Assyria, Its Princes, Priests and People

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ter and the Lesser Zab. It was the primitive capital of the district in which it stood, and to which, accordingly, it lent its name. It seems to have been built by a people who spoke an agglutinative language, like the languages of the modern Fins and Turks, and who we

r, the divine patron of the Assyrian capital, the result being that Assur signified not only a city and country, but also the supreme deity worshipped by their inhabitants.

s early an age as that of Assur, but it was not until a much later period that it became an important city, and supplanted the older capital of the kingdom. Calah, now called Nimr?d, though built some four centuries before, was not made the seat of royalty until the reigns of Assur-natsir-pal and Shalmaneser II, in the 9th century b.c.,

of the city of Assur, and superseded its older inhabitants. However this may be, we know from the cuneiform monuments that the rise of Assyria did not take place until the Babylonian monarchy was already growing old. The country afterwards known as Assyria had been comprised in Gutium or Kurdistan, a name which has been identified, with great probability, by

d doubtless included the country north of the Greater Zab, where Nineveh was situated. The exact frontiers of Assyria, however, were never accurately fixed. They varied with the military power and conquests of its monarchs. Sometimes portions of the plateau of Mesopotamia

ly termed Accadian; it spoke agglutinative dialects, and was the original possessor of the plain of Chald?a. The Accadians invented the cuneiform system of writing, founded the chief cities and civilisation of Babylonia, and erected the earliest Babylonian monuments with which we are acquainted. It was only gradually that they yielded to the advance of the Semit

orrowed from Babylonia, and they never took kindly to it. Even under the magnificent patronage of Assur-bani-pal, Assyrian literature was an exotic. It was cultivated only by the few; whereas in Babylonia the greater part of the population seems to have been able to read and write. If the Assyrian was less luxurious than his Babylonian neighbour, he was also less humane. Indeed, the Assyrian annals glory in the record of a ferocity at which

he modern town of Mosul, concealed its ruins beneath them, but it was not until the excavations of the Frenchman Botta, in 1842, and the Englishman Layard, in 1845, that the remains first of Dur-Sargon, and then of Nineveh itself, were revealed to the eyes of a wondering world. The capital of the Assyrian Empire was recovered, and with it the sculptured monuments of its kings, and the relics of its clay-inscribed library. The discovery came at an opportune moment. The cuneiform inscriptions of Persia had at last yielded up their secrets to the patient sagacity of European scholars, a