the ideal of the Yahwe, "the only
true god who was jealous of other gods and could brook none beside him."
To these uncompromising adherents of pure monotheism the royal titles of
the Assyrian kings who styled themselves the rulers of the centre, of the
four quarters of the earth and of the heavens, must indeed have appeared
as a sacrilege.

The existence of such opposite views clearly explains the ultimate
outbreak of hatred and war between monotheistic Israel and Juda and the
ancient empires of Western Asia which shared, with them, a remote but
common origin.

Returning to Assyria we find that this empire also, as it extended its
four-fold capital Assur into four provinces and developed the cult of the
high central power and the Heaven and Earth, gradually prepared in turn
its own downfall by an inevitable process of disintegration. In time two
great capitals grew up, situated to the northeast and northwest of the
ancient metropolis of Assur, the original seat of the "kings of the four
regions." These capitals were Ninive, divided into four cities, and
Arbela, also a "four-city." The fact that the latter capital was the seat
of Ishtar worship, further proves that, at one time, a definite separation
of cults had also supervened in Assyria and that Assur and Ninive may at
one time have been respectively centres of Polaris and sun worship. It is
well known that when about B.C. 606 the great Assyrian empire was
destroyed, it had four royal residences: Ninive, Dur-Sarrukin, Kalash and
Assur, which were then burnt and levelled to the ground, never to be
rebuilt.

Let us now examine the emblems of "divine royalty" exhibited on the famous
portrait stelae of Assyrian kings preserved at the British Museum which
strikingly confirm the view I advanced that the four-spoked wheel of
Shamash on the Sippara tablet was the ancient restored image of the
"primitive sun" Polaris and of circumpolar rotation.

The Assyrian kings on the British Museum stelae are represented as wearing
the cross, between the signs for the moon and planet Venus, that occurs on
the Sippara tablet. The four-spoked wheel thus explains itself as a
"wheel-cross" and is found to have been employed in Assyria alternately
with the plain cross; for the portrait statue of Asurnasirpal (about B.C.
880) represents the king wearing a chain about his neck from which hangs a
cross between the Ishtar and moon emblems, and next to a symbol
representing the lightning bolt