[Plate 4: ASSYRIAN EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY YEARS OF ASHURBANIPAL]
But Memphis was reoccupied by Esarhaddon's successor, and since the latter took and ruined Thebes also, and, after Tirhakah's death, drove the Cushites right out of Egypt, the doubtful credit of spreading the territorial empire of Assyria to the widest limits it ever reached falls to Ashurbanipal. Even Tyre succumbed at last, and he stretched his sphere of influence over Asia Minor to Lydia. First of Assyrian kings he could claim Elam with its capital Susa as his own (after 647), and in the east he professed overlordship over all Media. Mesopotamian arts and letters now reached the highest point at which they had stood since 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.
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 New Kingdom has been typically Oriental, anticipating, at every change of monarch, the history of Islamic Empires. There is no trace of unanimous national sentiment for the Great King. One occupant of the throne after another gains power by grace of a party and holds it by mercenary swords.