at peril when his back was turned; but for the rest only a sinister
memory. Early Babylonian and Early Assyrian "empire," therefore, meant,
territorially, no more than a geographical area throughout which an
emperor could, and did, raid without encountering effective opposition.

Nevertheless, such constant raiding on a great scale was bound to
produce some of the fruits of empire, and by its fruits, not its
records, we know most surely how far Babylonian Empire had made itself
felt. The best witnesses to its far-reaching influence are first, the
Babylonian element in the Hittite art of distant Asia Minor, which shows
from the very first (so far as we know it, i.e. from at least 1500 B.C.)
that native artists were hardly able to realize any native ideas without
help from Semitic models; and secondly, the use of Babylonian writing
and language and even Babylonian books by the ruling classes in Asia
Minor and Syria at a little later time. That governors of Syrian cities
should have written their official communications to Pharaohs of the
Eighteenth Dynasty in Babylonian cuneiform (as the archives found at
Amarna in Upper Egypt twenty years ago show us they did) had already
afforded such conclusive proof of early and long maintained Babylonian
influence, that the more recent discovery that Hittite lords of
Cappadocia used the same script and language for diplomatic purposes has
hardly surprised us.

It has been said already that Babylonia was a region so rich and
otherwise fortunate that empire both came to it earlier and stayed later
than in the other West Asian lands which ever enjoyed it at all. When we
come to take our survey of Western Asia in 400 B.C. we shall see an
emperor still ruling it from a throne set in the lower Tigris basin,
though not actually in Babylon. But for certain reasons Babylonian
empire never endured for any long period continuously. The aboriginal