from the confines of the Shubari country, near the sources of the Khabur, to the suburbs of Babylon itself.  Nearly the whole of Mesopotamia thus changed hands at one stroke, but Babylon had still more serious losses to suffer.  Nazimaruttash, who attempted to wipe out the disaster sustained by his father Kurigalzu, experienced two crushing defeats, one at Kar-Ishtar and the other near Akarsallu, and the treaty which he subsequently signed was even more humiliating for his country than the preceding one.  All that part of the Babylonian domain which lay nearest to Nineveh was ceded to the Assyrians, from Pilaski on the right bank of the Tigris to the province of Lulume in the Zagros mountains.  It would appear that the Cossaean tribes who had remained in their native country, took advantage of these troublous times to sever all connection with their fellow-countrymen established in the cities of the plain; for we find them henceforward carrying on a petty warfare for their own profit, and leading an entirely independent life.  The descendants of Gandish, deprived of territories in the north, repulsed in the east, and threatened in the south by the nations of the Persian Gulf, never recovered their former ascendency, and their authority slowly declined during the century which followed these events.  Their downfall brought about the decadence of the cities over which they had held sway; and the supremacy which Babylon had exercised for a thousand years over the countries of the Euphrates passed into the hands of the Assyrian kings.

Assyria itself was but a poor and insignificant country when compared with her rival.  It occupied, on each side of the middle course of the Tigris, the territory lying between the 35th and 37th parallels of latitude.*

* These are approximately the limits of the first Assyrian empire, as given by the monuments; from the Persian epoch onwards, the name was applied to the whole course of the Tigris as far as the mountain district.  The ancient orthography of the name is Aushar.

It was bounded on the east by the hills and mountain ranges running parallel to the Zagros Chain—­Gebel Guar, Gebel Gara, Zerguizavan-dagh, and Baravan-dagh, with their rounded monotonous limestone ridges, scored by watercourses and destitute of any kind of trees.  On the north it was hemmed in by the spurs of the Masios, and bounded on the east by an undefined line running from Mount Masios to the slopes of Singar, and from these again to the Chaldaean plain; to the south the frontier followed the configuration of the table-land and the curve of the low cliffs, which in prehistoric times had marked the limits of the Persian Gulf; from here the boundary was formed on the left side of the Tigris by one of its tributaries, either the Lower Zab or the Badanu.  The territory thus enclosed formed a compact and healthy district:  it was free from extremes of temperature arising from height or latitude, and the relative character and