It was not until the rise of the Second Assyrian Empire that the trade of Assyria became important. The earlier kings had gone forth to war for the sake of booty or out of mere caprice; Tiglath-Pileser II and his successors aimed at getting the commerce of the world into the hands of their own subjects. The fall of Carchemish and the overthrow of the Phœnician cities enabled them to carry out their design. Nineveh became a busy centre of trade, from whence caravans went and returned north and south, east and west. The old Hittite standard of weight, called 'the maneh of Carchemish' by the Assyrians, was made the ordinary legal standard, and Aramaic became the common language of trade. Not unfrequently an Aramaic docket accompanies an Assyrian contract tablet, stating briefly what were its contents and the names of the chief contracting parties. These contract tablets have to do with the sale and lease of houses, slaves, and other property, as well as with the amount of interest to be paid upon loans. We learn from them that the rate of interest was usually as low as four per cent., and when objects like bronze were borrowed as three per cent. House property naturally varied in value. A house sold at Nineveh on the sixteenth of Sivan or May, B.C. 692, fetched one maneh of silver or £9, the average price of a slave. Thus, three Israelites, as Dr. Oppert believes, were sold by a Phœnician on the twentieth of Ab or July, B.C. 709, for £27, retractation or annulment of the sale being subject to a penalty of about £230, part of which was to go to the temple of Istar of Arbela. Twenty years later, however, as many as seven slaves, among them an Israelite, Hoshea, and his two wives, were sold for the same price, while we find a girl handed over by her parents to an Egyptian lady Nitôkris, who wished to marry her to her son Takhos, for the small sum of £2 10_s_. The last deed of sale, by the way, proves that wives in Assyria could sometimes be bought. All deeds and contracts were signed and sealed in the presence of a number of attesting witnesses, who attached their seals, or, if they were too poor to possess any, their nail-marks, to the documents. It was then enclosed in an outer coating of clay, on which an abstract of its contents was given. Sometimes a further document on papyrus was fastened to it by means of a string.