Again and again, punitive expeditions would return from the mountains to their native plains, to the sacred cities of Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh, while in their wake, naked and tethered, followed stumbling lines of captives. These too, however, with regular incursions, could be taught to dread the name of Assyria, and provide her with the human plunder on which her greatness had come increasingly to depend.
Not even with their incomparable war machine could the Assyrians pacify all the mountain tribes-for there were some living in the Zagros who clung to the peaks like birds, or lurked in the depths of thick forests, so backward that they subsisted entirely on acorns, savages hardly worthy of the royal attention. This, the wilds being what they were, had proved a calling without limit. Themselves the patrons of a proud and brilliant civilization, sumptuous with palaces, gardens and canals, the kings of Assyria had always seen it as their duty to flatten resistance in the wilds beyond their frontiers. One empire, in particular, for centuries synonymous with cruel and remorseless invincibility, had sent repeated expeditions into the mountains, dyeing the peaks, in its own ferocious vaunt, "like wool, crimson with blood."(1) The Assyrians, inhabitants of what is now northern Iraq, were city-dwellers, a people of the flat, alluvial plains but to their kings, warlords who had spread terror and extermination as far as Egypt, the Zagros was less a barrier than a challenge. Over the millennia, the Khorasan Highway had been followed by any number of travelers: nomads, caravans-and the armies of conquering kings. Who, and when, no one really knew for sure,* but it was certainly very ancient-perhaps, some said, as old as time itself. Only a beneficent deity, it was assumed, could ever have fashioned such a wonder. In places, as it climbed through the Zagros Mountains, winding along river beds, or threading between jagged pinnacles and ravines, it might be little more than a footpath-but even that, to those who used it, was a miracle enough. One road did snake across them: the most famous in the world, the Khorasan Highway, which led from the limits of the East to the West, and joined the rising to the setting of the sun.
Yet these mountains, though savage, were not impassable. So it seemed to those who lived in the Zagros, the great chain of peaks which separates the Fertile Crescent from the upland plateau of Iran.
The gods, having scorned to mold a world that was level, had preferred instead to divide it into two.
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