He allowed them to take with them their wives and their children, their herds, their chattels, their gods, and even their money. Drafted into the towns and country districts in batches sufficiently numerous to be self-supporting, but yet not large enough to allow of their at once re-establishing themselves as a distinct nation in their new home, they seem to have formed, even in the midst of the most turbulent provinces, settlements of colonists who lived unaffected by any native influence or resentment. The aborigines hated them because of their religion, their customs, their clothing, and their language; in their eyes they were mere interlopers, who occupied the property of relations or fellow-countrymen who had fallen in battle or had been spirited away to the other end of the world. And even when, after many years, the native owners of the soil had become familiarised with them, this mutual antipathy had struck such deep root in their minds that any understanding between the natives and the descendants of the immigrants was quite out of the question: what had been formerly a vast kingdom, occupied by a single homogeneous race, actuated by a common patriotic spirit, became for many a year a region capriciously subdivided and torn by the dissensions of a number of paltry antagonistic communities. The colonists, exposed to the same hatreds as the original Assyrian conquerors, soon forgot to look upon the latter as the oppressors of all, and, allowing their present grudge to efface the memory of past injuries, did not hesitate to make common cause with them. In time of peace, the governor did his best to protect them against molestation on the part of the natives, and in return for this they rallied round him whenever the latter threatened to get out of hand, and helped him to stifle the revolt or hold it in check until the arrival of reinforcements. Thanks to their help, the empire was consolidated and maintained without too many violent outbreaks in regions far removed from the capital and beyond the immediate reach of the sovereign.* We possess very few details with regard to the administration of these prefects.** * This was the history of the only one of those colonies whose fate is known to us--that founded at Samaria by Sargon and his successors. ** The texts contain a certain number of names of offices, the precise nature of which it is not easy to ascertain, e.g. the Khazanu, the Labuttu, and others. One of them, apparently, should be read _Shuparshak_, and identical with one of the titles mentioned in Ezra (v. 6, vi. 6) as being in existence during the Persian epoch.