soon gained for her considerable importance. The kings of Tarsus now
extended their power into adjoining lands, such as Kue on the east and
Tabal on the north, and probably over even the holding of the Kummukh;
for Herodotus, writing a century and a half after our date, makes the
Euphrates a boundary of Cilicia. He evidently understood that the
northernmost part of Syria, called by later geographers (but never by
him) Commagene, was then and had long been Cilician territory. His
geographical ideas, in fact, went back to the greater Cilicia of
pre-Persian time, which had been one of the "four great powers of Asia."

The most interesting feature of Cilician history, as it is revealed very
rarely and very dimly in the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom,
consists in its relation to the earliest eastward venturing of the
Greeks. The first Assyrian king with whom these western men seem to have
collided was Sargon, who late in the eighth century, finding their ships
in what he considered his own waters, i.e. on the coasts of Cyprus and
Cilicia, boasts that he "caught them like fish." Since this action of
his, he adds, "gave rest to Kue and Tyre," we may reasonably infer that
the "Ionian pirates" did not then appear on the shores of Phoenicia and
Cilicia for the first time; but, on the contrary, that they were already
a notorious danger in the easternmost Levant. In the year 720 we find a
nameless Greek of Cyprus (or Ionia) actually ruling Ashdod. Sargon's
successor, Sennacherib, had serious trouble with the Ionians only a few
years later, as has been learned from the comparison of a royal record
of his, only recently recovered and read, with some statements made
probably in the first place by the Babylonian historian, Berossus, but
preserved to us in a chronicle of much later date, not hitherto much
heeded. Piecing these scraps of information together, the Assyrian
scholar, King, has inferred that, in the important campaign which a
revolt of Tarsus, aided by the peoples of the Taurus on the west and