Shalmaneser's later expeditions all passed the frontiers of that sphere
of influence. Having already crossed the Amanus mountains seven times,
he was in Tarsus in his twenty-sixth summer; Damascus was attacked again
and again in the middle of his reign; and even Jehu of Samaria paid his
blackmail in the year 842.

Assyria in the ninth century must have seemed by far the strongest as
well as the most oppressive power that the East had known. The reigning
house was passing on its authority from father to son in an unbroken
dynastic succession, which had not always been, and would seldom
thereafter be, the rule. Its court was fixed securely in midmost
Assyria, away from priest-ridden Asshur, which seems to have been always
anti-imperial and pro-Babylonian; for Ashurnatsirpal had restored Calah
to the capital rank which it had held under Shalmaneser I but lost under
Tiglath Pileser, and there the kings of the Middle Empire kept their
throne. The Assyrian armies were as yet neither composed of soldiers of
fortune, nor, it appears, swelled by such heterogeneous provincial
levies as would follow the Great Kings of Asia in later days; but they
were still recruited from the sturdy peasantry of Assyria itself. The
monarch was an absolute autocrat directing a supreme military despotism.
Surely such a power could not but endure. Endure, indeed, it would for
more than two centuries. But it was not so strong as it appeared. Before
the century of Ashurnatsirpal and Shalmaneser II was at an end, certain
inherent germs of corporate decay had developed apace in its system.

Natural law appears to decree that a family stock, whose individual
members have every opportunity and licence for sensual indulgence, shall
deteriorate both physically and mentally at an ever-increasing rate.
Therefore, _pari passu_, an Empire which is so absolutely autocratic
that the monarch is its one mainspring of government, grows weaker as it