On it he records his suppression of a revolt of the Tu'mânu tribe, who threatened his capital Ribanish, while he was holding festival in the neighbouring town of Baka. But he attacked them with the people who were with him, slew three hundred and fifty of them, and the rest submitted. He also records how he dug out the Sukhi Canal, when it had silted up, and how he planted palm-trees in his palace at Ribanish. But his most notable act, according to his own account, was the introduction of bees into Sukhi, which his improved irrigation of the district doubtless rendered possible. "Bees which collect honey," he tells us, "which no man had seen since the time of my fathers and forefathers, nor had brought to the land of Sukhi, I brought down from the mountains of the Khabkha-tribe and I put them in the garden of Gabbari-ibni." The text closes with an interesting little note upon the bees: "They collect honey and wax. The preparing of honey and wax I understand, and the gardeners understand it." And he adds that in days to come a ruler will ask the elders of his land, "Is it true that Shamash-rêsh-usur, governor of Sukhi, brought honey-bees into the land of Sukhi?" The monument may well have been carried to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II., when he incorporated the district within his empire. The subsequent period shows a gradual tightening of Assyria's grasp upon the southern kingdom, varied by comparatively ineffective struggles and revolts on Babylon's part to avoid her loss of independence. The temporary decline of Assyrian power enabled Babylon for a time to regain something of her former position under Nabû-shum-ishkun II., an early king of the Ninth Dynasty, and his successor Nabonassar. But the military revolt in Assyria, which in 745 B.C. placed Tiglath-pileser IV. upon the throne,[34] put a speedy end to Babylon's hopes of any permanent recovery of power. His accession marks the beginning of the last period of Assyrian expansion, and the administrative policy he inaugurated justifies us in ascribing the term "empire" to the area conquered by him, and his successors, in the last half of the eighth and the first half of the seventh centuries B.C. But it was an empire which carried in itself from the outset the seeds of decay. It was based on a policy of deportation, Assyria's final answer to her pressing problem of how to administer the wide areas she annexed. Former Assyrian kings had carried away the conquered into slavery, but Tiglath-pileser IV. inaugurated a regular transference of nations. The policy certainly effected its immediate object: it kept the subject provinces quiet. But as a permanent method of administration it was bound to be a failure. While destroying patriotism and love of country, it put an end at the same time to all incentives to labour. The subject country's accumulated wealth had already been drained for the benefit of Assyrian coffers; and in the hands of its half-starved colonists it was not likely to prove a