exhausted; nor could it continue to live on uncertain blackmail
collected at uncertain intervals now beyond Euphrates, now in Armenia,
now again from eastern and southern neighbours. Such Bedawi ideas and
methods were outworn. The new Great King tried new methods to express
new ideas. A soldier by profession, indebted to the sword for his
throne, he would have a standing and paid force always at his hand, not
one which had to be called from the plough spring by spring. The lands,
which used to render blackmail to forces sent expressly all the way from
the Tigris, must henceforward be incorporated in the territorial empire
and pay their contributions to resident governors and garrisons.
Moreover, why should these same lands not bear a part for the empire in
both defence and attack by supplying levies of their own to the imperial
armies? Finally the capital, Calah, with its traditions of the dead
dynasty, the old regime and the recent rebellion, must be replaced by a
new capital, even as once on a time Asshur, with its Babylonian and
priestly spirit, had been replaced. Accordingly sites, a little higher
up the Tigris and more centrally situated in relation to both the
homeland and the main roads from west and east, must be promoted to be
capitals. But in the event it was not till after the reign of Sargon
closed that Nineveh was made the definitive seat of the last Assyrian
kings.

Organized and strengthened during Tiglath Pileser's reign of eighteen
years, this new imperial machine, with its standing professional army,
its myriad levies drawn from all fighting races within its territory,
its large and secure revenues and its bureaucracy keeping the provinces
in constant relation to the centre, became the most tremendous power of
offence which the world had seen. So soon as Assyria was made conscious
of her new vigour by the ease with which the Urartu raiders, who had
long been encroaching on Mesopotamia, and even on Syria, were driven