and reclamations, which not unfrequently terminate in an appeal to the arbitrament of the sword.  Sennacherib does not inform us whether he made any attempt to recover his lost subjects by diplomatic representations at the court of Susa.  If he did, they were unsuccessful; and in order to obtain redress, he was compelled to resort to force, and to undertake an expedition into the Elamitie territory.  It is remarkable that he determined to make his invasion by sea.  Their frequent wars on the Syrian coasts had by this time familiarized the Assyrians with the idea, if not with the practice, of navigation; and as their suzerainty over Phoenicia placed at their disposal a large body of skilled shipwrights, and a number of the best sailors in the world, it was natural that they should resolve to employ naval as well as military force to advance their dominion.  We have seen that, as early as the time of Shalmaneser, the Assyrians ventured themselves in ships, and, in conjunction with the Phoenicians of the mainland, engaged the vessels of the Island Tyre.  It is probable that the precedent thus set was followed by later kings, and that both Sargon and Sennacherib had had the permanent, or occasional services of a fleet on the Mediterranean.  But there was a wide difference between such an employment of the navies belonging to their subjects on the sea, to which they were accustomed, and the transfer to the opposite extremity of the empire of the naval strength hitherto confined to the Mediterranean.  This thought—­certainly not an obvious one—­seems to have first occurred to Sennacherib.  He conceived the idea of having a navy on both the seas that washed his dominions; and, possessing on his western coast only an adequate supply of skilled shipwrights and sailors he resolved on transporting from his western to his eastern shores such a body of Phoenicians as would enable him to accomplish his purpose.  The shipwrights of Tyre and Sidon were carried across Mesopotamia to the Tigris, where they constructed for the Assyrian monarch a fleet of ships like their own galleys, which descended the river to its mouth, and astonished the populations bordering on the Persian Gulf with spectacle never before seen in those waters.  Though the Chaldaeans had for centuries navigated this inland sea, and may have occasionally ventured beyond its limits, yet neither as sailors nor as ship-builders was their skill to compare with that of the Phoenicians.  The masts and sails, the double tiers of oars, the sharp beaks of the Phoenician ships, were (it is probable) novelties to the nations of these parts, who saw now, for the first time, a fleet debouche from the Tigris, with which their own vessels were quite incapable of contending.