Each exercised an influence on the Israelites and their neighbours, though in a different way and with different results.

The influence of Assyria was ephemeral.
It represented the meteor-like rise of a great military power, which crushed all opposition, and introduced among mankind the new idea of a centralised world-empire.

It destroyed the northern kingdom of Samaria, and made Palestine once more what it had been in pre-Mosaic days, the battle-ground between the nations of the Nile and the Tigris.

On the inner life of western Asia it left no impression.
The influence of Babylonia, on the other hand, was that of a venerable and a widely reaching culture.

The Canaan of the patriarchs and the Canaanitish conquest was a Canaan whose civilisation was derived from the Euphrates, and this civilisation the Israelites themselves inherited.