Page 415 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

35* Bronze and Iron [1160-1090 B.C.]

standing army was greatly increased, and many of the thirty­
year-old veterans chose to take permanent service with the army,
seeing opportunity for promotion and plunder.
But the years went by, and while promotion came their way
plunder was but scanty. Assur-resh-ishi was a cautious man, and
was content to hold his southern frontier in strength, employing
his army actively only against the less well-organized countries to
west, north, and east, the Aramaeans and the Urartians and their
old enemies, the Lullubi. And from these less civilized nations
there was little to be gained in the way of plunder.
As the company and platoon commanders of the new army
reached and passed the age of forty, they began more and more
to pin their hopes to the young crown prince, Tiglathpileser, who
was being trained to generalship by his father and who was
known to have ambitions. They had hopes that he would lead
them south in 1117 b.c., when news came that Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon was dead. But Assur-resh-ishi was also ailing at the time,
and it was wise of the prince to stay by his father’s side—as was
proved the following year, when the Assyrian king died and
Tiglathpileser ascended the throne.
The next year the Assyrian army was unleashed.
The veteran company commanders, watching regiment after
regiment wheel away from the review ground outside the walls of
Assur, were convinced that this was the greatest army that had
ever taken the field. They had no means of knowing how large it
in fact was, but their estimates ranged from thirty to a hundred
thousand men. And while most of them, as always, were archers,
it looked as though at least one man in twenty was a charioteer.
Nothing, this time, could stand against the host of Assyria.
And nothing did. They marched north and west along the
Tigris, past Nineveh, and on towards the mountains. There they
swung onto the Great West Road, the road to the sea, with the
mountains on their right and the rolling plains stretching on their
left to the horizon, and beyond the horizon to the Euphrates.
The rumor soon spread that they were going to the old
Mitanni land, Hanigalbat, as they had always called it, to re­
establish the Assyrian frontier where it had stood in Tukulti-
Ninurta’s day, at the city of Carchemish. That, they knew, would