Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by M. Binder.

Sometimes they were entrenched behind one of those rapid watercourses
like the Radanu, the Zab, or the Turnat, which are winter torrents
rather than streams, and are overhung by steep banks, precipitous as a
wall above a moat; sometimes they took refuge upon some wooded height
and awaited attack amid its rocks and pine woods. Assyria was
superior to all of them, if not in the valour of its troops, at least
numerically, and, towering in the midst of them, she could single out
at will whichever tribe offered the easiest prey, and falling on it
suddenly, would crush it by sheer force of weight. In such a case the
surrounding tribes, usually only too well pleased to witness in safety
the fall of a dangerous rival, would not attempt to interfere; but their
turn was ere long sure to come, and the pity which they had declined
to show to their neighbours was in like manner refused to them. The
Assyrians ravaged their country, held their chiefs to ransom, razed
their strongholds, or, when they did not demolish them, garrisoned
them with their own troops who held sway over the country. The revenues
gleaned from these conquests would swell the treasury at Nineveh, the
native soldiers would be incorporated into the Assyrian army, and when
the smaller tribes had all in turn been subdued, their conqueror would,
at length, find himself confronted with one of the great states from
which he had been separated by these buffer communities; then it was
that the men and money he had appropriated in his conquests would
embolden him to provoke or accept battle with some tolerable certainty
of victory.

Immediately on his accession, Assur-nazir-pal turned his attention to
the parts of his frontier where the population was most scattered, and