It is true that Egypt, Chaldaea, and the other military nations of the East, had never, in their hours of prosperity, shown the slightest consideration for their vanquished foes; the Theban Pharaohs had mercilessly crushed Africa and Asia beneath their feet, and had led into slavery the entire population of the countries they had subdued. But the Egyptians and Chaldaeans had, at least, accomplished a work of civilization whose splendour redeemed the brutalities of their acts of reprisal. It was from Egypt and Chaldaea that the knowledge and the arts of antiquity--astronomy, medicine, geometry, physical and natural sciences--spread to the ancestors of the classic races; and though Chaldaea yields up to us unwillingly, with niggard hand, the monuments of her most ancient kings, the temples and tombs of Egypt still exist to prove what signal advances the earliest civilised races made in the arts of the sculptor and the architect. But on turning to Assyria, if, after patiently studying the successive centuries during which she held supreme sway over the Eastern world, we look for other results besides her conquests, we shall find she possessed nothing that was not borrowed from extraneous sources. She received all her inspirations from Chaldaea--her civilisation, her manners, the implements of her industries and of agriculture, besides her scientific and religious literature: one thing alone is of native growth, the military tactics of her generals and the excellence of her soldiery. From the day when Assyria first realised her own strength, she lived only for war and rapine; and as soon as the exhaustion of her population rendered success on the field of battle an impossibility, the reason for her very existence vanished, and she passed away. Two great kingdoms rose simultaneously from her ruins. Cyaxares claimed Assyria proper and its dependencies on the Upper Tigris, but he specially reserved for himself the yet unconquered lands on the northern and eastern frontiers, whose inhabitants had only recently taken part in the political life of the times. Nabopolassar retained the suzerainty over the lowlands of Elam, the districts of Mesopotamia lying along the Euphrates, Syria, Palestine, and most of the countries which had hitherto played a part in history;* he claimed to exert his supremacy beyond the Isthmus, and the Chaldaean government looked upon the Egyptian kings as its feudatories because for some few years they had owned the suzerainty of Nineveh.** * There was no actual division of the empire, as has been often asserted, but each of the allies kept the portion which fell into his power at the moment of their joint effort. The two new states gradually increased in power by successive conquests, each annexing by degrees the ancient provinces of Assyria nearest to its own frontier.