tradition of which, unsupported by any definite decree, had been handed on from one generation to another; yet in practice their kings had not succeeded in “taking the hands of Bel,” and in reigning personally in Babylon, nor in extorting from the native sovereign an official acknowledgment of his vassalage.  Profiting doubtless by past experience, Assur-nazir-pal resolutely avoided those direct conflicts in which so many of his predecessors had wasted their lives.  If he did not actually renounce his hereditary pretensions, he was content to let them lie dormant.  He preferred to accommodate himself to the terms of the treaty signed a few years previously by Ramman-nirari, even when Babylon neglected to observe them; he closed his eyes to the many ill-disguised acts of hostility to which he was exposed,* and devoted all his energies to dealing with less dangerous enemies.

* He did not make the presence of Cossoan troops among the allies of the Sukhi a casus belli, even though they were commanded by a brother and by one of the principal officers of the King of Babylon.

Even if his frontier touched Karduniash to the south, elsewhere he was separated from the few states strong enough to menace his kingdom by a strip of varying width, comprising several less important tribes and cities;—­to the east and north-east by the barbarians of obscure race whose villages and strongholds were scattered along the upper affluents of the Tigris or on the lower terraces of the Iranian plateau:  to the west and north-west by the principalities and nomad tribes, mostly of Aramoan extraction, who now for a century had peopled the mountains of the Tigris and the steppes of Mesopotamia.  They were high-spirited, warlike, hardy populations, proud of their independence and quick to take up arms in its defence or for its recovery, but none of them possessed more than a restricted domain, or had more than a handful of soldiers at its disposal.  At times, it is true, the nature of their locality befriended them, and the advantages of position helped to compensate for their paucity of numbers.

[Illustration:  017.jpg THE ESCARPMENTS OF THE ZAB]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by M. Binder.

Sometimes they were entrenched behind one of those rapid watercourses like the Radanu, the Zab, or the Turnat, which are winter torrents rather than streams, and are overhung by steep banks, precipitous as a wall above a moat; sometimes they took refuge upon some wooded height and awaited attack amid its rocks and pine woods.  Assyria was superior to all of them, if not in the valour of its troops, at least numerically, and, towering in the midst of them, she could single out at will whichever tribe offered the easiest prey, and falling on it suddenly, would crush it by sheer force of weight.  In such a case the surrounding tribes, usually only too well pleased to witness in safety the fall of a dangerous rival, would