Lastly, this militant monarchy, whose life was war, was bound to make
implacable enemies both within and without. Among those within were
evidently the priests, whose influence was paramount at Asshur.
Remembering who it was that had given the first independent king to
Assyria they resented that their city, the chosen seat of the earlier
dynasties, which had been restored to primacy by the great Tiglath
Pileser, should fall permanently to the second rank. So we find Asshur
joining the men of Arbela in both the rebellions mentioned above, and it
appears always to have been ready to welcome attempts by the Babylonian
Semites to regain their old predominance over Southern Assyria.


SECTION 2. URARTU

As we should expect from geographical circumstances, Assyria's most
perilous and persistent foreign enemies were the fierce hillmen of the
north. In the east, storms were brewing behind the mountains, but they
were not yet ready to burst. South and west lay either settled districts
of old civilization not disposed to fight, or ranging grounds of nomads
too widely scattered and too ill organized to threaten serious danger.
But the north was in different case. The wild valleys, through which
descend the left bank affluents of the Upper Tigris, have always
sheltered fierce fighting clans, covetous of the winter pasturage and
softer climate of the northern Mesopotamian downs, and it has been the
anxious care of one Mesopotamian power after another, even to our own
day, to devise measures for penning them back. Since the chief weakness
of these tribes lies in a lack of unity which the subdivided nature of
their country encourages, it must have caused no small concern to the
Assyrians that, early in the ninth century, a Kingdom of Urartu or, as