Asshurnazipal, 884 B.C., a king who showed the city great favour, calling it “his city,” took here a captive king who had rebelled against him, “flayed him alive, and spread out his skin upon the city wall.” Sennacherib, a greater king, perhaps the most famous of all kings of Assyria, performed a pilgrimage there in 692 B.C., to pray for success from Ishtar in his coming battle against the Babylonians. He was answered. His son Esarhaddon, but twenty-four years later, being in the northern mountains engaged upon an expedition to avenge the foul murder of his father, is described as having communicated with Ishtar the goddess, and received from her shrine at Arbela messages of encouragement and assurances of victory.[27] A few years later, in 656 B.C., Asshurnazipal (Sardanapalus), preparing for war against Elam (modern Arabistan in south-western Persia), made a great pilgrimage there, to pray for a sign from the goddess, which was granted. The temple was then one of the most glorious of Assyria. The usurping king, Teumman, was duly defeated, and many captives were brought to Arbela, and, in the brutal manner of the times, flayed alive. At the end of that century--in 608 B.C.--the battle of Nineveh finally overthrew the great empire, and the Medes took possession of it, Arbela falling into their hands. The city’s sacredness must have ensured a certain immunity from sack or destruction, for it was important eighty and odd years later, when Darius crucified there a petty king, him of Sagartia. [Sidenote: ADIABENE] Till Alexander with his army invaded Asia, it remained in tranquillity, but in 331 B.C. a great battle there made it a Greek town. However, it was but eighty years after that Arsaces I., the liberator and founder of the great Parthian empire, conquered Adiabene, and subsequently the sanctity of Arbela won for it the distinction of becoming the burial-place of the Arsacid kings of Parthia. The Greek and later Syrian kings of the Alexandrian Succession had, however, sufficient hold over the province to make it necessary for the Parthians to fight them for it; and not till about 136 B.C., did Mithridates, a Parthian monarch, overcome the last of them and possess the country then called Adiabene, ancient Assyria proper. The province became, under Parthian rule, governed by a petty king or “vitaxa.” Armenia in 83 B.C., under Tigran I., the ruling prince, who for some time enjoyed considerable power, possessed itself of Arbela and Adiabene, but was driven out a decade after he entered it, by the Romans and Parthians acting in concert against this insolent upstart. Under the Roman and Roman-Parthian sway the province of Adiabene--always coveted for its richness--attained prominence, for the Romans desired absolutely to possess it and its capital.