the thirty-fifth and thirty-seventh parallels. By degrees these limits
were enlarged; and the term Assyria came to be used, in a loose and
vague way, of a vast and ill-defined tract extending on all sides from
this central region. Herodotus considered the whole of Babylonia to be a
mere district of Assyria. Pliny reckoned to it all Mesopotamia. Strabo
gave it, besides these regions, a great portion of Mount Zagros (the
modern Kurdistan), and all Syria as far as Cilicia, Judaea, and
Phoenicia.

If, leaving the conventional, which is thus vague and unsatisfactory, we
seek to find certain natural limits which we may regard as the proper
boundaries of the country, in two directions we seem to perceive an
almost unmistakable line of demarcation. On the east the high
mountain-chain of Zagros. penetrable only in one or two places, forms a
barrier of the most marked character, and is beyond a doubt the natural
limit for which we are looking. On the south a less striking, but not
less clearly defined, line--formed by the abutment of the upper and
slightly elevated plain on the alluvium of the lower valley--separates
Assyria from Babylonia, which is best regarded as a distinct country. In
the two remaining directions, there is more doubt as to the most proper
limit. Northwards,we may either view Mount Masius as the natural
boundary, or the course of the Tigris from Diarbekr to Til, or even
perhaps the Armenian mountain-chain north of this portion of the
Tigris, from whence that river receives its early tributaries. Westward,
we might confine Assyria to the country watered by the affluents of the
Tigris, or extend it so as to in elude the Khabour and its tributaries,
or finally venture to carry it across the whole of Mesopotamia, and make
it be bounded by the Euphrates. On the whole it is thought that in both
the doubted cases the wider limits are historically the truer ones.
Assyrian remains cover the entire country between the Tigris and the