The first victory of Aram was over Neuchar king of Media, whom he took prisoner and put to death, and made a large part of the country of the defeated prince tributary to his own. The second victory of Aram was over Barsham king of Babylon, whom also he took prisoner and put to death. The next victory was over the king of Cappadocia; the army of the Cappadocians was pursued to the very shores of the Mediterranean, and the whole of Cappadocia fell into the hands of Aram B.C. 1796. Also Ninus king of Assyria, at one time an eager enemy, awed by the victories of Aram, sought to cultivate his friendship. No doubt if the volumes and scripts of paper or parchment of the famous Alexandrian library, which burned for six months as fuel in the four thousand baths of the city, had escaped that most atrocious act of vandalism, and been preserved instead, vast treasures of knowledge now lost to us concerning the ancient kingdoms of Western Asia might be known in our day; and also when the tide of Islam victory rolled over the kingdom of Armenia, how much of the story and history of the people was lost and destroyed along with the destruction of their independence it would be difficult now to calculate or assert, but in taking up link by link of whatever knowledge has been left to us, there seems to be grounds for supposing that the “Aramæans” designated by foreign writers as “a people of Semitic race, language and religion, coming from Northern Arabia and settling in the region between the western boundaries of Babylonia and the highlands of Western Asia” were no other than the Hai who under their King Aram had spread their conquests and their kingdom into Mesopotamia and even to the shores of the Mediterranean. Herodotus also rather corroborates this conjecture when he includes Northern Mesopotamia, together with the mountainous country of Ararat, under the name of Armenia, and in writing of the Armenian boats that brought merchandise to Babylon, he remarks that they were constructed in Armenia, _in the parts above Assyria_. Archæological researches have laid the claim that the modern Armenians are the descendants of the old Hittites; the modern Armenian being supposed to be the survival of the ancient Hittite tongue, and it is asserted almost everything that is known in the Hittite language is Old Armenian in form: but who these Hittites were, or whence they came neither historian nor archæologist have been able definitely to ascertain. In the Armenian version of the Bible, we find the name “Kethosi” used for the Hittite who were known to the Assyrians and Egyptians as “Ketha,” but this can have no important bearing since the Bible was translated into the Armenian language from the Greek in the fifth century of the Christian era, and the Armenian scribe no doubt simply translated what he found in the Greek.