Assyria

“ But, as it was, "Assyria and Egypt—the two world-powers in the dawn of history, the two chief sources of ancient civilisation, the twin giant-empires which bounded the Israelite people on the right hand and on the left—were cruel neighbours, between whom the ill-fated nation was tossed to and fro in wanton sport like a shuttlecock. ”

“ The Phœnician proverb says: ‘Better barley in the granary than gold in the desert.’ Should Egypt feel very weak she might prefer Sinai and Palestine to a war with Assyria. But this is what sets me to thinking: Not Egypt, but Assyria, is easy to conquer. Assyria has a quarrel on the northwest; Assyria has few troops, and those of poor quality. Were Egypt to attack she would destroy Assyria, seize immense treasures in Babylon and Nineveh, and establish her authority in Asia at once and securely—”
“Such a treaty cannot exist, as thou seest,” interrupted Rameses. ”

“ Who can imagine their despair? Less than fifty years earlier, Assyria had been the most powerful nation of the then known world, and the people suddenly saw themselves deprived of that proud position which they had enjoyed for so many centuries. Their national existence had, in fact, been brought to an abrupt end, but the few Assyrian names which appear in Babylonian contracts many years after their downfall show that theirs was a proud indomitable spirit, which could not give way to misfortune, and which probably hoped for better things and more prosperous times. ”

“ Assyria was the foremost kingdom of the East, and indeed of the whole world, and the hegemony which she exercised over all the countries within her reach cannot be accounted for solely by her military superiority. Not only did she excel in the art of conquest, as many before her had done—Babylonians, Elamites, Hittites, and Egyptians—but she did what none of them had been able to accomplish ”

“ The great cities of the triangle of Assyria were gradually supplanting all the capitals of the ancient world, not excepting Memphis, and becoming the centres of universal trade; unexcelled for centuries in the arts of war, Assyria was in a fair way to become mistress also in the arts of peace. A Jewish prophet thus described the empire at a later date: “The Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and of an high stature ”

“ Few things are more remarkable than the striking difference between the appearance of the same tract in Assyria at different seasons of the year. What at one time is a garden, glowing with brilliant hues and heavy with luxuriant pasture, on which the most numerous flocks can scarcely make any sensible impression, at another is an absolute waste, frightful and oppressive from its sterilityr. ”

“ But at this epoch Assyria woke once more from her lethargy, and became the scourge of God to the guilty people and their guiltier kings. For a whole century the Assyrians had either been governed by kings who had abjured the lust of blood and conquest, or had been too seriously occupied on their own eastern and northern frontiers to intermeddle with the southern kingdoms, or break down the barriers erected by the confederacy of Hamath and Damascus between Nineveh and the weaker principalities of Palestine. ”

“ In all that is known of Assyria, the most ancient empire of the earth, every extant fragment, moral or material, bears evidence of a sex to which that land of wonders owes the immortality of its grandeur. ”

“ Here, again, Tiglath-pileser had merely to show himself in order to re-establish the supremacy of Assyria: the races of the plain, for many years familiar with defeat, made no pretence of serious resistance, but bowed their necks beneath a fresh yoke almost without protest. ”

“ Therefore, Egypt by promises of help encouraged the states of Palestine to revolt against Assyria. In 711 B.C. the Philistine towns of Ashdod and Gath did actually rebel. It was only by going about in the garb of the captive, proclaiming in this objective way what would be the consequence if Judah rebelled against Assyria, that Isaiah was able to arrest the attention of the nation and save it from fatally compromising itself. When the great Assyrian king, Sargon, died in 705 B.C. the temptations to rebel were too strong to be resisted. ”

“ The language of the inscriptions of Assyria differs from those of the Babylonian inscriptions, as one dialect from another; [Pg 48] the system of writing is the same. The population of Assyria transferred their language and writing, their religious conceptions and modes of worship, from the Lower Euphrates to the Upper Tigris. If the princes of Erech, Nipur and Babylon had to repel the attacks of Elam, the Assyrian land, a region of moderate extent, lay under the spurs of the Armenian table-land, under the ranges of the Zagrus. ”

“ What, indeed, could be the object of a king of Assyria in founding such towns in a country so distant from his capital, and so divided from it by an immense extent of sandy desert and lofty mountains, and, still more, how the inhabitants could be at once in circumstances to abandon themselves to the intemperate joys which their prince has been supposed to have recommended, is not obvious ”

“ But now let her understand that out of the Assyrian empire split off three separate kingdoms, of which one was called the Assyrian, not empire, but kingdom; there lurks the secret of the error. And to this kingdom of Assyria it was that Sennacherib belonged. Or, in order to represent by a sensible image this derivation of kingdoms from the stock of the old superannuated Assyrian empire (to which belonged Nimrod, Ninus, and Semiramis—those mighty phantoms, with their incredible armies) ; let her figure to herself some vast river, like the Nile or the Ganges, with the form assumed by its mouths. ”

“ In later ages Assyria and Egypt were frequently at war with one another. The hostile armies were obliged to march through Palestine; and it became very difficult for the kings of Israel and Judah to look on with equanimity and preserve a strictly neutral attitude. Yet if they favoured one of the great powers they of course gave umbrage to the other; besides which, Assyria, in the days of its power, could hardly brook to leave any small kingdom independent. At length Samaria was conquered, and its inhabitants deported, by Shalmaneser or by Sargon; and afterwards Judea also, by Nebuchadnezzar. ”

“ The Assyrians were a nation of warriors, the Babylonians of traders, agriculturists, and scribes. Assur is accordingly 'a man of war'; it was in reliance upon him that the Assyrian armies marched into foreign lands, and compelled their inhabitants to acknowledge him. Not to believe in Assur was a crime, since Assur represented Assyria. ”

“ In this primitive mythology we find also
ASSUR. The “god of judges” was the especial patron of Assyria, and afterward made to express the power of the later Assyrian empire by becoming “father of the gods” and the head of the pantheon.
The Assyrian kings claimed that their power was derived from this deity, and in one of the inscriptions it is said that
“The universal king, [72] king of Assyria, the king whom Assur,
King of the spirits of heaven, appointed with a kingdom,
Without rival has filled his hand. ”

“ The obvious novelty is the presence of a predominant power. The mosaic of small states is still there, but one holds lordship over most of them, and that one is Assyria. Moreover, the foreign dominion which the latter has now been enjoying for three-parts of a century is the first of its kind established by an Asiatic power. Twice, as we have seen, had Assyria conquered in earlier times an empire of the nomad Semitic type, that is, a licence to raid unchecked over a wide tract of lands ”

“ The nations which erewhile disputed the supremacy with Assyria have either suffered a like eclipse—such as the Khâti, Urartu, the Cossæans, and Elam—or have fallen like Egypt and Southern Syria into the rank of second-rate powers. ”

“ The older nations—Egypt, Syria, Chaldæa, and Elam—had all had their day of supremacy; they had declined in the course of centuries, and Assyria had for a short time united them under her rule. On the downfall of Assyria, the Iranians had succeeded to her heritage, and they had built up a single empire comprising all the states which had preceded them in Western Asia; but decadence had fallen upon them also, and when they had been masters for scarcely two short centuries, they were in their turn threatened with destruction. ”

“ Assyria became dominant in Asia; its empire stretched from Media on the east to the Mediterranean on the west. But it was an empire which was without organisation or permanency. [pg 220] Every year a new campaign was needed to suppress the revolts which broke out as soon as the Assyrian army was out of sight, or to supply the treasury with fresh spoil. The campaigns were in most cases raids rather than the instruments of deliberately planned conquest. Hence it was that the Assyrian monarch found himself checked in the west by the petty kings of Damascus and the neighbouring states. ”

“ In contrast to Babylonia, which is from the start stamped as a civilizing power, Assyria, from its rise till its fall, is essentially a military empire, seeking the fulfillment of its mission in the enlargement of power and in incessant warfare. ”

“ In one instance only in later times, in Assyria, which had become exclusively Semitic, do we find the idea of one supreme god, who was national and not local, and who overshadowed all other gods, as Jahve in the later days of the Jewish monarchy, and in the conception of the Hebrew prophets, did the gods of the surrounding nations. Assur, the local god of the city of Assur, the first capital of Assyria, became, with the growth of the Assyrian Empire, the one supreme god, in whose name wars were undertaken, cities destroyed, and captives massacred or mutilated. ”

“ If Assyria be allowed the extent which is here assigned to her, she will be a country, not only very much larger than Chaldaea or Babylonia, but positively of considerable dimensions. Reaching on the north to the thirty-eighth and on the south to the thirty-fourth parallel, she had a length diagonally from Diarbekr to the alluvium of 350 miles, and a breadth between the Euphrates and Mount Zagros varying from about 300 to 170 miles. ”

“ Originally, the country to which I have alluded consisted of Assyria in the centre and Babylonia to the south; while to the east of Assyria was a country partly plain and partly hill, which formed the "plain of Shinar" and the hills beyond occupied by Accadian tribes, from whose chief city, Ur, Abraham, the forefather of the Jews, emigrated. ”

“ As we have seen, [255] the Assyrian Empire began about 625 to shrink to the limits of Assyria proper, or Upper Mesopotamia, within the Euphrates on the south-west, the mountain-range of Kurdistan on the north-east, the river Chabor on the north-west and the Lesser Zab on the south-east. ”

“ The Arabs usually kill them and eat their flesh.
It is probable that all these animals, and some others, inhabited Assyria during the time of the Empire. Lions of two kinds, with and without manes, abound in the sculptures, the former, which do not now exist in Assyria, being the more common. [PLATE XXV., Fig. 2.] They are represented with a skill and a truth which shows the Assyrian sculptor to have been familiar not only with their forms and proportions, but with their natural mode of life, their haunts, and habits. ”

“ We now enter upon the last and most brilliant phase of Assyrian civilization--the period of the Third or New Empire during which flourished Tiglath-pileser IV, the mighty conqueror; the Shalmaneser of the Bible; "Sargon the Later", who transported the "lost ten tribes" of Israel; Sennacherib, the destroyer of Babylon, and Esarhaddon, who made Lower Egypt an Assyrian province. We also meet with notable figures of Biblical fame, including Ahaz, Hezekiah, Isaiah, and the idolatrous Manasseh. ”

“ It would certainly be unwise to draw a sharp boundary line between the two districts; kings of Judah could be tempted to restore the kingdom of their traditional founder, or Assyria might be complaisant towards a faithful Judaean vassal. The character of the Assyrian domination over Israel must not be misunderstood; the regular payment of tribute and the provision of troops were the main requirements, and the position of the masses underwent little change if an Assyrian governor took the place of an unpopular native ruler. ”

“ And when Assyria came into sheol and also Egypt, they found other nations there. These are mentioned by the term "all the trees of Eden, the choice and best of Lebanon, all that drink water." These terms are symbolical of human greatness, glory and prosperity. And these once powerful and prosperous nations were "comforted" to find that even Pharaoh would share their fate and the fate of Assyria. It shows that the disembodied state in sheol is not an unconscious state, but one of consciousness. The next chapter, the final one on Egypt's judgment and fate will show us more of this. ”

“ They were non-Israelites, and designated themselves as those whom the king of Assyria had brought into the land. According to 2Ki 17:24, the king of Assyria brought colonists from Babylon, Cuthah, and other places, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel. Now we cannot suppose that every Israelite, to the very last man, was carried away by the Assyrians; such a deportation of a conquered people being unusual, and indeed impossible. ”