the districts which he had laid waste occupied by an Assyrian force.  Before his departure, he received homage and tribute from most of the Aramaean chiefs, including those of Balasu and the Bit-Dakkuri, of Nadinu, and even of the Bit-Yakin and Merodach-baladan, whose ancestors had never before “kissed the foot” of an Assyrian conqueror.  In this campaign he had acquired nearly three-fourths of the whole Babylonian kingdom; but Babylon itself still refused to yield, and it was no easy task to compel it to do so.  Tiglath-pileser spent the whole of the year 730 in preparing for another attack, and in 729 he again appeared in front of Shapia, this time with greater success:  Ukinzir fell into his hands, Babylon opened its gates, and he caused himself to be proclaimed King of Sumir and Akkad within its walls.* Many centuries had passed since the two empires had been united under the rule of a single master, or an Assyrian king had “taken the hands of Bel.”  Tiglath-pileser accepted the condition attached to this solemn investiture, which obliged him to divide his time between Calah and Babylon, and to repeat at every festival of the New Year the mystic ceremony by which the god of the city confirmed him in his office.**

* Contemporary documents do not furnish us with any information as to these events.  The Eponym Canon tells us that “the king took the hands of Bel.”  Pinches’ Chronicle adds that “in the third year of Ukinzir, Tiglath-pileser marched against Akkad, laid waste the Bit- Amukkani, and took Ukinzir prisoner; Ukinzir had reigned three years in Babylon.  Tiglath-pileser followed him upon the throne of Babylon.”

     ** The Eponym Canon proves that in 728 B.C., the year of
     his death, he once more took the hands of Bel.

His Babylonian subjects seem to have taken a liking to him, and perhaps in order to hide from themselves their dependent condition, they shortened his purely Assyrian name of Tukulti-abal-esharra into the familiar sobriquet of Puru or Pulu, under which appellation the native chroniclers later on inscribed him in the official list of kings:  he did not long survive his triumph, but died in the month of Tebeth, 728 B.C., after having reigned eighteen years over Assyria, and less than two years over Babylon and Chaldaea.

The formulae employed by the scribes in recording historical events vary so little from one reign to another, that it is, in most cases, a difficult matter to make out, under the mask of uniformity by which they are all concealed, the true character and disposition of each successive sovereign.  One thing, however, is certain—­the monarch who now came upon the scene after half a century of reverses, and in a brief space restored to his armies the skill necessary to defeat such formidable foes as the Armenians or the Syrians of Damascus, must have been an able general and a born leader of men.  Yet Nineveh had never