especially from north-east round to north-west, our present
understanding of the terms of ancient geography, used by Semitic
scribes, is very imperfect, and, when an Assyrian king has told us
carefully what lands, towns, mountains and rivers his army visited, it
does not follow that we can identify them with any exactness. Nor should
the royal records be taken quite at their face value. Some discount has
to be allowed (but how much it is next to impossible to say) on reports,
which often ascribe all the actions of a campaign not shared in by the
King in person (as in certain instances can be proved) to his sole
prowess, and grandiloquently enumerate twoscore princedoms and kingdoms
which were traversed and subdued in the course of one summer campaign in
very difficult country. The illusion of immense achievement, which it
was intended thus to create, has often imposed itself on modern critics,
and Tiglath Pileser and Sargon are credited with having marched to the
neighbourhood of the Caspian, conquering or holding to ransom great
provinces, when their forces were probably doing no more than climbing
from valley to valley about the headwaters of the Tigris affluents, and
raiding chiefs of no greater territorial affluence than the Kurdish beys
of Hakkiari.

East of Assyria proper, the territorial empire of Sargon does not seem
to have extended quite up to the Zagros watershed; but his sphere of
influence included not only the heads of the Zab valleys, but also a
region on the other side of the mountains, reaching as far as Hamadan
and south-west Azerbaijan, although certainly not the eastern or
northern districts of the latter province, or Kaswan, or any part of the
Caspian littoral. On the north, the frontier of Assyrian territorial
empire could be passed in a very few days' march from Nineveh. The
shores of neither the Urmia nor the Van Lake were ever regularly
occupied by Assyria, and, though Sargon certainly brought into his