His son, Tiglath-pileser I., was one of the great conquerors of history.  He carried his arms far and wide.  Kurdistan and Armenia, Mesopotamia and Comagene, were all alike overrun by his armies in campaign after campaign.  The Hittites paid tribute, as also did Phoenicia, where he sailed on the Mediterranean in a ship of Arvad and killed a dolphin in its waters.  The Pharaoh of Egypt, alarmed at the approach of so formidable an invader, sent him presents, which included a crocodile and a hippopotamus, and on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, near Carchemish and Pethor, he hunted wild elephants, as Thothmes III. had done before him.  His son still claimed supremacy in the west, as is shown by the fact that he erected statues in “the land of the Amorites.”  But the energy of the dynasty was now exhausted, and Assyria for a time passed under eclipse.  This was the period when David established his empire; there was no other great power to oppose him in the Oriental world, and it seemed as if Israel was about to take the place that had once been filled by Egypt and Babylon.  But the opportunity was lost; the murder of Joab and the unwarlike character of Solomon effectually checked all dreams of conquest, and Israel fell back into two petty states.

The military revival of Assyria was as sudden as had been its decline.  In B.C. 885, Assur-nazir-pal II. ascended the throne.  His reign of twenty-five years was passed in constant campaigns, in ferocious massacres, and the burning of towns.  In both his inscriptions and his sculptures he seems to gloat over the tortures he inflicted on the defeated foe.  Year after year his armies marched out of Nineveh to slaughter and destroy, and to bring back with them innumerable captives and vast amounts of spoil.  Western Asia was overrun, tribute was received from the Hittites and from Phoenicia, and Armenia was devastated by the Assyrian forces as far north as Lake Van.  The policy of Assur-nazir-pal was continued by his son and successor Shalmaneser II., with less ferocity, but with more purpose (B.C. 860-825).  Assyria became dominant in Asia; its empire stretched from Media on the east to the Mediterranean on the west.  But it was an empire which was without organisation or permanency.  Every year a new campaign was needed to suppress the revolts which broke out as soon as the Assyrian army was out of sight, or to supply the treasury with fresh spoil.  The campaigns were in most cases raids rather than the instruments of deliberately planned conquest.  Hence it was that the Assyrian monarch found himself checked in the west by the petty kings of Damascus and the neighbouring states.  Ben-Hadad and Hazael, it is true, were beaten again and again along with their allies, while Omri of Israel offered tribute to the invader, like the rich cities of Phoenicia; but Damascus remained untaken and its people unsubdued.