RECOVERY IN WESTERN ASIA

The pages of this history have had little to tell about Assyria or Babylonia since the reigns of Shamshi-Adad I and of his son Ishme-Dagan in the former, and since the end of Hammurabi's last successor in the latter. The intervening space of nearly three centuries was occupied by the invasions and retarding influences which affected the whole of Western Asia and Egypt as well, and had produced a similar dimness in the view of all that vast area. In Egypt the invaders were the Hyksos, in Syria, Mesopotamia, and eastward the Hurrians, in Babylonia the Kassites; all of them peoples of origins as obscure as their cultural levels were generally low, and all alike destined to lose their individuality, partly by conquest, but mostly by absorption, before they had attained a distinctive civilization or much history of their own. For this dark age modern research has therefore to depend partly upon survivals and intermittent gleams of the old. The point now reached in the story is that where the gloom is everywhere receding—it had been dispelled from Egypt with the ejection of the Hyksos and the counter-invasion of Syria by the kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty, but these had never approached near enough to the old seats of the Babylonian culture to exercise a direct influence there or to break (if such had been the effect) the deadening spell which still overpowered them. The greatest of Egyptian conquerors, Tuthmosis III, was indeed able, at the farthest point of his penetration into Syria, to include among the spoils of his campaign a tribute from Ashur, which his fame if not his armies had reached.