[Illustration:  379.jpg THE ASSYRIANS TAKING A MEDIAN TOWN]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the facsimile by Flandin.  It seems that this town was called Amkaru, and its name appears, as far as I know, in none of the accounts which we possess of the campaigns.  The town was apparently situated in Karalla or in Median territory.

This fresh danger absorbed their entire attention, and from this time forward they ceased to play a part in general history; the century which had seen the rise and growth of their power was also a witness of their downfall under the attacks of Assyria.  During the last months of 714, the tribes which had formerly constituted the kingdom of Karalla mutinied against the tyranny of their governor, and invited Ami-tashshi, the brother of their ancient lord Assurli, to rule over them.  Sargon attacked them in the spring of 713, dispersed their troops, held them to ransom, and after having once more exacted homage from Bit-Dayaukku,* Ellipi, and Allabria.

* The Dayaukku who gave his name to this province was at first confounded with the personage who was entangled in the affairs of Ullusunu, and was then banished by Sargon to Hamath.  A good number of historians now admit that they were different persons.  Bit-Dayaukku is evidently the district of Ecbatana.

He made a raid extending as far as the confines of the Iranian desert, the barren steppes of Eastern Arabia,* and the district of Nagira belonging to the “powerful” Manda.*

* The Eastern Arabs mentioned here were nomadic, and inhabited the confines of the Great Desert to the south-east of Media, or the steppes of Northern Iran.  They are those mentioned in a passage of Appian, together with Parthians, Bactrians, and Tapyraeans, as having submitted to Seleucus.

** The “powerful” Manda, encamped in the mountain and desert, and who were named after the Eastern Arabs, must be the peoples situated between the Caspian and the steppes of the Iranian plateau, and a branch of the Scythians who are soon to appear in Asiatic history.

While he was thus preparing the way for peace in his Median domains, one of his generals crossed the Euphrates to chastise the Tabal for their ill deeds.  The latter had figured, about the year 740 B.C., among the peoples who had bowed before the supremacy of Urartu, and their chief, Uassarmi, had been the ally or vassal of Sharduris.  Contemptuously spared at the taking of Arpad, he had not been able to resign himself to the Assyrian yoke, and had, in an ill-timed moment, thrown it off in 731; he had, however, been overcome and forced to surrender, and Tiglath-pileser had put in his place a man of obscure birth, named Khulli, whose fidelity had remained unshaken throughout the reign of Shalmaneser V. and the first years of Sargon.  Khulli’s son, Ambaridis, the husband of a Ninevite princess, who had brought him as dowry