only get the better of such a position.  Tiglath-pileser invested the citadel and ravaged its outskirts without pity, hoping, no doubt, that he would thus provoke the enemy into capitulating.  Day after day, Sharduris, perched in his lofty eyrie, saw his leafy gardens laid bare under the hatchet, and his villages and the palaces of his nobles light up the country round as far as the eye could reach:  he did not flinch, however, and when all had been laid waste, the Assyrians set up a statue of their king before the principal gate of the fortress, broke up their camp, and leisurely retired.  They put the country to fire and sword, destroyed its cities, led away every man and beast they could find into captivity, and then returned to Nineveh laden with plunder.  Urartu was still undaunted, and Sharduris remained king as before; but he was utterly spent, and his power had sustained a blow from which it never recovered.  He had played against Assur with the empire of the whole Asiatic world as the stake, and the dice had gone against him:  compelled to renounce his great ambitions from henceforth, he sought merely to preserve his independence.  Since then, Armenia has more than once challenged fortune, but always with the same result; it fared no better under Tigranes in the Roman epoch, than under Sharduris in the time of the Assyrians; it has been within an ace of attaining the goal of its ambitions, then at the last moment its strength has failed, and it has been forced to retire worsted from the struggle.  Its position prevented it from exercising very wide influence; hidden away in a corner of Asia at the meeting-point of three or four great mountain ranges, near the source of four rivers, all flowing in different directions, it has lacked that physical homogeneity without which no people, however gifted, can hope to attain supremacy; nature has doomed it to remain, like Syria, split up into compartments of unequal size and strength, which give shelter to half a score of independent principalities, each one of them perpetually jealous of the rest.  From time to time it is invested with a semblance of unity, but for the most part it drags on an uneventful existence, dismembered into as many fragments as there happen to be powerful states around it, its only chance of complete reunion lying in the possibility of one or other of these attaining sufficient predominance to seize the share of the others and absorb it.

The subjection of Urartu freed Assyria from the only rival which could at this moment have disputed its supremacy on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris.  The other nations on its northern and eastern frontiers as yet possessed no stability; they might, in the course of a passing outburst, cut an army to pieces or annex part of a province, but they lacked strength to follow up their advantage, and even their most successful raids were sure, in the long run, to lead to terrible reprisals, in which their gains were two or three times