Two centuries have passed over the East, and at first sight it looks as if no radical change has taken place in its political or social condition. No new power has entered it from without; only one new state of importance, the Phrygian, has arisen within. The peoples, which were of most account in 1000, are still of the most account in 800--the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Mushki of Cappadocia, the tribesmen of Urartu, the Aramaeans of Damascus, the trading Phoenicians on the Syrian coast and the trading Greeks on the Anatolian. Egypt has remained behind her frontier except for one raid into Palestine about 925 B.C., from which Sheshenk, the Libyan, brought back treasures of Solomon's temple to enhance the splendour of Amen. Arabia has not begun to matter. There has been, of course, development, but on old lines. The comparative values of the states have altered: some have become more decisively the superiors of others than they were two hundred years ago, but they are those whose growth was foreseen. Wherein, then, lies the great difference? For great difference there is. It scarcely needs a second glance to detect the change, and any one who looks narrowly will see not only certain consequent changes, but in more than one quarter signs and warnings of a coming order of things not dreamt of in 1000 B.C.
The obvious novelty is the presence of a predominant power. The mosaic of small states is still there, but one holds lordship over most of them, and that one is Assyria. Moreover, the foreign dominion which the latter has now been enjoying for three-parts of a century is the first of its kind established by an Asiatic power. Twice, as we have seen, had Assyria conquered in earlier times an empire of the nomad Semitic type, that is, a licence to raid unchecked over a wide tract of lands; but, so far as we know, neither Shalmaneser I nor Tiglath Pileser I had so much as conceived the idea of holding the raided provinces by a permanent official organization. But in the ninth century, when Ashurnatsirpal and his successor Shalmaneser, second of the name, marched out year by year, they passed across wide territories held for them by governors and garrisons, before they reached others upon which they hoped to impose like fetters. We find Shalmaneser II, for example, in the third year of his reign, fortifying, renaming, garrisoning and endowing with a royal palace the town of Til Barsip on the Euphrates bank, the better to secure for himself free passage at will across the river. He has finally deprived Ahuni its local Aramaean chief, and holds the place as an Assyrian fortress. Thus far had the Assyrian advanced his territorial empire but not farther. Beyond Euphrates he would, indeed, push year by year, even to Phoenicia and Damascus and Cilicia, but merely to raid, levy blackmail and destroy, like the old emperors of Babylonia or his own imperial predecessors of Assyria.