ly as Shahnaneser's fifth year, was in
his twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, thirtieth, and thirty-first employed
as commander-in-chief, and sent out, at the head of the main army of
Assyria, to conduct campaigns against the Armenians, against the
revolted Patena, and against the inhabitants of the modern Kurdistan. It
is uncertain whether the king himself took any part in the campaigns of
these years, the native record the first and third persons are
continually interchanged, some of the actions related being ascribed to
the monarch and others to the general; but on the whole the impression
left by the narrative is that the king, in the spirit of a well-known
legal maxim assumes as his own the acts which he has accomplished
through his representative. In his twenty-ninth year, however,
Shalmaneser seems to have led an expedition in person into Khirki (the
Niphates country), where he "overturned, beat to pieces, and consumed
with fire the towns, swept the country with his troops, and impressed on
the inhabitants the fear of his presence."

The campaigns of Shalmaneser which have the greatest interest are those
of his sixth, eighth, ninth, eleventh, fourteenth, eighteenth, and
twenty-first years. Two of these were directed against Babylonia, three
against Ben-hadad of Damascus, and two against Khazail (Hazael) of
Damascus.

In his eighth year Shalmaneser took advantage of a civil war in
Babylonia between King Merodach-sum-adin and a younger brother,
Merodach-bel-usati (?), whose power was about evenly balanced, to
interfere in the affairs of that country, and under pretence of helping
the legitimate monarch, to make himself master of several towns. In the
following year he was still more fortunate. Having engaged, defeated,
and slain the pretender to the Babylonian crown, he marched on to
Babylon itself, where he was probably welcomed as a deliverer, and from
thence proceeded into Chaldaea, or the tract upon the coast, which was
at this time independent of Babylon, and forced its kings to become his
tributaries. "The power of his army," he tells us, "struck terror as far
as the sea."

The wars of Shalmaneser in Southern Syria commenced as early as his
ninth year. He had succeeded to a dominion in Northern Syria which
extended over the Patena, and probably over most of the northern
Hittites; and this made his territories conterminous with those of the
Phoenicians, the Hamathites, the southern Hittites, and perhaps the
Sy