schemes which required prolonged and sustained effort that they felt the drawbacks of their position.  In that age of hand-to-hand combats, the mortality in battle was very high, forced marches through forests and across mountains entailed a heavy loss of men, and three or four consecutive campaigns against a stubborn foe soon reduced an army to a condition of dangerous weakness.  Recruits might be obtained to fill the earlier vacancies in the ranks, but they soon grew fewer and fewer if time was not given for recovery after the opening victories in the struggle, and the supply eventually ceased if operations were carried on beyond a certain period.

The total duration of the dynasty was, according to the Royal Canon, 72 years 6 months.  Peiser has shown that this is a mistake, and he proposes to correct it to 132 years 6 months, and this is accepted by most Assyri-ologists.

A reign which began brilliantly often came to an impotent conclusion, owing to the king having failed to economise his reserves; and the generations which followed, compelled to adopt a strictly defensive attitude, vegetated in a sort of anaemic condition, until the birth-rate had brought the proportion of males up to a figure sufficiently high to provide the material for a fresh army.  When Nebuchadrezzar made war upon Assurishishi, he was still weak from the losses he had incurred during the campaign against Elam, and could not conduct his attack with the same vigour as had gained him victory on the banks of the Ulai; in the first year he only secured a few indecisive advantages, and in the second he succumbed.  Merodach-nadin-akhi was suffering from the reverses sustained by his predecessors when Tiglath-pileser provoked him to war, and though he succeeded in giving a good account of an adversary who was himself exhausted by dearly bought successes, he left to his descendants a kingdom which had been drained of its last drop of blood.  The same reason which explains the decadence of Babylon shows us the cause of the periodic eclipses undergone by Assyria after each outburst of her warlike spirit.  She, too, had to pay the penalty of an ambition which was out of all proportion to her resources.  The mighty deeds of Shalmaneser and Tukulti-ninip were, as a natural consequence, followed by a state of complete prostration under Tukultiassurbel and Assurnirari:  the country was now forced to pay for the glories of Assurishishi and of Tiglath-pileser by falling into an inglorious state of languor and depression.  Its kings, conscious that their rule must be necessarily precarious as long as they did not possess a larger stock of recruits to fall back on, set their wits to work to provide by various methods a more adequate reserve.  While on one hand they installed native Assyrians in the more suitable towns of conquered countries, on the other they imported whole hordes of alien prisoners chosen for their strength and courage, and settled them down in districts by the banks of the Tigris