ent of its first founder. The steady erage length of the reigns speaks of e permanence and stability of the work hich had been done by the great and ise man who had united all the wrangng communities of Babylonia into a ngle strong State.

But no human work can endure forver, and the first empire of Babylonia as no exception to the rule. It sufered the fate common to most early emires. The more highly cultured and adanced and more peaceful people were verwhelmed by the descent of a ruder nd more warlike race, who had envied he wealth and prosperity of their neigh

ors.

The conquering race, in this instance, vas one of those wild mountain peoples who occupied the hill country between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Findng a footing on the Babylonian plain ear the mouth of the rivers, they gradtally advanced, until their chief ascended he throne of Babylon and set up a new lynasty. They were called the Kassites, and for over 570 years they ruled over Babylonia, but a Babylonia that was no longer as it had once been, the one great power in the world of the ancient Orient.

A new power, Assyria, had begun to rise above the horizon, and from now onward, with occasional intervals of weakness and decline, this power strides like a Colossus over the whole of the ancient world, terrifying the nations by its remorseless cruelty, and crushing down all opposition and all national aspirations by the ruthless force of one of the most tremendous implements of warfare ever forged by the hand of man.

ASSYRIAN RUTHLESSNESS

With the possible exception of the Huns, or the wild hordes of Tamerlane, there has probably never existed in the history of the world a power so purely and solely destructive, so utterly devoid of the slightest desire to make any real contribution to the welfare of the human race, as Assyria. But the Huns and the hordes of Tamerlane were untaught savages.

In the case of Assyria you have a highly organized and civilized people,

skilled to an astounding degree in the arts, with all the power to do great things for humanity, but absolutely deficient in the will.

If you can imagine a man with no small amount of learning, with all the externals of civilization, with a fine taste in certain aspects of art, and a tremendous aptitude for organization and discipline, and then imagine such a man imbued with the ruthless spirit of a Red Indian brave and an absolute delight in witnessing the most ghastly forms of human suffering, you will have a fairly accurate conception of the ordinary Assyrian, king or moner; the outside, a splendid specimen of highly developed humanity-the inside a mere ravening tiger.

com

There have been other great conquering races which could be cruel enough on occasion, but at least they contributed something to the sum of human knowledge or achievement. The Roman Em pire, for instance, ruthless as were its methods often, was actually a great boon to the world.

ASSYRIA AN IMITATOR

Assyria made no such contribution to human life. Totally lacking in originality, she took her art, her language, her literature, and her science from the elder Babylonian race upon which she waged such constant war.

She created nothing: she existed simply to destroy; and when she ceased to destroy, she was destroyed. In a word, she was the scourge of God, or, as Isaiah put it, with his vivid insight, her function in the world was just to be God's ax and saw to do the rough hewing that Providence needed for the shaping of the race.

Early in their history the Babylonians seem to have sent a colony northwestward up the rivers into the land of Mesopotamia. There the colonists founded a city which they called Assur, after their god Ashur (see map, page 216). In the time of Hammurabi, Assur was still merely a colony of Babylonia and subject to the empire.

In the less luxurious uplands of Mesopotamia the race had no temptation to degeneracy. Warfare with their wild. neighbors from the hills, and warfare

even more constant with the wild beasts, the lions and elephants, which abounded in the district, kept them hardy and bold, and welded them together into a people capable of and ready for great achievements should the opportunity arise.

This opportunity came with the Kassite conquest of Babylonia. The familiar rule of their mother-city was broken, and they owed no allegiance, but rather the reverse, to the conquerors. The patesis of Assur threw off the yoke of Babylon, called themselves kings, and established a kingdom (Assyria) which speedily became a formidable rival to the more ancient southern State.

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF STRIFE

Five centuries or so ensued, filled with more or less constant strife and bickering between the two States. In the meantime Egypt, under the great soldier Pharaohs of the XVIIIth dynasty, took advantage of the divisions of the only two powers that could have resisted her conquest of all Palestine and Syria, and pushed her empire as far as to the banks of the Euphrates.

In the letters of the time which have been preserved (the Tell-el-Amarna tablets) it is interesting and amusing to see the eagerness with which the kings of Assyria, Babylonia, and Mitanni plead for recognition by the Egyptian Pharaoh, each striving to impress upon the great king the value of his own friendship and the worthlessness of his neighbor's.

Pharaoh of Egypt is the dominating figure of the whole world at this stage, and the kings of the East, whatever their private pride, are, in their public correspondence, his very humble and obedient. servants. The balance of power, how ever, was to be readjusted before long.

There is no need to wade through the dreary story of Assyrian conquest, save where we find it touching upon the Scripture records. King after king repeats, with monotonous reiteration, the story of endless campaigns, all marked by the same ruthless slaughter, the same ghastly cruelty, and the same lack of permanent results. Apparently it was quite impossible for an Assyrian king to be a peaceful sovereign. His State lived by and

for the army alone, and if he did not give the army successful employment he was quickly murdered to make way for some one who would lead the troops to conquest and plunder.

A KING REVIEWS HIS REIGN

Take, as a single specimen of an Assyrian conqueror, Ashur-natsir-pal III, whose magnificent palace at Kalah, with its alabaster slabs exquisitely carved in relief, was excavated by Layard in the forties of last century. The slabs are now one of the glories of the British Museum, where also the statue of the great conqueror stands.

We have the record of eighteen years of his reign: there is scarcely a year in which he was not at war; and this is the kind of war he made:

"To the city of Tela I approached. The city was very strong; three fortresswalls surrounded it. The inhabitants trusted to their strong walls and their numerous army; they did not come down or embrace my feet. With battle and slaughter I attacked the city and captured it. Three thousand of their fighting men I slew with the sword; their spoil, their goods, their oxen, and their sheep I carried away; many captives I burned with fire.

"I captured many of their soldiers. alive; I cut off the hands and feet of some; of others I cut off the noses, the ears, and the fingers; I put out the eyes of many soldiers. I built up a pyramid of the living and a pyramid of heads. On high I hung up their heads on trees in the neighborhood of their city. Their young men and their maidens I burned with fire. The city I overthrew, dug it up, and burned it with fire; I annihilated it."

A STAGGERING CRUELTY

The imagination is staggered at the very thought of that pyramid of the living-human beings piled one upon another, suffocating, strangling, perishing slowly and miserably before that other pyramid of their more fortunate friends to whom death had come swiftly, and at the thought of the monster who not only did this, but gloried in it, and caused the