History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12)Maspero, G. (Gaston)
History
History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12)
Maspero, G. (Gaston)
Civilization, Ancient; Egypt -- History -- To 640 A.D.; History, Ancient; Middle East -- History
The campaigns of the monarch were thus almost always of a double nature,
comprising not merely a conflict with men, but a continual pursuit of
wild beasts. Tiglath-pileser, in the service of Ninib, had killed four
great specimens of the male urus in the desert of Mitanni, near to the
town of Arazîki, opposite to the countries of the Khâti;* he killed them
with his powerful bow, his dagger of iron, his pointed lance, and he
brought back their skins and horns to his city of Assur. He secured ten
strong male elephants, in the territory of Harrân and upon the banks of
the Khabur, and he took four of them alive: he brought back their skins
and their tusks, together with the living elephants, to his city of
Assur. He killed moreover, doubtless also in the service of Ninib, a
hundred and twenty lions, which he attacked on foot, despatching eight
hundred more with arrows from his chariot,** all within the short space
of five years, and we may well ask what must have been the sum total,
if the complete record for his whole reign were extant. We possess,
unfortunately, no annals of the later years of this monarch; we have
reason to believe that he undertook several fresh expeditions into
Nairi,*** and a mutilated tablet records some details of troubles with
Elam in the Xth year of his reign.
* The town of Arazîki has been identified with the Eragiza
(Eraziga) of Ptolemy; the Eraziga of Ptolemy was on the
right bank of the Euphrates, while the text of Tiglath-
pileser appears to place Arazîki on the left bank.
** The account of the hunts in the _Annals_ is supplemented
by the information furnished in the first column of the
Broken Obelisk. The monument is of the time of Assur-nazir-
pal, but the first column contains an abstract from an
account of an anonymous hunt, which a comparison of numbers
and names leads us to attribute to Tiglath-pileser I.; some
Assyri-ologists, however, attribute it to Assur-nazir-pal.
* The inscription of Sebbeneh-Su was erected at the time of
the third expedition into Naîri, and the _Annals_ give only
one; the other two expeditions must, therefore, be
subsequent to the Vth year of his reign.
We gather that he attacked a whole series of strongholds, some of
whose names have a Cossæan ring about them, such as Madkiu, Sudrun,
Ubrukhundu, Sakama, Shuria, Khirishtu, and Andaria. His advance in this
direction must have considerably provoked the Chaldæans, and, indeed,
it was not long before actual hostilities broke out between the two
nations. The first engagement took place in the valley of the Lower Zab,
in the province of Arzukhina, without any decisive result, but in the
following year fortune favoured the Assyrians, for Dur-kurigalzu, both
Sipparas, Babylon, and Upi opened their gates to them, while Akar-sallu,
the Akhlamê, and the whole of Sukhi as far as Eapîki tendered their
submission to Tiglath-achuch-sawh-akhl-pileser.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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