the campaign. This later version also states that Uiate was captured and paraded in Nineveh together with prisoners captured during the wars in Elam, that Uiate was hitched up to Ashurbanipal's hariot like a horse, and that Aya-ammu was flayed alive. Supposedly spoils brought back from the Arabian campaigns were so extensive that they caused inflation in the Assyrian Empire and famine in Arabia. Despite this, and despite being impressive in the sense that no previous Assyrian ruler had campaigned against the Arabs with the same vigor, Ashurbanipal's Arabian campaigns are sometimes assessed as a strategic blunder. The two wars were time-consuming, wasted valuable resources and failed to consolidate Assyrian rule over any of the lands they took place in. Late reign and succession The end of Ashurbanipal's reign and the beginning of the reign of his son and successor, Ashur-etil-ilani, is shrouded in mystery on account of a lack of available sources. Events in Ashurbanipal's reign after 649 are relatively poorly recorded since the secure eponym canon (known Assyrian year names) ends in that year. After 639, only two inscriptions by Ashurbanipal are known, a sharp contrast to the abundant records known from previous years. This scarcity of documentation might reflect the beginning of a serious internal political crisis. Ashurbanipal's late reign appears to have seen a growing disconnect between the king and the traditional elite of the empire. Ashurbanipal heavily promoted eunuchs to prominent positions, to the detriment of the nobility and aristocracy. At some point late in his reign, the chief singer, Bullutu, was made eponym, an unprecedented and perhaps self-indulgent move. Some Assyriologists, such as Eckart Frahm, have drawn parallels between the sparse evidence from Ashurbanipal's late reign and Sardanapalus, in Greco-Roman literary tradition the decadent last king of Assyria, based on Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal himself recognized that he had failed to maintain the durability of the Assyrian Empire. In one of his final known inscriptions, Ashurbanipal, saddened and faced with his own mortality due to illness, lamented the state of his empire. This inscriptions reads: In addition to internal strife, it is clear that the hold of the Assyrian Empire on its peripheral regions had severely weakened by the end of Ashurbanipal's reign. Some peripheral lands had regained independence; there was for instance no longer an Assyrian presence in the southern Levant, where the Egyptians had instead become the hegemonic power. Ashurbanipal's late reign may have