of the day.  The success was so prompt and complete, that the king was inclined to attribute it to the help of Ramman, and he made an offering to the temple of this god at Assur of all the copper, whether wrought or in ore, which was found among the spoil of the vanquished.  He was recalled almost immediately after this victory by a sedition among the Kurkhi near the sources of the Tigris.  One of their tribes, known as the Sugi, who had not as yet suffered from the invaders, had concentrated round their standards contingents from some half-dozen cities, and the united force was, to the number of six thousand, drawn up on Mount Khirikha.  Tiglath-pileser was again victorious, and took from them twenty-five statues of their gods, which he despatched to Assyria to be distributed among the sanctuaries of Belit at Assur, of Anu, Bamman, and of Ishtar.  Winter obliged him to suspend operations.  When he again resumed them at the beginning of his third year, both the Kummukh and the Kurkhi were so peaceably settled that he was able to carry his expeditions without fear of danger further north, into the regions of the Upper Euphrates between the Halys and Lake Van, a district then known as Nairi.  He marched diagonally across the plain of Diarbekir, penetrated through dense forests, climbed sixteen mountain ridges one after the other by paths hitherto considered impracticable, and finally crossed the Euphrates by improvised bridges, this being, as far as we know, the first time that an Assyrian monarch had ventured into the very heart of those countries which had formerly constituted the Hittite empire.

He found them occupied by rude and warlike tribes, who derived considerable wealth from working the mines, and possessed each their own special sanctuary, the ruins of which still appear above ground, and invite the attention of the explorer.  Their fortresses must have all more or less resembled that city of the Pterians which flourished for so many ages just at the bend of the Halys;* its site is still marked by a mound rising to some thirty feet above the plain, resembling the platforms on which the Chaldaean temples were always built—­a few walls of burnt brick, and within an enclosure, among the debris of rudely built houses, the ruins of some temples and palaces consisting of large irregular blocks of stone.

* The remains of the palace of the city of the Pterians, the present Euyuk, are probably later than the reign of Tiglath- pileser, and may be attributed to the Xth or IXth century before our era; they, however, probably give a very fair idea of what the towns of the Cappadocian region were like at the time of the first Assyrian invasions.

[Illustration:  216.jpg GENERAL VIEW OF THE RUINS OF EUYUK]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph.

[Illustration:  217.jpg THE SPHINX ON THE RIGHT OF EUYUK]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.