ed curve;
the lips are thick and full, the chin bony, while the face is framed by
the coarse dark wavy hair and beard, which fell in curly masses over the
nape of the neck and the breast. The expression of the face is rarely
of an amiable and smiling type, such as we find in the statues of the
Theban period or in those of the Memphite empire, nor, as a matter of
fact, did the Assyrian pride himself on the gentleness of his manners:
he did not overflow with love for his fellow-man, as the Egyptian made
a pretence of doing; on the contrary, he was stiff-necked and proud,
without pity for others or for himself, hot-tempered and quarrelsome
like his cousins of Chaldaea, but less turbulent and more capable of
strict discipline. It mattered not whether he had come into the world in
one of the wretched cabins of a fellah village, or in the palace of
one of the great nobles; he was a born soldier, and his whole education
tended to develop in him the first qualities of the soldier--temperance,
patience, energy, and unquestioning obedience: he was enrolled in an
army which was always on a war footing, commanded by the god Assur, and
under Assur, by the king, the vicegerent and representative of the god.
His life was shut in by the same network of legal restrictions which
confined that of the Babylonians, and all its more important events
had to be recorded on tablets of clay; the wording of contracts, the
formalities of marriage or adoption, the status of bond and free, the
rites of the dead and funeral ceremonies, had either remained identical
with those in use during the earliest years of the cities of the Lower
Euphrates, or differed from them only in their less important details.
The royal and municipal governments levied the same taxes, used the
same procedure, employed the same magistrates, and the grades of their
hierarchy were the same, with one exception. After the king, the highest
office was filled by a soldier, the _tartan_ who saw to the recruiting
of the troops, and led them in time of war, or took command of the
staff-corps whenever the sovereign himself deigned to appear on the
scene of action.*

* We can determine the rank occupied, by the _tartanu_ at
court by the positions they occupy in the lists of eponymous
_limmu_: they invariably come next after the king--a fact
which was noticed many years ago.

The more influential of these functionaries bore, in addition to their
other titles, one