swell his triumph. A few years later, on the accession of Sargon, Hamath
made a final effort to recover its freedom. But the effort was
ruthlessly crushed, and henceforward the last of the Aramæan kingdoms
was made an Assyrian province. When an Aramæan tribe again played a part
in history it was in the far south, among the rocky cliffs of Petra and
the desert fortress of the Nabathean merchants.

In the Book of Genesis, Mesopotamia, the country between the Euphrates
and Tigris, is called not only Aram-Naharaim, "Aram of the Two Rivers,"
but also Padan-Aram, "the acre of Aram." Padan, as we learn from the
Assyrian inscriptions, originally signified as much land as a yoke of
oxen could plough; then it came to denote the "cultivated land" or
"acre" itself. The word still survives in modern Arabic. In the Egypt of
to-day land is measured by _feddans_, the _feddan_ (or _paddmi_) being
the equivalent of our acre. _Paddan_ was used in the same sense in the
Babylonia of the age of Abraham. Numerous contracts have been found for
the lease or sale of estates in which the "acreage" or number of
_paddani_ is carefully stated. The application of the name to the plain
of Mesopotamia was doubtless clue to the Babylonians. An early
Babylonian king claims rule over the "land of Padan," and elsewhere we
are told that it lay in front of the country of the Arman or Aramæans.

It was in western Padan that the kingdom of Mitanni was established. Its
founders, as we have seen, came from the north. From the river Halys in
Asia Minor to Lake Urumiyeh, east of Armenia, there was a multitude of
tribes, most of whom seem to have belonged to the same race and to have
spoken dialects of the same language. The Hittites of Cappadocia and the
ranges of the Taurus have already been described. East of them came the
Meshech and Tubal of the Bible as well as the kingdom of Comagênê, of
which we often hear in the Assyrian texts. But of all these northern