covered. 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 outweighed by
their losses in men and treasure. For nearly a hundred years Nineveh
found its hands free, and its rulers were able to concentrate all their
energy on two main points of the frontier--to the south-west on Syria
and Egypt, to the south-east on Chaldaea and Elam. Chaldaea gave little
trouble, but the condition of Syria presented elements of danger. The
loyalty of its prince