When Aššurnaṣirpal II commissioned his artists to carve scenes of battle on stone, an artistic tradition was created which was to last for two hundred years of Assyrian history—a tradition which perfectly reflected the ideology and served the propaganda purposes of empire. Narrative was ideally suited to express such concepts as the insurmountable power of Assyria, the inevitability of its victory over its enemies, and the empire's wide extent embracing varied peoples and lands under one mighty and invincible king. These concepts underlie all the manifestations of the narrative art of the Assyrian palaces. The basic elements and subjects remain the same—foreign peoples dressed in their native clothes, enemy cities under siege, victorious Assyrian soldiers killing enemies, and, of course, the king, sometimes seated on his throne, sometimes standing in his chariot or hunting lions. However, the means by which these elements were deployed to express these concepts changed perceptibly over time—from the vigorous introduction of the genre under Aššurnasirpal through the imaginative inventiveness of Sennacherib to the finesse of Aššurbanipal. With this in mind, it would be instructive to examine a few examples of the narrative technique used under one king, Tiglath-Pileser III who reigned from 745 to 727 B.C., both to determine in what way stylistic devices were employed to express this ideology and as a means of further defining what that ideology was.