"taking the hands of Bel," and in reigning personally in Babylon, nor
in extorting from the native sovereign an official acknowledgment of
his vassalage. Profiting doubtless by past experience, Assur-nazir-pal
resolutely avoided those direct conflicts in which so many of his
predecessors had wasted their lives. If he did not actually renounce
his hereditary pretensions, he was content to let them lie dormant. He
preferred to accommodate himself to the terms of the treaty signed a
few years previously by Ramman-nirari, even when Babylon neglected
to observe them; he closed his eyes to the many ill-disguised acts of
hostility to which he was exposed,* and devoted all his energies to
dealing with less dangerous enemies.

* He did not make the presence of Cossoan troops among the
allies of the Sukhi a casus belli, even though they were
commanded by a brother and by one of the principal officers
of the King of Babylon.

Even if his frontier touched Karduniash to the south, elsewhere he was
separated from the few states strong enough to menace his kingdom by
a strip of varying width, comprising several less important tribes and
cities;--to the east and north-east by the barbarians of obscure race
whose villages and strongholds were scattered along the upper affluents
of the Tigris or on the lower terraces of the Iranian plateau: to the
west and north-west by the principalities and nomad tribes, mostly of
Aramoan extraction, who now for a century had peopled the mountains
of the Tigris and the steppes of Mesopotamia. They were high-spirited,
warlike, hardy populations, proud of their independence and quick
to take up arms in its defence or for its recovery, but none of them
possessed more than a restricted domain, or had more than a handful
of soldiers at its disposal. At times, it is true, the nature of their
locality befriended them, and the advantages of position helped to
compensate for their paucity of numbers.

[Illustration: 017.jpg THE ESCARPMENTS OF THE ZAB]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by M. Binder.

Sometimes they were entrenched behind one of those rapid watercourses
like the Radanu, the Zab, or the Turnat, which are winter torrents
rather than streams, and are overhung by steep banks, precipitous as a
wall above a moat; sometimes they took refuge upon some wooded height
and awaited attack amid its rocks and pine woods. Assyria was
superior to all of them, if not in the valour