favoured him; the bed
alone he retained, in order that he might dedicate it as a trophy to the
goddess Ishtar of Nineveh.

He had covered himself with glory, and might well be proud of his
achievement, yet the victory was in no way a decisive one. The damage
inflicted on the allies, considerable though it was, had cost him dear:
the forces left to him were not sufficient to enable him to finish the
campaign, and extort oaths of allegiance from the Syrian princes before
they had recovered from the first shock of defeat. He returned to
Nineveh, and spent the whole winter in reorganising his troops; while
his enemies, on the other hand, made preparations to repel the attack
energetically. Sharduris could not yet venture outside his mountain
strongholds, but the hope of being reinforced by him, as soon as he
had got together another army, encouraged the Syrian kings to remain
faithful to him in spite of his reverses.*

* The part played by Sharduris in the events of the years
which followed, passing mention of which was made by
Winckler (_Gesch. Bab. und Ass_,, pp. 224, 225), have been
fully dealt with by Belck and Lehmann (Chaldische
_Forschungen, in Veriiand. der Berliner anthropol.
Gesellschaft_, 1895, pp. 325-336).

Matilu of Agusi, unable to carry the day against the Assyrians in
the open field, distributed his men among his towns, and resisted all
attacks with extraordinary persistence, confident that Sharduris would
at length come to help him, and with this hope he held out for three
years in his town of Arpad. This protracted resistance need no longer
astonish us, now that we know, from observations made on the spot, the
marvellous skill displayed in the fortification of these Asiatic towns.
The ruins of Arpad have yet to be explored, but those of Samalla have
been excavated, and show us the methods adopted for the defence of a
royal residence about the middle of the century with which we are now
concerned. The practice of building citadels on a square or rectangular
plan, which prevailed so largely under the Egyptian rule, had gradually
gone out of fashion as the knowledge of engineering advanced, and the
use of mines and military engines had been more fully developed among
the nations of Western Asia. It was found that the heavily fortified
angles of the enclosing wall merely presented so many weak points, easy
to attack but difficult to defend, no matter how carefully they might