Tiglath-pileser was probably attracted to Asia Minor as much by considerations of mercantile interest as by the love of conquest or desire for spoil. It would, indeed, have been an incomparable gain for him had he been able, if not to seize the mines themselves, at least to come into such close proximity to them that he would be able to monopolise their entire output, and at the same time to lay hands on the great commercial highway to the trade centres of the west. The eastern terminus of this route lay already within his domains, namely, that which led to Assur by way of Amid, Nisibe, Singar, and the valley of the Upper Tigris; he was now desirous of acquiring that portion of it which wound its way from the fords of the Euphrates at Malatîyeh to the crossing of the Halys. The changes which had just taken place in Kummukh and Nairi had fully aroused the numerous petty sovereigns of the neighbourhood. The bonds which kept them together had not been completely severed at the downfall of the Hittite empire, and a certain sense of unity still lingered among them in spite of their continual feuds; they constituted, in fact, a sort of loose confederation, whose members never failed to help one another when they were threatened by a common enemy. As soon as the news of an Assyrian invasion reached them, they at once put aside their-mutual quarrels and combined to oppose the invader with their united forces. Tiglath-pileser had, therefore, scarcely crossed the Euphrates before he was attacked on his right flank by twenty-three petty kings of Naîri,* while sixty other chiefs from the same neighbourhood bore down upon him in front. He overcame the first detachment of the confederates, though not without a sharp struggle; he carried carnage into their ranks, “as it were the whirlwind of Eammân,” and seized a hundred and twenty of the enemy’s chariots. The sixty chiefs, whose domains extended as far as the “Upper Sea,” ** were disconcerted by the news of the disaster, and of their own accord laid down their arms, or offered but a feeble resistance. * The text of the Annals of the Xth year give thirty instead of twenty-three; in the course of five or six years the numbers have already become exaggerated. ** The site of the “Upper Sea” has furnished material for much discussion. Some believe it to be the Caspian Sea or the Black Sea, others take it to be Lake Van, while some think it to be the Mediterranean, and more particularly the Gulf of Issus between Syria and Cilicia. At the present day several scholars have returned to the theory which makes it the Black Sea.