SECTION 4. EARLY ASSYRIAN EMPIRE
Remains Assyria, which before 1000 B.C. had twice conquered an empire of the same kind as that credited to the First Babylonian Dynasty and twice recoiled. The early Assyrian expansions are, historically, the most noteworthy of the early West Asian Empires because, unlike the rest, they were preludes to an ultimate territorial overlordship which would come nearer to anticipating Macedonian and Roman imperial systems than any others precedent. Assyria, rather than Babylon or Egypt, heads the list of aspirants to the Mastership of the World.
There will be so much to say of the third and subsequent expansion of Assyria, that her earlier empires may be passed over briefly. The middle Tigris basin seems to have received a large influx of Semites of the Canaanitic wave at least as early as Babylonia, and thanks to various causes - to the absence of a prior local civilization as advanced as the Sumerian, to greater distance from such enterprising fomenters of disturbance as Elam and Arabia, and to a more invigorating climate - these Semites settled down more quickly and thoroughly into an agricultural society than the Babylonians and developed it in greater purity. Their earliest social centre was Asshur in the southern part of their territory. There, in proximity to Babylonia, they fell inevitably under the domination of the latter; but after the fall of the First Dynasty of Babylon and the subsequent decline of southern Semitic vigour, a tendency manifested itself among the northern Semites to develop their nationality about more central points. Calah, higher up the river, replaced Asshur in the thirteenth century B.C., only to be replaced in turn by Nineveh, a little further still upstream; and ultimately Assyria, though it had taken its name from the southern city, came to be consolidated round a north Mesopotamian capital into a power able to impose vassalage on Babylon and to send imperial raiders to the Mediterranean, and to the Great Lakes of Armenia. The first of her kings to attain this sort of imperial position was Shalmaneser I, who early in the thirteenth century B.C. appears to have crushed the last strength of the north Mesopotamian powers of Mitanni and Khani and laid the way open to the west lands. The Hatti power, however, tried hard to close the passages and it was not until its catastrophe and the retirement of those who brought it about - the Mushki and their allies - that about 1100 Tiglath Pileser I could lead his Assyrian raiders into Syria, and even, perhaps, a short distance across Taurus. Why his empire died with him we do not know precisely. A new invasion of Arabian Semites, the Aramaeans, whom he attacked at Mt. Bishri (Tell Basher), may have been the cause. But, in any case, the fact is certain. The sons of the great king, who had reached Phoenician Aradus and there embarked vaingloriously on shipboard to claim mastery of the Western Sea, were reduced to little better than vassals of their father's former vassal, Babylon; and up to the close of the eleventh century Assyria had not revived.