which waters Savur, chief town of the caza of Avinch. Ardupa
must have been situated near, or on the actual site of, the
present Mardin, whose Assyrian name is unknown to us; it was
at all events a military station on the road to Nineveh,
along which the king returned victorious with the spoil.

At Ardupa a brief halt was made to receive the ambassadors of one of the
Hittite sovereigns and others from the kings of Khanigalbat, after which
he returned to Nineveh, where he spent the winter. As a matter of fact,
these were but petty wars, and their immediate results appear at the
first glance quite inadequate to account for the contemporary enthusiasm
they excited. The sincerity of it can be better understood when we
consider the miserable state of the country twenty years previously.
Assyria then comprised two territories, one in the plains of the middle,
the other in the districts of the upper, Tigris, both of considerable
extent, but almost without regular intercommunication. Caravans or
isolated messengers might pass with tolerable safety from Assur and
Nineveh to Singar, or even to Nisibis; but beyond these places they
had to brave the narrow defiles and steep paths in the forests of the
Masios, through which it was rash to venture without keeping eye and
ear ever on the alert. The mountaineers and their chiefs recognized the
nominal suzerainty of Assyria, but refused to act upon this recognition
unless constrained by a strong hand; if this control were relaxed they
levied contributions on, or massacred, all who came within their reach,
and the king himself never travelled from his own city of Nineveh to his
own town of Amidi unless accompanied by an army. In less than the short
space of three years, Assur-nazir-pal had remedied this evil. By
the slaughter of some two hundred men in one place, three hundred in
another, two or three thousand in a third, by dint of impaling
and flaying refractory sheikhs, burning villages and dismantling
strongholds, he forced the marauders of Nairi and Kirkhi to respect his
frontiers and desist from pillaging his country. The two divisions
of his kingdom, strengthened by the military colonies in Nirbu, were
united, and became welded together into a compact whole from the banks
of the Lower Zab to the sources of the Khabur and the Supnat.

During the following season the course of events diverted the king's
efforts into quite an opposite direction (B.C. 882). Under