In Babylonia, the name of Nebuchadrezzar meant literally, “Nebo protect the boundary!” The threshold of the empire was sacred; and the deity, with whom the Babylonian king was in covenant, was the protector of that boundary, and of those who dwelt within it. From the earliest times onward an Oriental sovereign would set up a pillar, or pillars, or stele, at the extreme limits of his newly extended dominion, as the outer threshold or doorway of his empire. From Tiglath-Pileser I. to Esarhaddon, from about 1100 B.C. to 669 B.C., the great Assyrian kings tell us, in their inscriptions, that whenever they restored an old boundary of their predecessors that had been lost to them, or extended their boundary beyond its former limits, they had set up a large stele bearing their image at this threshold of their empire.[491] Frequently these stele doorways,[492] with the king represented on the threshold, had inscriptions on them giving the story of the new conquests, with an ascription of honor to the covenant god by whose power they had been wrought. Prominent mountain peaks, sources of rivers, the temples or market-places of conquered cities, the banks of lakes, or the shores of the sea, are chosen as conspicuous places for such steles. National boundary marks of this character are still to be seen on the rocks of Nahr-el-Kelb, above Beyroot, on the shores of the Mediterranean, and at the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates.[493] Ashurnâsirapli (king of Assyria, 885–860 B.C.) tells of such a new boundary mark set up by him at the farthest point of his conquests, “whither nobody of my royal ancestors had advanced.... At that time I made a picture [a stele] of my person. The glory of my power I wrote upon it. On the mountain Eki, in the city Ashurnâsirapli [named after the king], at a spring I set it up.”[494] A similar custom would seem to have prevailed with the rulers of ancient Egypt. Sneferu, a king of the fourth dynasty, greatest among the very early names of the Old Empire (say, about 4000 B.C.), went down as a conqueror into the Peninsula of Sinai, and left there inscribed a mammoth figure of himself, on the granite hills above the famous copper and turquoise mines of Wady Magharah. He is styled in the accompanying inscription the “vanquisher of a foreign people.”[495]