ames to the verdict.

The main attention of the Assyrian government was devoted to the army,
which was kept in the highest possible state of efficiency. It was
recruited from the free peasantry of the country--a fact which, while it
explains the excellence of the Assyrian veterans, also shows why it was
that the empire fell as soon as constant wars had exhausted the native
population. Improvements were made in it from time to time; thus,
cavalry came to supersede the use of chariots, and the weapons and
armour of the troops were changed and improved. Engineers and sappers
accompanied it, cutting down the forests and making roads as it marched,
and the commissariat was carefully attended to. The royal tent was
arranged like a house, and one of its rooms was fitted up as a kitchen,
where the food was prepared as in the palace of Nineveh. In Babylonia it
was the fleet rather than the army which was the object of concern,
though under Nebuchadrezzar and his successors the army also became an
important engine of war. But, unlike the Assyrians, the Babylonians had
been from the first a water-faring people, and the ship of war floated
on the Euphrates by the side of the merchant vessel and the state barge
of the king.

Such then were the kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria. Each exercised an
influence on the Israelites and their neighbours, though in a different
way and with different results. The influence of Assyria was ephemeral.
It represented the meteor-like rise of a great military power, which
crushed all opposition, and introduced among mankind the new idea of a
centralised world-empire. It destroyed the northern kingdom of Samaria,
and made Palestine once more what it had been in pre-Mosaic days, the
battle-ground between the nations of the Nile and the Tigris. On the
inner life of western Asia it left no impression.

The influence of Babylonia, on the other hand, was that of a venerable
and a widely reaching culture. The Canaan of the patriarchs and the
Canaanitish conquest was a Canaan whose civilisation was derived from
the Euphrates, and this civilisation the Israelites themselves
inherited. Abraham was a Babylonian, and the Mosaic Law is not Egyptian
but Babylonian in character, wherever it ceases to be specifically
Israelite. The influence of Babylonia, moreover, continued to the last.
It was the Babylonish Exile which changed the whole nature of the Jewish
people, which gave it new aims and ideals, and prepared