came a quarry for the builders of the new seat of government.[5]

VI. _Assyria and Babylonia contrasted._--The sister-states of Babylonia and
Assyria differed essentially in character. Babylonia was a land of
merchants and agriculturists; Assyria was an organized camp. The Assyrian
dynasties were founded [v.03 p.0107] by successful generals; in Babylonia
it was the priests whom a revolution raised to the throne. The Babylonian
king remained a priest to the last, under the control of a powerful
hierarchy; the Assyrian king was the autocratic general of an army, at
whose side stood in early days a feudal nobility, and from the reign of
Tiglath-pileser III. onwards an elaborate bureaucracy. His palace was more
sumptuous than the temples of the gods, from which it was quite separate.
The people were soldiers and little else; even the sailor belonged to
Babylonia. Hence the sudden collapse of Assyria when drained of its
fighting population in the age of Assur-bani-pal.

VII. _Assyro-Babylonian Culture_.--Assyrian culture came from Babylonia,
but even here there was a difference between the two countries. There was
little in Assyrian literature that was original, and education, which was
general in Babylonia, was in the northern kingdom confined for the most
part to a single class. In Babylonia it was of very old standing. There
were libraries in most of the towns and temples; an old Sumerian proverb
averred that "he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise
with the dawn." Women as well as men learned to read and write, and in
Semitic times this involved a knowledge of the extinct Sumerian as well as
of a most complicated and extensive syllabary. A considerable amount of
Semitic Babylonian literature was translated from Sumerian originals, and
the language of religion and law long continued to be the old agglutinative
language of Chaldaea. Vocabularies, grammars and interlinear translations
were compiled for the use of students as well as commentaries on the older
texts and explanations of obscure words and phrases. The characters of the
syllabary were all arranged and named, and elaborate lists of them were
drawn up. The literature was for the most part inscribed with a metal
stylus on tablets of clay, called _laterculae coctiles_ by Pliny; the
papyrus which seems to have been also employed has perished. Under the
second Assyrian empire, when Nineveh had become a great centre of trade,
Aramaic--the language of c