The system was a defective on, in that it exposed to strong temptation the very functionaries whose loyalty was most essential to the proper working of the administration, but its dangers were out weighed by such important advantages that we cannot but regard it as a very real improvement on the haphazard methods of the past.  In the first place, it opened up a larger recruiting-ground for the army, and, in a measure, guaranteed it against that premature exhaustion which had already led more than once to an eclipse of the Assyrian power.  It may be that the pick of these provincial troops were, preferably, told off for police duties, or for the defence of the districts in which they were levied, and that they seldom left it except to do battle in the adjacent territory;* but, even with these limitations they were none the less of inestimable value, since they relieved the main army of Assyria from garrison duties in a hundred scattered localities, and allowed the king to concentrate it almost in its entirety about his own person, and to direct it en masse upon those points where he wished to strike a decisive blow.

     * Thus, in the reign of Assur-bani-pal, we find the militia
     of the governor of Uruk marching to battle against the
     Gambulu.

On the other hand, the finances of the kingdom were put on a more stable and systematic basis.  For nearly the whole of the two previous centuries, during which Assyria had resumed its victorious career, the treasury had been filled to some extent by taxes in kind or in money, and by various dues claimed from the hereditary kingdom and its few immediate dependencies, but mainly by booty and by tribute levied after each campaign from the peoples who had been conquered or had voluntarily submitted to Assyrian rule.  The result was a budget which fluctuated greatly, since all forays were not equally lucrative, and the new dependencies proved so refractory at the idea of perpetual tribute, that frequent expeditions were necessary in order to persuade them to pay their dues.  We do not know how Tiglath-pileser III. organised the finances of his provinces, but certain facts recorded here and there in the texts show that he must have drawn very considerable amounts from them.  We notice that twenty or thirty years after his time, Carchemish was assessed at a hundred talents, Arpad and Kui at thirty each, Megiddo and Manzuatu at fifteen, though the purposes to which these sums were applied is not specified.

[Illustration:  314.jpg A HERD OF HORSES BROUGHT IN AS TRIBUTE]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the bronze bas-reliefs on the gates of Balawat.  The breed here represented seems to have been common in Urartu, as well as in Cappadocia and Northern Syria.

On the other hand, we know the precise object to which the contributions of several other cities were assigned; as, for instance, so much for the maintenance of the