70 Outlines of European History Section 13. Early Assyria and her Rivals Semitic king- doms along the fertile crescent Assur, once a Hittite chieftain's stronghold Earliest Assyrian civilization came from the south Western expansion of Assyria The history of our great fertile crescent (see p. ^8) did not end, however, with this decline of Babylonia. We find its story- continuing among other settlements of the desert nomads ex- tending all along the shores of the northern desert-bay. In the northeast corner of the desert-bay, in the days when Sargon I and his line were ruling in Babylonia, a Hittite chief (Fig. 60) from the mountains of Asia Minor had built his castle. It was really a mountain outpost within the desert-bay, whose rolling hills enveloped it on all sides. Seeking the northern pas- tures, a tribe of desert nomads who called themselves Assur (whence Assyria) seized this stronghold and its outlying vil- lages. Thus arose the little kingdom of Assur, like a dozen others along this desert margin. It was nearer the middle of the great crescent than Babylonia and held a position better suited to rule the shores of the desert-bay. In climate more invigorating than the hot Babylonian plain, Assur had many fertile valleys and an agricultural population. The Assyrians early learned cuneiform writing (p. 62), and their language was the same as that of Semitic Babylonia, with slight differences in dialect. In the days when Hammurapi's ancestors had seized Babylon ("2225 B.C.) (p. 67), Assur was already strong enough to dispute the boundary line with them. Constantly obliged to defend their uncertain frontiers and settlements, both against their kindred of the desert and against the mountaineers, the Assyrians were toughened by the strain of unceasing war. By 1 100 B.C. their peasant militia had beaten the western kings in Syria and looked down upon the Mediterranean, where the Egyptian Empire had collapsed two generations before (p. 53). Thrown back at this time, they reached it again in the ninth century B.C., and likewise made their power felt through a wide region of the northern mountains, around which they passed in a march of a thousand miles. At the same time the Assyrian kings more than once occupied and ruled Babylonia.
