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Since, apparently, he never used Cilicia as a base for further operations in force beyond Taurus, being content with a formal acknowledgment of his majesty by the Prince of Tabal, one is forced to conclude that he invaded the land for its own sake.
Yet on the other side of the snow-streaked wall which bounded the northward view lay desirable kingdoms, Khanigalbat with its capital, Milid, comprising the fertile district which later would be part of Cataonia; Tabal to west of it, extending over the rest of Cataonia and southern Cappadocia; and Kas, possessing the Tyanitis and the deep Lycaonian plain.
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.
In the year 722 another victorious general thrust himself on to the throne and, under the famous name of Sargon, set forth to extend the bounds of the empire towards Media on the east, and over Cilicia into Tabal on the west, until he came into collision with King Mita of the Mushki and held him to tribute.
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.
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.
It is not unlikely that the Mermnad dynasty inherited most of what the Phrygian kings had held before the Cimmerian attack; and perhaps it was due to an oppressive Lydian occupation of the plateau as far east as the Halys and the foot of Anti-Taurus, that the Mushki came to be represented in later times only by Moschi in western Armenia, and the men of Tabal by the equally remote and insignificant Tibareni.
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.
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.
Into Asia Minor beyond Taurus we have no reason to suppose that an Assyrian monarch of the ninth century ever marched in person, though several raiding columns visited Khanigalbat and Tabal, and tributary acknowledgment of Assyrian dominance was made intermittently by the princes of both those countries in the latter half of Shalmaneser's reign.
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