Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/32

20 Palestine, and had played a part in the pirate attack upon Egypt. King Solomon married a daughter of one of the last of these Pharaohs. The Hebrew power was consolidated and widely extended under Saul, and especially under David; but after Solomon's death it was broken up by the rift between Israel and Judah. Politically, the two kingdoms at once became nothing more than two minor principalities, generally but irregularly paying tribute to one or another of the greater kingdoms.

The last Egyptian Dynasties.

Jeroboam's revolt took place shortly before his friend Sheshonk, or Shishak, secured his own succession to the last Pharaoh of the twenty-first dynasty; his mother being a royal princess, though otherwise he was of Libyan descent. For a long while the Libyans had been the mainstay of the Egyptian army. Under this twenty-second dynasty, which ruled for about 200 years (b.c. 930-730), Egypt really broke up into a number of practically independent principalities. This resulted, towards 700, in the establishment of a dynasty of Pharaohs from Ethiopia, beyond the southern confines of Egypt proper. It was in their day that the army of the Assyrian Sennacherib was destroyed, probably by an outbreak of the Plague.

5. Assyria and Babylonia.

When the Tell el-Amarna letters were written, Assyria or Asshur was beginning to assert its independence and to demand recognition as a sovereign state, in spite of the protests of the Kassite King of Babylon. Not long afterwards, a revolution in Babylon gave the Assyrian monarch a chance of taking control of the Babylonian government The Kassite dynasty was in decay, and Assyria became the great  rival of the Mitani kingdom for the dominion of upper  Mesopotamia; while the advancing Hittites absorbed Syria. This race was at the height of its power in the days of Rameses 11. Much however still remains to be learnt concerning it from a quantity of Hittite inscriptions which have hitherto remained undecipherable. From this time it ceases to be prominent. The Aramaean wave of Semitic migration has been credited with helping the first rise of Assyria; but it can certainly claim to have been largely concerned in driving back