The Ancient East | Page 5

think too territorially. No permanent organization of
territorial dominion in foreign parts was established by Semitic rulers
till late in Assyrian history. The earlier Semitic overlords, that is, all
who preceded Ashurnatsirpal of Assyria, went a-raiding to plunder,
assault, destroy, or receive submissive payments, and their ends
achieved, returned, without imposing permanent garrisons of their own
followers, permanent viceroys, or even a permanent tributary burden, to
hinder the stricken foe from returning to his own way till his turn
should come to be raided again. The imperial blackmailer had possibly
left a record of his presence and prowess on alien rocks, to be defaced
at peril when his back was turned; but for the rest only a sinister
memory. Early Babylonian and Early Assyrian "empire," therefore,
meant, territorially, no more than a geographical area throughout which
an emperor could, and did, raid without encountering effective
opposition.
Nevertheless, such constant raiding on a great scale was bound to
produce some of the fruits of empire, and by its fruits, not its records,
we know most surely how far Babylonian Empire had made itself felt.
The best witnesses to its far-reaching influence are first, the Babylonian
element in the Hittite art of distant Asia Minor, which shows from the
very first (so far as we know it, i.e. from at least 1500 B.C.) that native
artists were hardly able to realize any native ideas without help from
Semitic models; and secondly, the use of Babylonian writing and
language and even Babylonian books by the ruling classes in Asia
Minor and Syria at a little later time. That governors of Syrian cities
should have written their official communications to Pharaohs of the
Eighteenth Dynasty in Babylonian cuneiform (as the archives found at

Amarna in Upper Egypt twenty years ago show us they did) had
already afforded such conclusive proof of early and long maintained
Babylonian influence, that the more recent discovery that Hittite lords
of Cappadocia used the same script and language for diplomatic
purposes has hardly surprised us.
It has been said already that Babylonia was a region so rich and
otherwise fortunate that empire both came to it earlier and stayed later
than in the other West Asian lands which ever enjoyed it at all. When
we come to take our survey of Western Asia in 400 B.C. we shall see
an emperor still ruling it from a throne set in the lower Tigris basin,
though not actually in Babylon. But for certain reasons Babylonian
empire never endured for any long period continuously. The aboriginal
Akkadian and Sumerian inhabitants were settled, cultivated and home
keeping folk, while the establishment of Babylonian empire had been
the work of more vigorous intruders. These, however, had to fear not
only the imperfect sympathy of their own aboriginal subjects, who
again and again gathered their sullen forces in the "Sea Land" at the
head of the Persian Gulf and attacked the dominant Semites in the rear,
but also incursions of fresh strangers; for Babylonia is singularly open
on all sides. Accordingly, revolts of the "Sea Land" folk, inrushing
hordes from Arabia, descents of mountain warriors from the border
hills of Elam on the south-eastern edge of the twin river basin, pressure
from the peoples of more invigorating lands on the higher Euphrates
and Tigris--one, or more than one such danger ever waited on imperial
Babylon and brought her low again and again. A great descent of Hatti
raiders from the north about 1800 B.C. seems to have ended the
imperial dominion of the First Dynasty. On their retirement Babylonia,
falling into weak native hands, was a prey to a succession of inroads
from the Kassite mountains beyond Elam, from Elam itself, from the
growing Semitic power of Asshur, Babylon's former vassal, from the
Hittite Empire founded in Cappadocia about 1500 B.C., from the fresh
wave of Arabian overflow which is distinguished as the Aramaean, and
from yet another following it, which is usually called Chaldaean; and it
was not till almost the close of the twelfth century that one of these
intruding elements attained sufficient independence and security of
tenure to begin to exalt Babylonia again into a mistress of foreign

empire. At that date the first Nebuchadnezzar, a part of whose own
annals has been recovered, seems to have established overlordship in
some part of Mediterranean Asia--Martu, the West Land; but this
empire perished again with its author. By 1000 B.C. Babylon was once
more a small state divided against itself and threatened by rivals in the
east and the north.
SECTION 2. ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT
During the long interval since the fall of the First Babylonian Dynasty,
however, Western Asia had not been left masterless. Three other
imperial powers had waxed and waned in her borders, of which one
was destined to a second