“To the great king, my lord, my god, my sun; Aziru, thy servant. Seven times and again seven times, &c. Oh, lord, I am indeed thy servant; and only when prostrate on the ground before the king, my lord, can I speak what I have to say. But hearken not, O lord, to the foes who slander me before thee. I remain thy servant for ever.” This trusty vassal added to his other known faults the peculiarity of conspiring readily with the Hittite foes of the Court. His insolence helped him successfully out of these awkward difficulties also whenever the matter came under discussion. When preparing fresh raids he did not hesitate to invent news of Hittite invasions which he was bound to resist, and all territory which he then took from his co-vassals would, according to his own account, otherwise certainly have fallen into the hands of the enemy. But as the result was always the same—_i.e._, to the advantage of Aziru alone—the opinion began to prevail in Egyptian councils that this restless vassal should be summoned to Court and tried. For many years Aziru succeeded in evading these fatal and dangerous, or at best very costly orders. But finally he was forced to obey, and with heavy heart and well-filled treasure chests set off for Egypt. Apparently he relied on his principal ally Dudu, whom in his letters he always addresses as “father”; but this pleasant alliance did not avail to protect the disturber of the peace from provisional arrest. The last letter in the Aziru series, which had obviously been confiscated and subsequently found its way back into the archives, is a letter of condolence from the adherents or sons of Aziru to their imprisoned chief. Nevertheless, the political activity of the Amorite chief seemed to many Syrian, and especially to Phœnician princes as on the whole for the good of the land, and, therefore, to be supported. His appearance put the longed-for end to a far less endurable condition of things. Two communications from Akizzi, the headman of the city of Katna, near Damascus, exhibit the difference clearly. When Akizzi sent his first communication to Nimmuria every petty chief went raiding on his own account: Teuwatta of Lapana, Dasha, Arzawia and all the rest of them. These vanished with the entrance of Aziru upon the scene, though the change was by no means welcome to Akizzi. In the Lebanon things were no better. Here Namyauza was struggling with the headmen of Puzruna and Khalunni. “They began hostilities together with Biridashwi against me and said: ‘Come, let us kill Namyauza.’ But I escaped.” This promiscuous warfare raged most fiercely in the south. Here a certain Labaya tried to play the part taken by Aziru in the north. But fortune was less favourable to Labaya. Probably he failed to induce his undisciplined officers to act in unison, and the unhappy man’s sole achievement seems to have been the welding of his foes into a compact body against himself. He lost his