Hammurabi's days, and the fame of the wealth and luxury of "Sardanapal"
went out even into the Greek lands. About 660 B.C. Assyria seemed in a
fair way to be mistress of the desirable earth.


SECTION 4. DECLINE AND FALL OF ASSYRIA

Strong as it seemed in the 7th century, the Assyrian Empire was,
however, rotten at the core. In ridding itself of some weaknesses it had
created others. The later Great Kings of Nineveh, raised to power and
maintained by the spears of paid praetorians, found less support even
than the old dynasty of Calah had found, in popular religious sentiment,
which (as usual in the East) was the ultimate basis of Assyrian
nationality; nor, under the circumstances, could they derive much
strength from tribal feeling, which sometimes survives the religious
basis. Throughout the history of the New Kingdom we can detect the
influence of a strong opposition centred at Asshur. There the last
monarch of the Middle Kingdom had fixed his dwelling under the wing of
the priests; there the new dynasty had dethroned him as the consummation
of an anti-sacerdotal rising of nobles and of peasant soldiery. Sargon
seems to have owed his elevation two generations later to revenge taken
for this victory by the city folk; but Sargon's son, Sennacherib, in his
turn, found priestly domination intolerable, and, in an effort to crush
it for ever, wrecked Babylon and terrorized the central home of Semitic
cult, the great sacerdotal establishment of Bel-Marduk. After his
father's murder, Esarhaddon veered back to the priests, and did so much
to court religious support, that the military party incited Ashurbanipal
to rebellion and compelled his father to associate the son in the royal
power before leaving Assyria for the last time to die (or be killed) on
the way to Egypt. Thus the whole record of dynastic succession in the