According to this king Bin-nirar not only maintained the predominance over Babylon which his grandfather had gained, but extended it: his authority reached from Media, perhaps from the shores of the Caspian Sea, to the shore of the Mediterranean as far as Damascus and Israel and Edom, as far as Sidon and Tyre and the cities of the Philistines. The Cilicians and Tibarenes who paid tribute to Shalmanesar are not mentioned by Bin-nirar in his description of his empire. So far as we can see, the centre of the kingdom was meanwhile extended and more firmly organised. Among the magistrates with whose names the Assyrians denote the years, at the time of Shalmanesar and his immediate successors the names of the commander-in-chief and three court officers are regularly followed by the names of the overseers of the districts of Rezeph (Resapha on the Euphrates), of Nisib (Nisibis on the Mygdonius, the eastern affluent of the Chaboras), of Arapha, _i.e._ the mountain-land of Arrapachitis (Albak); hence we may conclude that these districts were more closely connected or incorporated with the native land, and governed immediately by viceroys of the king. How uncertain the power and supremacy of Assyria was at a greater distance is on the other hand equally clear from the fact that Bin-nirar had to make no fewer than eight campaigns in the land of the streams, _i.e._ between the Tigris and the Euphrates; that he marched four times against the land of Khubuskia in the neighbourhood of Armenia, and twice against the district of Lake Van, against which his father and grandfather had so often contended. Bin-nirar III. also built himself a separate palace at Chalah, on the western edge of the terrace of the royal dwellings, to the south of the palace of his great grandfather Assurnasirpal. In the ruins of the temple which he dedicated to Nebo have been found six standing images of this deity, two of which bear upon the pedestal those inscriptions which informed us that the wife of Bin-nirar III. was named Sammuramat (p. 45). On a written tablet dated from the year of Musallim-Adar (_i.e._ from the year 793 B.C.), the eighteenth year of Bin-nirar, on which is still legible the fragment of a royal decree, we also find the double impress of his seal--a royal figure which holds a lion. A second document from the time of the reign of this prince, from the twenty-sixth year of his reign (782 B.C.), registers the sale of a female slave at the price of ten and a half minæ, and gives the name of the ten witnesses to the transaction.[597] The preservation of this document is the more important inasmuch as a notice in Phenician letters is written beside it. Hence we may conclude that even in the days of Bin-nirar III. the alphabetic writing was known as far as this point in the East, though the cuneiform alphabet was retained beside it, not only at that time, but down to 100 B.C., and indeed, to all appearance, down to the first century of our reckoning.[598] FOOTNOTES: