The financial prosperity of the temple and its attachés is shown by their opening their doors for financial business pure and simple, money-lending in time becoming quite an important branch of the temple work. The loans however seem to have generally been free loans, no interest being exacted. But the temple had its obligations to perform as well as its privileges to enjoy, one of the duties incumbent upon the temple authorities being the ransoming of a fellow townsman who had been taken prisoner by the enemy. (_C_) THE ASSYRIAN ERA 1. _STATE OF SOCIETY_ In Assyrian times the same explicit or implicit regulations in regard to the family seem to have been in force, or tacitly agreed to, as those which obtained in the older Babylonian period. Apparently a man was only expected in the normal way to marry one woman, though it seems probable that in the event of the first wife proving childless it was regarded as quite justifiable and legitimate for a man to take to himself another woman, in view of the desirability of his having an heir.[183] Accordingly monogamy seems to have been the general rule, though polygamy was by no means unknown. When a man married, he left his father and mother and was expected to “cleave” unto his wife, and they became “one flesh” and inhabited “one house”; in short, the Assyrian “home” was normally the same as the English “home” of to-day. As in the time of Khammurabi, women could be legal owners of property, and often owned farms and occupied vineyards. The general pursuits of the people were much the same as those followed by the earlier inhabitants of Mesopotamia. The population was, as then, largely agricultural; the land required the same careful and elaborate irrigation while the ground had to be ploughed, the seed sown, and the harvest reaped as heretofore. A corn-land holding[184] usually had a house attached to it, and also a court where the corn was stored, which thus served the purpose, if not resembling the appearance, of a barn. A large number of people were evidently employed in the vineyards, which must sometimes have been very extensive, for the number of plants in a single vineyard in one case was as many as 49,300, and it is a significant fact that the most celebrated wines in Babylonia came from the north, while it is also worth noting the frequency with which the vine occurs on Assyrian bas-reliefs. Orchards and gardens also abounded, though what grew in them is to some extent a matter of conjecture; if however we may assume that the list of plants mentioned in the Babylonian _Garden Tablet_ published by Meissner, holds good also for the Assyrian garden, leek, onion, garlic, lettuce, coriander, hyssop, turnip, cabbage, and radish must have been familiar garden products.