It will be remembered how much attention a great raiding Emperor of the
Middle Assyrian period, Shalmaneser II, had devoted to this little
country. The conquering kings of later dynasties had devoted hardly
less. From Sargon to Ashurbanipal they or their armies had been there
often, and their governors continuously. Sennacherib is said to have
rebuilt Tarsus "in the likeness of Babylon," and Ashurbanipal, who had
to concern himself with the affairs of Asia Minor more than any of his
predecessors, was so intimately connected with Tarsus that a popular
tradition of later days placed there the scene of his death and the
erection of his great tomb. And, in fact, he may have died there for all
that we know to the contrary; for no Assyrian record tells us that he
did not. Unlike the rest of Asia Minor, Cilicia was saved by the
Assyrians from the ravages of the Cimmerians. Their leader, Dugdamme,
whom the Greeks called Lygdamis, is said to have met his death on the
frontier hills of Taurus, which, no doubt, he failed to pass. Thus, when
Ashurbanipal's death and the shrinking of Ninevite power permitted
distant vassals to resume independence, the unimpaired wealth of Cilicia
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
north, compelled the generals of Sennacherib to wage in Cilicia in the
year 698, Ionians took a prominent part by land, and probably also by
sea. Sennacherib is said (by a late Greek historian) to have erected an
"Athenian" temple in Tarsus after the victory, which was hardly won; and
if this means, as it may well do, an "Ionic" temple, it states a by no
means incredible fact, seeing that there had been much local contact
between the Cilicians and the men of the west. Striking similarities of
form and artistic execution between the early glyptic and toreutic work
of Ionia and Cilicia respectively have been mentioned in the last
chapter; and it need only be added here, in conclusion, that if Cilicia
had relations with Ionia as early as the opening of the seventh
century--relations sufficient to lead to alliance in war and to
modification of native arts--it is natural enough that she should be
found allied a few years later with Lydia rather than with Media.