The whole country from the Orontes to the mountains of Seir and the river of Egypt was again reduced to obedience, and set itself by peaceful labours to repair the misfortunes which had befallen it during the previous quarter of a century. Sargon returned to his capital, but fate did not yet allow him to renew his projects against Babylon. Barely did an insurrection break out in any part of the country on the accession of a new king at Nineveh without awaking echoes in the distant provinces of the empire. The report of a revolt in Chaldæa roused a slumbering dissatisfaction among the Syrians, and finally led them into open rebellion: the episodes of the Syrian campaign, narrated in Armenia or on the slopes of the Taurus with the thousand embellishments suggested by the rancour of the narrators, excited the minds of the inhabitants and soon rendered an outbreak inevitable. The danger would have been serious if the suppressed hatred of all had found vent at the same moment, and if insurrections in five or six different parts of his empire had to be faced by the sovereign simultaneously; but as a rule these local wars broke out without any concentrated plan, and in localities too remote from each other to permit of any possible co-operation between the assailants; each chief, before attempting to assert his independence, seemed to wait until the Assyrians had had ample time to crush the rebel who first took the field, having done which they could turn the whole of their forces against the latest foe. Thus Iaubîdi did not risk a campaign till the fall of Elam and Karduniash had been already decided on the field of Durilu; in the same way, the nations of the North and East refrained from entering the lists till they had allowed Sargon time to destroy the league of Hamath and repel the attack of Bharaoh.
They were secretly incited to rebellion by a power which played nearly the same part with regard to them that Egypt had played in Southern Syria. Urartu had received a serious rebuff in 735 B.C., and the burning of Dhuspas had put an end to its ascendency, but the victory had been effected at the cost of so much bloodshed that Tiglath-pileser was not inclined to risk losing the advantage already gained by pushing it too far: he withdrew, therefore, without concluding a treaty, and did not return, being convinced that no further hostilities would be attempted till the vanquished enemy had recovered from his defeat. He was justified in his anticipations, for Sharduris died about 730, without having again taken up arms, and his son Busas I. had left Shalmaneser V. unmolested:* but the accession of Sargon and the revolts which harassed him had awakened in Busas the warlike instincts of his race, and the moment appeared advantageous for abandoning his policy of inactivity.
* The name of this king is usually written Ursa in the
Assyrian inscriptions, but the Annals of Sargon give in
each case the form Rusa, in accordance with which Sayce had
already identified the Assyrian form Ursa or Rusa with the
form Rusas found on some Urartian monuments. Belck and
Lehmann have discovered several monuments of this Rusas I.,
son of Sharduris.
The remembrance of the successful exploits of Menuas and Argistis still lived in the minds of his people, and more than one of his generals had entered upon their military careers at a time when, from Arpad and Carchemish to the country of the Medes, quite a third of the territory now annexed to Assyria had been subject to the king of Urartu; Eusas, therefore, doubtless placed before himself the possibility of reconquering the lost provinces, and even winning, by a stroke of fortune, more than had been by a stroke of fortune wrested from his father. He began by intriguing with such princes as were weary of the Assyrian rule, among the Mannai, in Zikartu,* among the Tabal, and even among the Khâti.
* Zikruti, Zikirtu, Zikartu, may probably be identified with
the Sagartians of Herodotus.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from the facsimile by Flandin.
Iranzu, who was at that time reigning over the Mannai, refused to listen to the suggestions of his neighbour, but two of his towns, Shuandakhul and Durdukka, deserted him in 719 B.C., and ranged themselves under Mitâtti, chief of the Zikartu, while about the same time the strongholds of Sukkia, Bala, and Abitikna, which were on the borders of Urartu, broke the ties which had long bound them to Assyria, and concluded a treaty of alliance with Rusas. Sargon was not deceived as to the meaning of these events, and at once realised that this movement was not one of those local agitations which broke out at intervals in one or other of his provinces. His officers and spies must have kept him informed of the machinations of Eusas and of the revolutions which the migrations of the last thirty years had provoked among the peoples of the Iranian table-land. A new race had arisen in their rear, that of the Cimmerians and Scythians, which, issuing in irresistible waves from the gorges of the Caucasus, threatened to overwhelm the whole ancient world of the East. The stream, after a moment’s vacillation, took a westerly direction, and flooded Asia Minor from one end to the other. Some tribes, however, which had detached themselves from the main movement sought an outlet towards the south-east, on to the rich plains of the Araxes and the country around Lake Urumiah. The native races, pressed in the rear by these barbarians, and hemmed in on either side and in front by Urartu and Assyria, were forced into closer proximity, and, conscious of their individual weakness, had begun to form themselves into three distinct groups, varying considerably in compactness,—the Medes in the south, Misianda in the north, with Zikartu between them. Zikartu was at that time the best organised of these nascent states, and its king, Mitâtti, was not deficient either in military talent or political sagacity. The people over whom he ruled were, moreover, impregnated with the civilisation of Mesopotamia, and by constantly meeting the Assyrians in battle they had adopted the general principles of their equipment, organisation, and military tactics. The vigour of his soldiers and the warlike ardour which inspired them rendered his armies formidable even to leaders as experienced, and warriors as hardened, as the officers and soldiers of Nineveh. Mitâtti had strongly garrisoned the two rebel cities, and trusted that if the Assyrians were unable to recapture them without delay, other towns would not be long in following their example; Iranzu would, no doubt, be expelled, his place would be taken by a hostile chief, and the Mannai, joining hands with Urartu on the right and Zikartu on the left, would, with these two states, form a compact coalition, whose combined forces would menace the northern frontier of the empire from the Zagros to the Taurus.
Sargon, putting all the available Assyrian forces into the field, hurled them against the rebels, and this display of power had the desired effect upon the neighbouring kingdoms: Busas and Mitâtti did not dare to interfere, the two cities were taken by assault, burnt and razed to the ground, and the inhabitants of the surrounding districts of Sukkia, Bala, and Abitikna were driven into exile among the Khâti. The next year, however, the war thus checked on the Iranian table-land broke out in the north-west, in the mountains of Cilicia. A Tabal chief, Kiakku of Shinukhta, refused to pay his tribute (718). Sargon seized him and destroyed his city; his family and adherents, 7500 persons in all, were carried away captives to Assyria, and his principality was given to a rival chief, Mattî of Atuna, on a promise from the latter of an increased amount of tribute.*