races or savage monsters, and however far an alien army might penetrate in a southerly direction, it would still meet with the language, customs, and divinities of Egypt—­an Egypt whose boundary seemed to recede as the invader advanced, and which was ever ready to oppose the enemy with fresh forces whenever its troops had suffered from his attacks.  Sargon, having reached Kaphia, halted on the very threshold of the unexplored realm whose portals stood ajar ready to admit him:  the same vague disquietude which had checked the conquering career of the Pharaohs on the borders of Asia now stayed his advance, and bade him turn back as he was on the point of entering Africa.  He had repulsed the threatened invasion, and as a result of his victory the princes and towns which had invoked the aid of the foreigner lay at his mercy; he proceeded, therefore, to reorganise the provinces of Philistia and Israel, and received the homage of Judah and her dependencies.  Ahaz, while all the neighbouring states were in revolt, had not wavered in his allegiance; the pacific counsels of Isaiah had once more prevailed over the influence of the party which looked for safety in an alliance with Egypt.*

* Sargon probably alludes to homage received at this time, when he styles himself “the subduer of far-off Judah.”  It is not certain that Ahaz was still King of Judah; it was for a long time admitted that Hezekiah was already king when these events took place, in accordance with 2 Kings xviii. 9, 10, where it is stated that Samaria was destroyed in the sixth year of Hezekiah.  I consider, in agreement with several historians, that the date of Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah must have remained more firmly fixed in the minds of the Jewish historians than that of the taking of Samaria, and as 2 Kings xviii. 13 places this invasion in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, which corresponds, as we shall see, to the third year of Sennacherib, or 702 B.C., it seems better to place the accession of Hezekiah about 715, and prolong the reign of Ahaz till after the campaign of Sargon against Hannon of Gaza.

The whole country from the Orontes to the mountains of Seir and the river of Egypt was again reduced to obedience, and set itself by peaceful labours to repair the misfortunes which had befallen it during the previous quarter of a century.  Sargon returned to his capital, but fate did not yet allow him to renew his projects against Babylon.  Barely did an insurrection break out in any part of the country on the accession of a new king at Nineveh without awaking echoes in the distant provinces of the empire.  The report of a revolt in Chaldaea roused a slumbering dissatisfaction among the Syrians, and finally led them into open rebellion:  the episodes of the Syrian campaign, narrated in Armenia or on the slopes of the Taurus with the thousand embellishments suggested by the rancour of the narrators, excited the minds of the inhabitants and soon rendered an outbreak inevitable.