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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.
The failure of Wang Kue gave boldness to the Tartars, who carried on in their old way the war the Chinese had begun, making such bold and destructive raids that the emperor sent out a general with orders to fight the enemy wherever he could find them. This warrior, Wei Tsing by name, succeeded in catching the raiders in a trap.
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.
Such are Kas in later Lycaonia, Tabal or Tubal in south-eastern Cappadocia, Khilakku, which left its name to historical Cilicia, and Kue in the rich eastern Cilician plain and the north-eastern hills. In north Syria again we find both in early and in late times Kummukh, which left to its district the historic name, Commagene.
Those who did not know me, Said I was seeking for something. That is, there where the ancestral temple and other grand buildings of Hao had once stood. The speaker would by it express his grief that the dynasty of Kau and its people were abandoned and uncared for by Heaven. THE TA KUe. His great carriage rolls along, And his robes of rank glitter like the young sedge. Do I not think of you?
His plan failed, the Tartars avoided an attack, and Wang Kue closed the campaign without a shred of the glory he had promised to gain. The emperor ordered his arrest, which he escaped in the effective Eastern fashion of himself putting an end to his life. But, though the general was dead, his policy survived, his idea of aggression taking deep root in the Chinese official mind.
To carry their arms into the wilds of Central Asia seemed a desperate enterprise to the peaceful Chinese, and their first effort in this direction proved a serious failure. Wang Kue, at the head of an army of three hundred thousand men, marched into the desert, adopting a stratagem to bring the Tartars within his reach.
Wang Kue, an able general, suggested the policy "of destroying them rather than to remain constantly exposed to their insults," and in the end war was declared. The hesitation of the emperor had not been without abundant reason.
A king Mita of the Mushki first appears in the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom as opposing Sargon, when the latter, early in his reign, tried to push his sphere of influence, if not his territorial empire, beyond the Taurus to include the principalities of Kue and Tabal; and the same Mita appears to have been allied with Carchemish in the revolt which ended with its siege and final capture in 717 B.C. As has been said in the last chapter, it is usual to identify this king with one of those "Phrygians" known to the Greeks as Midas preferably with the son of the first Gordius, whose wealth and power have been immortalized in mythology.
Mita's relations with Kue, Tabal and Carchemish do not, in themselves, argue that his seat of power was anywhere else than in the east of Asia Minor, where Moschi did actually survive till much later times: but, on the other hand, the occurrence of inscriptions in the distinctive script of Phrygia at Eyuk, east of the Halys, and at Tyana, south-east of the central Anatolian desert, argue that at some time the filaments of Phrygian power did stretch into Cappadocia and towards the land of the later Moschi.
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