In Assyria the rate of interest was a good deal higher than it was in Babylonia. It is true that in a contract dated 667 B.C., one of the parties to which was the son of the secretary of the municipality of Dur-Sargon, the modern Khorsabad, it is twenty per cent., as in Babylonia, but this is almost the only case in which it is so. Elsewhere, in deeds dated 684 B.C., 656, and later, the rate is as much as twenty-five per cent., while in one instance—a deed dated 711 B.C.—it rises to thirty-three and a third per cent. Among the witnesses to the last-mentioned deed are two “smiths,” one of whom is described as a “coppersmith,” and the other bears the Armenian name of Sihduri or Sarduris. The money is usually reckoned according to the standard of Carchemish. That the rate of interest should have been higher in Assyria than in Babylonia is not surprising. Commerce was less developed there, and the attention of the population was devoted rather to war and agriculture than to trade. It seems to have been the conquest of Western Asia, the subjugation of the Phœnician cities, and above all the incorporation of Babylonia in the empire, which introduced a commercial spirit into Nineveh, and made it in the latter days of its existence an important centre of trade. Indeed, one of the objects of the Assyrian campaigns in Syria was to divert the trade of the Mediterranean into Assyrian hands; the fall of Carchemish made Assyria mistress of the caravan-road which led across the Euphrates, and of the commerce which had flowed from Asia Minor, while the ruin of Tyre and Sidon meant prosperity to the merchants of Nineveh. Nevertheless, the native population of Assyria was slow to avail itself of the commercial advantages which had fallen to it, and a large part of its trading classes were Arameans or other foreigners who had settled in the country. So large, indeed, was the share in Assyrian trade which the Arameans absorbed that Aramaic became the _lingua panca_, the common medium of intercommunication, in the commercial world of the second Assyrian empire, and, as has been already stated, many of the Assyrian contract-tablets are provided with Aramaic dockets, which give a brief abstract of their contents.