable of bearing arms was enrolled in the army, the Chaktean kings had no difficulty in raising, at a moment’s notice, a force which could be employed to repel an invasion, or make a sudden attack on some distant territory; it was in schemes which required prolonged and sustained effort that they felt the drawbacks of their position. In that age of hand-to-hand combats, the mortality in battle was very high, forced marches through forests and across mountains entailed a heavy loss of men, and three or four consecutive campaigns against a stubborn foe soon reduced an army to a condition of dangerous weakness. Recruits might be obtained to fill the earlier vacancies in the ranks, but they soon grew fewer and fewer if time was not given for recovery after the opening victories in the struggle, and the supply eventually ceased if operations were carried on beyond a certain period.

The total duration of the dynasty was, according to the Royal Canon, 72 years 6 months. Peiser has shown that this is a mistake, and he proposes to correct it to 132 years 6 months, and this is accepted by most Assyri-ologists.

A reign which began brilliantly often came to an impotent conclusion, owing to the king having failed to economise his reserves; and the generations which followed, compelled to adopt a strictly defensive attitude, vegetated in a sort of anaemic condition, until the birth-rate had brought the proportion of males up to a figure sufficiently high to provide the material for a fresh army. When Nebuchadrezzar made war upon Assurîshishî, he was still weak from the losses he had incurred during the campaign against Elam, and could not conduct his attack with the same vigour as had gained him victory on the banks of the Ulaî; in the first year he only secured a few indecisive advantages, and in the second he succumbed. Merodach-nadin-akhi was suffering from the reverses sustained by his predecessors when Tiglath-pileser provoked him to war, and though he succeeded in giving a good account of an adversary who was himself exhausted by dearly bought successes, he left to his descendants a kingdom which had been drained of its last drop of blood. The same reason which explains the decadence of Babylon shows us the cause of the periodic eclipses undergone by Assyria after each outburst of her warlike spirit. She, too, had to pay the penalty of an ambition which was out of all proportion to her resources. The mighty deeds of Shalmaneser and Tukulti-ninip were, as a natural consequence, followed by a state of complete prostration under Tukultiassurbel and Assurnîrarî: the country was now forced to pay for the glories of Assurîshishî and of Tiglath-pileser by falling into an inglorious state of languor and depression. Its kings, conscious that their rule must be necessarily precarious as long as they did not possess a larger stock of recruits to fall back on, set their wits to work to provide by various methods a more adequate reserve. While on one hand they installed native Assyrians in the more suitable towns of conquered countries, on the other they imported whole hordes of alien prisoners chosen for their strength and courage, and settled them down in districts by the banks of the Tigris and the Zab. We do not know what Eammânirâni and Shalmaneser may have done in this way, but Tiglath-pileser undoubtedly introduced thousands of the Mushku, the Urumseans, the people of Kummukh and Naîri, and his example was followed by all those of his successors whose history has come down to us. One might have expected that such an invasion of foreigners, still smarting under the sense of defeat, might have brought with it an element of discontent or rebellion; far from it, they accepted their exile as a judgment of the gods, which the gods alone had a right to reverse, and did their best to mitigate the hardness of their lot by rendering unhesitating obedience to their masters. Their grandchildren, born in the midst of Assyrians, became Assyrians themselves, and if they did not entirely divest themselves of every trace of their origin, at any rate became so closely identified with the country of their adoption, that it was difficult to distinguish them from the native race. The Assyrians who were sent out to colonise recently acquired provinces were at times exposed to serious risks. Now and then, instead of absorbing the natives among whom they lived, they were absorbed by them, which meant a loss of so much fighting strength to the mother country; even under the most favourable conditions a considerable time must have passed before they could succeed in assimilating to themselves the races amongst whom they lived. At last, however, a day would dawn when the process of incorporation was accomplished, and Assyria, having increased her area and resources twofold, found herself ready to endure to the end the strain of conquest. In the interval, she suffered from a scarcity of fighting men, due to the losses incurred in her victories, and must have congratulated herself that her traditional foe was not in a position to take advantage of this fact.

The first wave of the Assyrian invasion had barely touched Syria; it had swept hurriedly over the regions in the north, and then flowed southwards to return no more, so that the northern races were able to resume the wonted tenor of their lives. For centuries after this their condition underwent no change; there was the same repetition of dissension and intrigue, the same endless succession of alliances and battles without any signal advantage on either side. The Hittites still held Northern Syria: Carchemish was their capital, and more than one town in its vicinity preserved the tradition of their dress, their language, their arts, and their culture in full vigour. The Greek legends tell us vaguely of some sort of Cilician empire which is said to have brought the eastern and central provinces of Asia Minor into subjection about ten centuries before our era.*

Is there any serious foundation for such a belief, and must we assume that there existed at this time and in this part of the world a kingdom similar to that of Sapalulu? Assyria was recruiting its forces, Chaldæa was kept inactive by its helplessness, Egypt slumbered by the banks of its river, there was no actor of the first rank to fill the stage; now was the opportunity for a second-rate performer to come on the scene and play such a part as his abilities permitted. The Cilician conquest, if this be indeed the date at which it took place, had the boards to itself for a hundred years after the defeat of Assurirba. The time was too short to admit of its striking deep root in the country. Its leaders and men were, moreover, closely related to the Syrian Hittites; the language they spoke was, if not precisely the Hittite, at any rate a dialect of it; their customs were similar, if, perhaps, somewhat less refined, as is often the case with mountain races, when compared with the peoples of the plain. We are tempted to conclude that some of the monuments found south of the Taurus were their handiwork, or, at any rate, date from their time. For instance, the ruined palace at Sinjirli, the lower portions of which are ornamented with pictures similar to those at Pteria, representing processions of animals, some real, others fantastic, men armed with lances or bending the bow, and processions of priests or officials. Then there is the great lion at Marash, which stands erect, with menacing head, its snarling lips exposing the teeth; its body is seamed with the long lines of an inscription in the Asiatic character, in imitation of those with which the bulls in the Assyrian palaces are covered. These Cilicians gave an impulse to the civilization of the Khâti which they sorely needed, for the Semitic races, whom they had kept in subjection for centuries, now pressed them hard on all the territory over which they had formerly reigned, and were striving to drive them back into the hills.