His first relations with them had been of a courteous and friendly nature.  Hazael of Adumu, one of the sheikhs of Kedar, defeated by Sennacherib towards the end of his reign, had taken the opportunity of the annual tribute to come to Nineveh with considerable presents, and to implore the restoration of the statues of his gods.  Esarhaddon had caused these battered idols to be cleaned and repaired, had engraved upon them an inscription in praise of Assur, and had further married the suppliant sheikh to a woman of the royal harem, named Tabua.  In consideration of this, he had imposed upon the Arab a supplementary tribute of sixty-five camels, and had restored to him his idols.  All this took place, no doubt, soon after the king’s accession.  A few years later, on the death of Hazael, his son Yauta solicited investiture, but a competitor for the chieftaincy, a man of unknown origin, named Uahab, treacherously incited the Arabs to rebel, and threatened to overthrow him.  Esarhaddon caused Uahab to be seized, and exposed him in chains at the gate of Nineveh; but, in consideration of this service to the Arabs, he augmented the tribute which already weighed upon the people by a further demand for ten gold minas, one thousand precious stones, fifty camels, and a thousand measures of spicery.  The repression of these Arabs of Kedar thus confirmed Esarhaddon’s supremacy over the extreme northern region of Arabia, between Damascus and Sippara or Babylon; but in a more southerly direction, in the wadys which unite Lower Chaldaea to the districts of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, there still remained several rich and warlike states—­among others, Bazu,* whose rulers had never done homage to the sovereigns of either Assyria or Karduniash.

* The Bazu of this text is certainly the Buz which the Hebrew books name among the children of Nahor (Gen. xxii. 21; Jer. xxv. 23).  The early Assyriologists identified Khazu with Uz, the son of Nahor; Delitzsch compares the name with that of Hazo (Huz), the fifth son of Nahor (Gen. xxii. 22), and his opinion is admitted by most scholars.  For the site of these countries I have followed the ideas of Delattro, who identifies them with the oases of Jauf and Meskakeh, in the centre of Northern Arabia.  The Assyrians must have set out by the Wady Hauran or by one of the wadys near to Babylon, and have returned by a more southern wady.

To carry hostilities into the heart of their country was a bold and even hazardous undertaking; it could be reached only by traversing miles of arid and rocky plains, exposed to the rays of a burning sun, vast extents of swamps and boggy pasture land, desolate wastes infested with serpents and scorpions, and a mountain range of blackish lava known as Khazu.  It would have been folly to risk a march with the heavy Assyrian infantry in the face of such obstacles.  Esarhaddon probably selected for the purpose a force composed of cavalry, chariots, and lightly equipped