Upon conquest followed organization.  The great Assyrian was not content merely to overrun Egypt; he was bent upon holding it.  Acting on the Roman principle, “Divide et impera,” he broke up the country into twenty distinct principalities, over each of which he placed a governor, while in the capital of each he put an Assyrian garrison.  Of the governors, by far the greater number were native Egyptians; but in one or two instances the command was given to an Assyrian.  For the most part, the old divisions of the nomes were kept, but sometimes two or more nomes were thrown together and united under a single governor.  Neco, an ancestor of the great Pharaoh who bore the same name (2 Kings xxiii. 29-35), had Sais, Memphis, and the nomes that lay between them; Mentu-em-ankh had Thebes and southern Egypt as far as Elephantine.  Satisfied with these arrangements, the conqueror returned to Nineveh, having first, however, sculptured on the rocks at the mouth of the Nahr-el-Kelb a representation of his person and an account of his conquests.

[Illustration:  FIGURE OF ESAR-HADDON AT THE NAHR-EL-KELB.]

Egypt lay at the feet of Assyria for about three or four years (B.C. 672-669).  Then the struggle was renewed.  Tehrak, who had bided his time, learning that Esarhaddon was seized with a mortal malady, issued (B.C. 669) from his Ethiopian fastnesses, descended the valley of the Nile, expelled the governors whom Esarhaddon had set up, and possessed himself of the disputed territory.  Thebes received him with enthusiasm, as one attached to the worship of Ammon; and the priests of Phthah opened to him the gates of Memphis, despite the efforts of Neco and the Assyrian garrison.  The religious sympathy between Ethiopia and Egypt was an important factor in the as yet undecided contest, and helped much to further the Ethiopic cause.  But in war sentiment can effect but little.  Physical force, on the whole, prevails, unless in the rare instances where miracle intervenes, or where patriotic enthusiasm is exalted to such a pitch as to strike physical force with impotency.

In the conflict that was now raging patriotism had little part.  Ethiopia and Assyria were contending, partly for military pre-eminence, partly for the prey that lay between them, inviting a master—­the rich and now weak Egyptian kingdom.  Tehrak’s success, communicated to the Assyrian Court by the dispossessed governors, drew forth almost immediately a counter effort on the part of Assyria, which did not intend to relinquish without a struggle the important addition that Esarhaddon had made to the empire.  In B.C. 668, Asshur-bani-pal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, having succeeded his father Esarhaddon, put the forces of Assyria once more in motion, and swooping down upon the unhappy Egypt, succeeded in carrying all before him, defeated Tehrak at Karbanit in the Delta, recovered Memphis and Thebes, forced Tehrak to take refuge at Napata, re-established in power the twenty petty kings, and restored the country in all respects to the condition into which it had been brought four years previously by Esarhaddon.  Egypt thus passed under the Assyrians for the second time, Ethiopia relinquishing her hold upon the prey as soon as Assyria firmly grasped it.