The construction of the walls, as well as the pottery found within them, marks it off with great distinctness from the ruins of the Hittite or native Cappadocian cities in its neighbourhood. While in their case the city wall is made of unmortared blocks of stone, the walls of Kara Eyuk are built of brick, and where stones are used they are of small size and cemented with mortar. The pottery differs considerably from that of the Hittite capital at Boghaz Keui. Some of it is of black ware, especially characterized by the vases with long spouts, which are also found in Phrygia and the Troad. Some of it, again, is of the dark-red lustrous ware which has been met with at Toprak Kaleh, near Van, and Boz Eyuk in Phrygia, while the yellow ware with geometrical patterns in black and maroon-red which has been discovered in Phrygia occurs in large quantities. This latter ware is of the class known as “Mykenæan.”[141] The cuneiform tablets which have come from the site are known as “Cappadocian,” and were first noticed by Dr. Pinches. The forms of the characters resemble those of the early Babylonian script, which was still used in Assyria in the age of Khammu-rabi. Many of the proper names, moreover, seem to be distinctive of that period. On the other hand, a large proportion of them contain the name of Asur--often in its primitive form of Asir--or are otherwise characteristic of Assyria. The tablets are further dated by the archons who gave their names to the years, a system of chronology which was peculiar to Assyria and unknown in Babylonia, while the month was divided into “weeks” of five days each. The language of the tablets also, which is full of dialectic mispronunciations and strange words, points to Assyria rather than to the southern kingdom, and we may therefore conclude that the colonists were Assyrians, even though the colony may have been founded when Assyria was still a Babylonian province. There are indications in the Assyrian inscriptions themselves that the road to Cappadocia was known to the Assyrian princes at an early epoch. The earliest Assyrian kings whose annals have come down to us are Hadad-nirari I. and his son Shalmaneser I. (B.C. 1300). Hadad-nirari tells us that his greatgrandfather, Assur-yuballidh, whose letters form part of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, had subdued “the wide-spread” province of Subari, which lay near the sources of the Euphrates, and in which Kara Eyuk was perhaps included, while he himself restored the cities of the same province which had fallen into ruin. Later, Shalmaneser I. conducted campaign after campaign towards the same region. In his second year he overthrew the king of Malatia, and the combined forces of the other “Hittite” states, who had come to his assistance: “all were conquered,” from the borders of Cappadocia to the Hittite stronghold of Carchemish. A military colony was settled at the head waters of the Tigris which secured the high-road to Asia Minor.