and he brought back their skins and horns to his city of Assur.  He secured ten strong male elephants, in the territory of Harran 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.

* The town of Araziki has been identified with the Eragiza (Eraziga) of Ptolemy; the Eraziga of Ptolemy was on the right bank of the Euphrates, while the text of Tiglath- pileser appears to place Araziki on the left bank.

** The account of the hunts in the Annals is supplemented by the information furnished in the first column of the “Broken Obelisk.”  The monument is of the time of Assur-nazir- pal, but the first column contains an abstract from an account of an anonymous hunt, which a comparison of numbers and names leads us to attribute to Tiglath-pileser I.; some Assyri-ologists, however, attribute it to Assur-nazir-pal.

* The inscription of Sebbeneh-Su was erected at the time of the third expedition into Nairi, and the Annals give only one; the other two expeditions must, therefore, be subsequent to the Vth year of his reign.

We gather that he attacked a whole series of strongholds, some of whose names have a Cossaean ring about them, such as Madkiu, Sudrun, Ubrukhundu, Sakama, Shuria, Khirishtu, and Andaria.  His advance in this direction must have considerably provoked the Chaldaeans, 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 Akhlame, and the whole of Sukhi as far as Eapiki tendered their submission to Tiglath-achuch-sawh-akhl-pileser.

[Illustration:  239.jpg MERODACH-NADIN-AKHI]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the heliogravure in Pr.  Lenormant.  The original is in the British Museum.  It is one of the boundary stones which were set up in a corner of a field to mark its legal limit.

Merodach-nadin-akhi, who was at this time reigning in Chaldaea, was like his ancestor Nebuchadrezzar I., a brave and warlike sovereign:  he appears