Though at least one large province had still to be added to the Assyrian
Empire, Sargon's reign may be considered the period of its greatest
strength. He handed on to Sennacherib no conquests which could not have
been made good, and the widest extent of territory which the central
power was adequate to hold. We may pause, then, just before Sargon's
death in 705, to see what the area of that territory actually was.
Its boundaries cannot be stated, of course, with any approach to the
precision of a modern political geographer. Occupied territories faded
imperceptibly into spheres of influence and these again into lands
habitually, or even only occasionally, raided. In some quarters,
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
sphere of influence the kingdom of Urartu, which surrounded the latter
lake and controlled the tribes as far as the western shore of the
former, it is not proved that his armies ever went round the east and
north of the Urmia Lake, and it is fairly clear that they left the
northwestern region of mountains between Bitlis and the middle Euphrates
to its own tribesmen.
Westwards and southwards, however, Sargon's arm swept a wider circuit.
He held as his own all Mesopotamia up to Diarbekr, and beyond Syria not
only eastern and central Cilicia, but also some districts north of
Taurus, namely, the low plain of Milid or Malatia, and the southern part
of Tabal; but probably his hand reached no farther over the plateau than
to a line prolonged from the head of the Tokhma Su to the neighbourhood
of Tyana, and returning thence to the Cilician Gates. Beyond that line
began a sphere of influence which we cannot hope to define, but may
guess to have extended over Cappadocia, Lycaonia and the southern part
of Phrygia. Southward, all Syria was Sargon's, most of it by direct
occupation, and the rest in virtue of acknowledged overlordship and
payment of tribute. Even the seven princes of Cyprus made such
submission. One or two strong Syrian towns, Tyre and Jerusalem, for
example, withheld payment if no Assyrian army was at hand; but their
show of independence was maintained only on sufferance. The Philistine
cities, after Sargon's victory over their forces and Egyptian allies at
Raphia, in 720, no longer defended their walls, and the Great King's
sphere of influence stretched eastward right across the Hamad and
southward over north Arabia. Finally, Babylonia was all his own even to
the Persian Gulf, the rich merchants supporting him firmly in the
interests of their caravan trade, however the priests and the peasantry
might murmur. But Elam, whose king and people had carried serious
trouble into Assyria itself early in the reign, is hardly to be reckoned
to Sargon even as a sphere of influence. The marshes of its south-west,
the tropical plains of the centre and the mountains on the east, made it
a difficult land for the northern Semites to conquer and hold. Sargon
had been wise enough to let it be. Neither so prudent nor so fortunate
would be his son and successors.