These, it is probable, extend no further than his sixteenth year, B.C.689, thus leaving blank his last eight years, from B.C.

689 to 681.

The defeat of the Greeks, the occupation of Cilicia, and the founding of Tarsus, may well have fallen into this interval.

To the same time may have belonged Sennacherib's conquest of Edom.
There is reason to suspect that these successes of Sennacherib on the western limits of his empire were more than counterbalanced by a contemporaneous loss at the extreme south-east.

The Canon of Ptolemy marks the year B.C.688 as the first of an interregnum at Babylon which continues from that date till the accession of Esar-haddon in B.C.