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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
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