deities little more than saints. Thus we have a psychological unity foreign to Babylonia.
The city of Ashur stood on a great land strait, on the Tigris, between two strips of unirrigated land, at the crossing of the one line of hills which commands the east-west road of the ancient world. Such a position, of danger and of opportunity alike, could not but develop in the Assyrians the spirit which found its only worthy activity in war and in government, which looked down with contempt on the merchant princes of the south. While the earlier Assyrian monarchs were, as they called themselves, "kings of kings", the formal change was made by Ashur-nasir-apal and the conquered states began to be placed directly under provincial governors. By the reign of the last Adad-nirari, the system was in full working order.
In the system, the provinces were of regular size. The officials were advanced in a regular cursus from the provinces of Assyria proper, where they were under the direct control of the king, to the marches on the exposed frontiers to which could be sent only the most experienced and the most trusted. Taxation was formally organized and there was a regular budget of taxes and expenditures. The whole organization centred around the worship of Ashur, the deified state, and of the reigning king, prototype of the later cult of Rome and Augustus. When all the archival material is utilized, not the least the more than a thousand letters exchanged between the king and his provincial governors, we shall have a picture of the system in its actual workings which will rival that of the Roman.
Like the Romans, the Assyrians permitted their sentiment in one instance to outweigh their political sense, for Babylonia was the same culture mother-land to them as was Greece to the Romans. Thus, while a part of the country was ruled by governors, Babylon itself was never brought within the system. At first Assyrian intervention meant merely placing on the throne the Assyrian nominee. The last Tiglath Pileser began the practice of ruling Babylonia directly, but only by a personal union and that hidden by the changed name he used in official documents. But one king, Sennacherib, fairly grappled with the problem, and then only after repeated attempts to rule through a native nominee or through members of the royal house. When his own first-born was treacherously betrayed into captivity, Babylon was destroyed. A sentimental son, Esarhaddon, rebuilt it and granted almost complete autonomy, "so that a dog entering its borders should not be killed". The result of this ill-advised clemency was that Babylon succeeded Assyria. Rome was wiser when she destroyed Carthage and Corinth.
