consider the miserable state of the country twenty years previously.  Assyria then comprised two territories, one in the plains of the middle, the other in the districts of the upper, Tigris, both of considerable extent, but almost without regular intercommunication.  Caravans or isolated messengers might pass with tolerable safety from Assur and Nineveh to Singar, or even to Nisibis; but beyond these places they had to brave the narrow defiles and steep paths in the forests of the Masios, through which it was rash to venture without keeping eye and ear ever on the alert.  The mountaineers and their chiefs recognized the nominal suzerainty of Assyria, but refused to act upon this recognition unless constrained by a strong hand; if this control were relaxed they levied contributions on, or massacred, all who came within their reach, and the king himself never travelled from his own city of Nineveh to his own town of Amidi unless accompanied by an army.  In less than the short space of three years, Assur-nazir-pal had remedied this evil.  By the slaughter of some two hundred men in one place, three hundred in another, two or three thousand in a third, by dint of impaling and flaying refractory sheikhs, burning villages and dismantling strongholds, he forced the marauders of Nairi and Kirkhi to respect his frontiers and desist from pillaging his country.  The two divisions of his kingdom, strengthened by the military colonies in Nirbu, were united, and became welded together into a compact whole from the banks of the Lower Zab to the sources of the Khabur and the Supnat.

During the following season the course of events diverted the king’s efforts into quite an opposite direction (B.C. 882).  Under the name of Zamua there existed a number of small states scattered along the western slope of the Iranian Plateau north of the Cossaeans.* Many of them—­as, for instance, the Lullume—­had been civilized by the Chaldaeans almost from time immemorial; the most southern among them were perpetually oscillating between the respective areas of influence of Babylon and Nineveh, according as one or other of these cities was in the ascendant, but at this particular moment they acknowledged Assyrian sway.  Were they excited to rebellion against the latter power by the emissaries of its rival, or did they merely think that Assur-nazir-pal was too fully absorbed in the affairs of Nairi to be able to carry his arms effectively elsewhere?  At all events they coalesced under Nurramman, the sheikh of Dagara, blocked the pass of Babiti which led to their own territory, and there massed their contingents behind the shelter of hastily erected ramparts.**