17　Kings with Corkscrew Curls

After Rome's bad start she had one king after another,and some of these kings were pretty good and some were pretty bad……

The most important city in the world at this time was far away from Rome on the Tigris River. This city was called Nineveh,and here lived the kings of the country called Assyria,which I told you about some time ago.

As usual,the chief thing we hear about Assyria and the Assyrians is that they were fighting with their neighbors. This,however,was not the fault of their neighbors.

The Assyrian kings who lived in Nineveh wanted more land and power,and so they fought their neighbors in order to take their land away from them. These kings had long corkscrew curls.They were such vicious fighters that they were feared far and near.They treated their prisoners terribly；they skinned them alive,cut off their ears,pulled out their tongues,bored sticks into their eyes,then bragged about it.They made the people whom they conquered pay them huge sums of money and promise to fight along with them whenever they went to war.

Assyria became so strong and powerful that it owned a lot of the world,the land between the rivers called Mesopotamia,and the land to the east,north,and south,and Phoenicia,and even Egypt.