Education, as we have seen, meant a good deal more than merely learning the cuneiform characters. It meant, in the case of the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians, learning the ancient agglutinative language of Sumer as well. In later times this language ceased to be spoken except in learned society, and consequently bore the same relation to Semitic Babylonian that Latin bears to English. In learning Sumerian, therefore, the Babylonian learned what was equivalent to Latin in the modern world. And the mode of teaching it was much the same. There were the same paradigms to be committed to memory, the same lists of words and phrases to be learned by heart, the same extracts from the authors of the past to be stored up in the mind. Even the “Hamiltonian” system of learning a dead language had already been invented. Exercises were set in translation from Sumerian into Babylonian, and from Babylonian into Sumerian, and the specimens of the latter which have survived to us show that “dog-Latin” was not unknown. But the dead language of Sumer was not all that the educated Babylonian or Assyrian gentlemen of later times was called upon to know. In the eighth century before our era Aramaic had become the common medium of trade and diplomacy. If Sumerian was the Latin of the Babylonian world, Aramaic was its French. The Aramaic dialects seem to have been the result of a contact between the Semitic languages of Arabia and Canaan, and the rising importance of the tribes who spoke them and who occupied Mesopotamia and Northern Arabia caused them to become the language of trade. Aramaic merchants were settled on the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, and conveyed the products of Babylonia and Phœnicia from one country to the other. Many of the commercial firms in Babylonia were of Aramaic origin, and it was natural that some part at least of their business should have been carried on in the language of their fathers. Hence it was that, when the Rab-shakeh or Vizier of Sennacherib appeared before Jerusalem and summoned its inhabitants to submit to the Assyrian King, he was asked by the ministers of Hezekiah to speak in “Aramæan.” It was taken for granted that Aramaic was known to an Assyrian official and diplomatist just as it was to the Jewish officials themselves. The Rab-shakeh, however, knew the Hebrew language as well, and found it more to his purpose to use it in addressing the Jews. Here, then, we have an Assyrian officer who is acquainted not only with Sumerian, but also with two of the living languages of Western Asia. And yet he was not a scribe; he did not belong to the professional class of learned men. Nothing can show more clearly the advanced state of education even in the military kingdom of Assyria. In Babylonia learning had always been honored; from the days of Sargon of Akkad onward the sons of the reigning king did not disdain to be secretaries and librarians.