and the same person; afterwards the theory took shape that Samaria was really captured in the reign of Shalmaneser, but by Sargon, who was in command of the besieging army at the time, and who transferred this achievement, of which he was naturally proud, to the beginning of his own reign.  The simplest course seems to be to accept for the present the testimony of contemporary documents, and place the fall of Samaria at the beginning of the reign of Sargon, being the time indicated by Sargon in his inscriptions.

Sargon made the whole territory into a province; an Assyrian governor was installed in the palace of the kings of Israel, and soon the altars of the strange gods smoked triumphantly by the side of the altars of Jahveh (722 B.C.).*

* Kings xvii. 24-41, a passage to which I shall have occasion to refer farther on in the present volume.  The following is a list of the kings of Israel, after the division of the tribes:—­

[Illustration:  333.jpg TABLE OF KINGS OF ISRAEL]

     [In this table father and son are shown by a perpendicular
     line.  The king’s name in italics signifies that he died a
     violent death.—­Tr.]

Thus fell Samaria, and with Samaria the kingdom of Israel, and with Israel the last of the states which had aspired, with some prospect of success, to rule over Syria.  They had risen one after another during the four centuries in which the absence of the stranger had left them masters of their own fate—­the Hittites in the North, the Hebrews and the Philistines in the South, and the Aramaeans and Damascus in the centre; each one of these races had enjoyed its years of glory and ambition in the course of which it had seemed to prevail over its rivals.  Then those whose territory lay at the extremities began to feel the disadvantages of their isolated position, and after one or two victories gave up all hope of ever establishing a supremacy over the whole country.  The Hittite sphere of influence never at any time extended much further southwards than the sources of the Orontes, while that of the Hebrews in their palmiest days cannot have gone beyond the vicinity of Hamath.  And even progress thus far had cost both Hebrews and Hittites a struggle so exhausting that they could not long maintain it.  No sooner did they relax their efforts, than those portions of Coele-Syria which they had annexed to their original territory, being too remote from the seat of power to feel its full attraction, gradually detached themselves and resumed their independence, their temporary suzerains being too much exhausted by the intensity of their own exertions to retain hold over them.  Damascus, which lay almost in the centre, at an equal distance from the Euphrates and the “river of Egypt,” could have desired no better position for grouping the rest of Syria round her.

[Illustration:  334.jpg SARGON OF ASSYRIA AND HIS VIZIER]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Flandin.