least, accomplished a work of
civilization whose splendour redeemed the brutalities of their acts of
reprisal. It was from Egypt and Chaldaea that the knowledge and the
arts of antiquity--astronomy, medicine, geometry, physical and natural
sciences--spread to the ancestors of the classic races; and though
Chaldaea yields up to us unwillingly, with niggard hand, the monuments
of her most ancient kings, the temples and tombs of Egypt still exist to
prove what signal advances the earliest civilised races made in the arts
of the sculptor and the architect. But on turning to Assyria, if,
after patiently studying the successive centuries during which she held
supreme sway over the Eastern world, we look for other results besides
her conquests, we shall find she possessed nothing that was not
borrowed from extraneous sources. She received all her inspirations from
Chaldaea--her civilisation, her manners, the implements of her industries
and of agriculture, besides her scientific and religious literature: one
thing alone is of native growth, the military tactics of her generals
and the excellence of her soldiery. From the day when Assyria first
realised her own strength, she lived only for war and rapine; and as
soon as the exhaustion of her population rendered success on the field
of battle an impossibility, the reason for her very existence vanished,
and she passed away.

Two great kingdoms rose simultaneously from her ruins. Cyaxares
claimed Assyria proper and its dependencies on the Upper Tigris, but he
specially reserved for himself the yet unconquered lands on the northern
and eastern frontiers, whose inhabitants had only recently taken part
in the political life of the times. Nabopolassar retained the suzerainty
over the lowlands of Elam, the districts of Mesopotamia lying along
the Euphrates, Syria, Palestine, and most of the countries which had
hitherto played a part in history;* he claimed to exert his supremacy
beyond the Isthmus, and the Chaldaean government looked upon the Egyptian
kings as its feudatories because for some few years they had owned the
suzerainty of Nineveh.**

* There was no actual division of the empire, as has been
often asserted, but each of the allies kept the portion
which fell into his power at the moment of their joint
effort. The two new states gradually increased in power by
successive conquests, each annexing by degrees the ancient
provinces of Assyria near