the attack.  We cannot follow with any precision the exact operations of the battle, but it appears that Sargon fell upon the Babylonian troops, defeated them, and drove them into their own dyke, in which many of therm were drowned, at the same time separating them from their allies, who, on seeing the disaster, took to flight, and succeeded in making their escape.  Merodach-Baladan, abandoning his camp, threw himself with the poor remains of his army into Beth-Yakin, which Saigon then besieged and took.  The Babylonian monarch fell into the hands of his rival, who plundered his palace and burnt his city, but generously spared his life.  He was not, however, allowed to retain his kingdom, the government of which was assumed by Sargon himself, who is the Arceanus of Ptolemy’s Canon.

The submission of Babylonia was followed by the reduction of the Aramaeans, and the conquest of at least a portion of Susiana.  To the Susianin territory Sargon transported the Comnumkha from the Upper Tigris, placing the mixed population under a governor, whom he made dependent on the viceroy of Babylon.

The Assyrian dominion was thus firmly established on the shores of the Persian Gulf.  The power of Babylon was broken.  Henceforth the Assyrian rule is maintained over the whole of Chaldaea and Babylonia, with few and brief interruptions, to the close of the Empire.  The reluctant victim struggles in his captor’s grasp, and now and then for a short space shakes it off; but only to be seized again with a fiercer gripe, until at length his struggles cease, and he resigns himself to a fate which he has come to regard as inevitable.  During the last fifty years of the Empire, from B.C. 650 to B.C. 625, the province of Babylon was almost as tranquil as any other.

The pride of Sargon received at this time a gratification which he is not able to conceal, in the homage which was paid to him by sovereigns who had only heard of his fame, and who were safe from the attacks of his armies.  While he held his court at Babylon, in the year B.C. 708 or 707, he gave audience to two embassies from two opposite quarters, both sent by islanders dwelling (as he expresses it) “in the middle of the seas” that washed the outer skirts of his dominions.  Upir, king of Asmun, who ruled over an island in the Persian Gulf,—­Khareg, perhaps, or Bahrein,—­sent messengers, who bore to the Great King the tribute of the far East.  Seven Cyprian monarchs, chiefs of a country which lay “at the distance of seven days from the coast, in the sea of the setting sun,” offered him by their envoys the treasures of the West.  The very act of bringing presents implied submission; and the Cypriots not only thus admitted his suzerainty, but consented to receive at his hands and to bear back to their country a more evident token of subjection.  This was an effigy of the Great King carved in the usual form, and accompanied with an inscription recording his name and titles, which was set up at Idalium, nearly in the centre of the island, and made known to the Cypriots the form and appearance of the sovereign whom it was not likely that they would ever see.