my eighteenth campaign" (886), we read on the Nimrud obelisk, "I
crossed the Euphrates for the sixteenth time. Hazael, king of Damascus,
came toward me to give battle. I took from him eleven hundred and
twenty-one chariots and four hundred and seventy horsemen, with his
camp.

"In my nineteenth campaign (885) I crossed the Euphrates for the
eighteenth time. I marched toward Mount Amanus, and there cut beams of
cedar.

"In my twenty-first campaign (883) I crossed the Euphrates for the
twenty-second time. I marched to the cities of Hazael of Damascus. I
received tribute from Tyre, Sidon, and Byblus."

It evidently was at the end of this campaign that Jehu, king of Israel,
whose territory Hazael had ravaged, appealed to Shalmaneser for help
against his powerful enemy. The inscription on the obelisk says that the
Assyrian King received tribute from Jehu, whom it names "son of Omri,"
for the great renown of the founder of Samaria had made the Assyrians
consider all the kings of Israel as his descendants. One of the
bas-reliefs of the same monument represents Jehu prostrating himself
before Shalmaneser, as if acknowledging himself a vassal.

The annals of Shalmaneser say no more after this, either of the king of
Damascus or of Israel. They record, as his twenty-seventh campaign, a
great war in Armenia that brought about the submission of all the
districts of that country that still resisted the Assyrian monarch. In
the thirty-first campaign (873), the last mentioned on the obelisk, the
King sent the general-in-chief of his armies, Tartan, again into
Armenia, where he gave up to pillage fifty cities, among them Van; and
during this time he himself went into Media, subjected part of the
northern districts of that country, which were in a state of rebellion,
chastised the people in the neighborhood of Mount Elwand, where in
after-times Ecbatana was built, and finally made war on the Scythians of
the Caspian Sea.

The official chronology of the Assyrians dates the termination of the
reign of Shalmaneser IV in 870, the period of his death. But during the
last two years his power was entirely lost, and he was reduced to the
possession of two cities, Nineveh and Calah. His second son,
Asshurdaninpal, in consequence of circumstances unknown to us, raised
the standard of revolt against his father, assumed the royal title, and
was supported by twenty-seven of the most important cities in the
empire. One of the monuments has pres