If any city had a chance of establishing a single kingdom, it was Damascus, and Damascus alone.  But lulled to blissful slumbers in her shady gardens, she did not awake to political life and to the desire of conquest until after all the rest, and at the very moment when Nineveh was beginning to recover from her early reverses.  Both Ben-hadads had had a free hand given them during the half-century which followed, and they had taken advantage of this respite to reduce Coele-Syria, the Lebanon, Arvadian Phoenicia, Hamath, and the Hebrews—­in fact, two-thirds of the whole country—­to subjection, and to organise that league of the twelve kings which reckoned Ahab of Israel among its leaders.  This rudimentary kingdom had scarcely come into existence, and its members had not yet properly combined, when Shalmaneser III. arose and launched his bands of veterans against them; it however successfully withstood the shock, and its stubborn resistance at the beginning of the struggle shows us what it might have done, had its founders been allowed time in which to weld together the various elements at their disposal.  As it was, it was doomed to succumb—­not so much to the superiority of the enemy as to the insubordination of its vassals and its own internal discords.  The league of the twelve kings did not survive Ben-hadad II.; Hazael and his successors wore themselves out in repelling the attacks of the Assyrians and in repressing the revolts of Israel; when Tiglath-pileser III. arrived on the scene, both princes and people, alike at Damascus and Samaria, were so spent that even their final alliance could not save them from defeat.  Its lack of geographical unity and political combination had once more doomed Syria to the servitude of alien rule; the Assyrians, with methodical procedure, first conquered and then made vassals of all those states against which they might have hurled their battalions in vain, had not fortune kept them divided instead of uniting them in a compact mass under the sway of a single ruler.  From Carchemish to Arpad, from Hamath to Damascus and Samaria, their irresistible advance had led the Assyrians on towards Egypt, the only other power which still rivalled their prestige in the eyes of the world; and now, at Gaza, on the frontier between Africa and Asia, as in days gone by on the banks of the Euphrates or the Balikh, these two powers waited face to face, hand on hilt, each ready to stake the empire of the Asiatic world on a single throw of the dice.

[Illustration:  336.jpg TAILPIECE]

CHAPTER III—­SARGON OF ASSYRIA (722-705 B.C.)

SARGON AS A WARRIOR AND AS A BUILDER.

The origin of Sargon II.:  the revolt of Babylon, Merodach-baladan and Elam—­The kingdom of Elam from the time of the first Babylonian empire; the conquest’s of Shutruh-nalkunta I.; the princes of Malamir—­The first encounter of Assyria and Elam, the battle of Durilu (721 B.C.)—­Revolt of Syria, Iaubidi of Hamath and Hannon of Gaza—­Bocchoris and the XXIVth Egyptian dynasty; the first encounter of Assyria with Egypt, the battle of Raphia (720 B.C.).