n would spread across the plains of Asia with the
rapidity of a prairie fire.

Thus no question received a final settlement. On the morrow of the hardest
won victory the fight had to begin anew. The strongest and bravest
exhausted themselves at such a game. Each campaign left gaps in the ranks
of the governing and fighting classes, and in time, their apparent
privilege became the most crushing of burdens. The same burden has for a
century past been slowly destroying the dominant race in modern Turkey. Its
members occupy nearly all the official posts, but they have to supply the
army as well. Since the custom of recruiting the latter with the children
of Christians, separated from their families in infancy and converted to
Islamism has been abandoned, the military population has decreased year by
year. One or two more wars like the last and the Ottoman race will be
extinct.

Losses in battle were then a chief cause of decadence in a state which
failed to discipline its subject peoples and to incorporate them in its
armies. A further explanation is to be found in the lassitude and
exhaustion which must in time overtake the most warlike princes, the
bravest generals, and the most highly tempered of conquering races. A few
years of relaxed watchfulness, an indolent and soft-hearted sovereign, are
enough to let loose all the pent up forces of insubordination and to unite
them into one formidable effort. We thus see that, in many respects,
nothing could be more precarious than the prosperity of that Assyria whose
insolent triumphs had so often astonished the world since the accession of
Sargon.

The first shock came from the north. About the year 632 all western Asia
was suddenly overrun by the barbarians whom the Greeks called the Cimmerian
Scythians. With an _elan_ that nothing could resist, they spread
themselves over the country lying between the shores of the Caspian and the
Persian Gulf; they even menaced the frontiers of Egypt. The open towns were
pillaged and destroyed, the fields and agricultural villages ruthlessly
laid waste. Thanks to the height and thickness of their defending walls
Nineveh, Babylon, and a few other cities escaped a sack, but Mesopotamia as
a whole suffered cruelly. The dwellers in its vast plains had no
inaccessible summits or hidden valleys to which they could retreat until
the wave of destruction had passed on. At the end of a few years the
loot-laden Scythians withdrew into those steppes of