The sister-states of Babylonia and Assyria differed essentially in character. Babylonia was a land of merchants and agriculturists; Assyria was an organized camp. The Assyrian dynasties were founded by successful generals; in Babylonia it was the priests whom a revolution raised to the throne. The Babylonian king remained a priest to the last, under the control of a powerful hierarchy; the Assyrian king was the autocratic general of an army, at whose side stood in early days a feudal nobility, aided from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III onwards by an elaborate bureaucracy. His palace was more sumptuous than the temples of the gods, from which it was quite separate. The people were soldiers and little else; even the sailor belonged to Babylonia. Hence the sudden collapse of Assyria when drained of its fighting population in the age of Assur-bani-pal.
Assyria, however, was aided by civil war in Elam itself; the country was wasted with fire and sword,, and its capital Susa or Shushan levelled with the ground.
In Babylonia the abundance of clay and want of stone led to the employment of brick; the Babylonian temples are massive but shapeless structures of crude brick, supported by buttresses, the rain being carried off by drains, one of which at Ur was of lead.
Babylonia on the shores of the Persian Gulf; that its kings were contemporaneous with the later kings of Dynasty I. and with the earlier kings of Dynasty III.
Assyria proper was located in a mountainous region, extending along the Tigris as far as the high Gordiaean or Carduchian mountain range of Armenia, sometimes called the "Mountains of Ashur".
The population of Assyria was rather small, and the main cities were Ashur, Kalhu and Nineveh, all situated in the Tigris river valley.
Assyria, therefore, was ill-prepared to face the hordes of Scythians and Medes who now began to harass the frontiers to the east; Asia Minor too was infested by the Cimmerians.
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