It may consequently be doubted whether the Assyrian armies, when they went out on their expeditions, were attended, like the Egyptian and Roman armies, by military bands.

Possibly, the musicians in the processional scenes alluded to belong to the court rather than to the camp, and merely take part as civilians in a pageant, wherein a share is also assigned to the soldiery.
In proceeding, as already proposed, to speak of the navigation of the Assyrians, it must be at once premised that it is not as mariners, but only as fresh-water sailors, that they come within the category of navigators at all.

Originally an inland people, they had no power, in the earlier ages of their history, to engage in any but the secondary and inferior kind of navigation; and it would seem that, by the time when they succeeded in opening to themselves through their conquests a way to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, their habits had become so fixed in this respect that they no longer admitted of change.

There is satisfactory evidence which shows that they left the navigation of the two seas at the two extremities of their empire to the subject nations--the Phoenicians and the Babylonians contenting themselves with the profits without sharing the dangers of marine voyages, while their own attention was concentrated upon their two great rivers--the Tigris and the Euphrates, which formed the natural line of communication between the seas in question.
The navigation of these streams was important to the Assyrians in two ways.

In the first place it was a military necessity that they should be able, _readily and without delay_, to effect the passage of both of them, and also of their tributaries, which were frequently too deep to be forded.