Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/103

 Western Asia : Babylonia, Assyria, and Chaldea 7 1 Meanwhile a new wave of Semitic nomads had rolled in from The Ara- the desert-bay and by 1400 B.C. occupied its western shores; Sama^scu^ that is, Palestine and Syria. These were the Hebrews in Pales- tine, and somewhat later the Arameans, who founded a power- ful kingdom at Damascus. The expansion of Assyria was stopped in the west by the Aramean kings of Damascus, who were wealthy commercial rulers. Indeed, these Arameans persistently pushed their caravans and settlements all along the shores of the desert-bay, and after the decline of Babylonia they held the commerce of western Asia. They received alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians, the earliest system of writing known which employed only alphabetic signs (p. 139). The Aramaic language of this merchant people of Damascus finally dis- placed that of the Hebrews, and Aramaic became the tongue spoken by Jesus and the other Hebrews of his time in Pal-. estine. It is called Aramaic because it was spoken by the Arameans, and it is a Semitic dialect differing but little from its sister tongue, Hebrew. Section 14. The Assyrian Empire (about 750 TO 606 B.C.) By the middle of the eighth century e.g., however, Assyria Sargon il resumed her plans of westward expansion. We can follow her ° ssyna irresistible western campaigns not only in the clay-tablet records of her kings but also in the warnings and appeals of the Hebrew prophets, as they talked to their people. But they were unable to prevent the advance of the Assyrians as they beheld Damas-. cus, the only defense between them and the armies of Assyria, slowly giving way. In the midst of these great western cam- paigns of Assyria one of the leading Assyrian generals usurped the throne (7 2 2 B.C.) while he was besieging the unhappy Hebrew city of Samaria (p. 1 06). He was a very skillful soldier, and as king he took the name of Sargon, the first great Semite of Babylonia, who had reigned two thousand years earlier (p. 64). The new