me. His predecessors had usually sent Assyrians to these
colonies, and filled the villages vacated by them with families taken
from the conquered region: a transfer of inhabitants was made, for
instance, from Nairi or from Media into Assyria, and _vice versa_. By
following this system, Tiglath-pileser would soon have scattered his
whole people over the dependencies of his empire, and have found his
hereditary states peopled by a motley and incoherent collection of
aliens; he therefore left his Assyrians for the most part at home, and
only effected exchanges between captives. In his earlier campaigns
he brought back with him, on one occasion, 65,000 prisoners from the
table-land of Iran, in order to distribute them over a province which
he was organising on the banks of the Turnat and the Zab: he levied
contributions of this kind without mercy from all the states that he
conquered from year to year, and dispersed the captives thus obtained
over the length and breadth of his empire; he transplanted the Aramaeans
of the Mesopotamian deserts, and the Kalda to the slopes of Mount Amanus
or the banks of the Orontes, the Patinians and Hamathaeans to Ulluba,
the inhabitants of Damascus to Kir or to the borders of Elam,* and the
Israelites to some place in Assyria.**

* 2 Kings xvi. 9.

** 2 Kings xv. 29.

He allowed them to take with them their wives and their children, their
herds, their chattels, their gods, and even their money. Drafted into
the towns and country districts in batches sufficiently numerous to
be self-supporting, but yet not large enough to allow of their at once
re-establishing themselves as a distinct nation in their new home, they
seem to have formed, even in the midst of the most turbulent provinces,
settlements of colonists who lived unaffected by any native influence or
resentment. The aborigines hated them because of their religion, their
customs, their clothing, and their language; in their eyes they
were mere interlopers, who occupied the property of relations or
fellow-countrymen who had fallen in battle or had been spirited away to
the other end of the world. And even when, after many years, the native
owners of the soil had become familiarised with them, this mutual
antipathy had struck such deep root in their minds that any
understanding between the natives and the descendants of the immigrants
was quite out of the question: what had been formerly a vast kingdom,
occupied by a single