official organization. But in the ninth century, when Ashurnatsirpal and
his successor Shalmaneser, second of the name, marched out year by year,
they passed across wide territories held for them by governors and
garrisons, before they reached others upon which they hoped to impose
like fetters. We find Shalmaneser II, for example, in the third year of
his reign, fortifying, renaming, garrisoning and endowing with a royal
palace the town of Til Barsip on the Euphrates bank, the better to
secure for himself free passage at will across the river. He has finally
deprived Ahuni its local Aramaean chief, and holds the place as an
Assyrian fortress. Thus far had the Assyrian advanced his territorial
empire but not farther. Beyond Euphrates he would, indeed, push year by
year, even to Phoenicia and Damascus and Cilicia, but merely to raid,
levy blackmail and destroy, like the old emperors of Babylonia or his
own imperial predecessors of Assyria.

There was then much of the old destructive instinct in Shalmaneser's
conception of empire; but a constructive principle also was at work
modifying that conception. If the Great King was still something of a
Bedawi Emir, bound to go a-raiding summer by summer, he had conceived,
like Mohammed ibn Rashid, the Arabian prince of Jebel Shammar in our own
days, the idea of extending his territorial dominion, so that he might
safely and easily reach fresh fields for wider raids. If we may use
modern formulas about an ancient and imperfectly realized imperial
system, we should describe the dominion of Shalmaneser II as made up
(over and above its Assyrian core) of a wide circle of foreign
territorial possessions which included Babylonia on the south, all
Mesopotamia on the west and north, and everything up to Zagros on the
east; of a "sphere of exclusive influence" extending to Lake Van on the
north, while on the west it reached beyond the Euphrates into mid-Syria;
and, lastly, of a licence to raid as far as the frontiers of Egypt.