These inflated skins were largely used in warfare for conveying troops and animals across a stream. The chief officers, along with their chariots and commissariat, were ferried across in boats, but the soldiers had to strip, and with the help of the skins convey themselves, their arms, the horses, and other baggage to the opposite bank.
At times a pontoon-bridge of boats was constructed, at other times the Assyrian army was fortunate enough to meet with bridges of stone or wood. In fact, such bridges existed on all the main roads which it traversed. Western Asia was more thickly populated then than is at present the case, and the roads were not only more numerous than they are to-day, but better kept. Hence the ease and rapidity with which large bodies of men were moved by the Assyrian kings from one part of Asia to another. Where a road did not already exist, it was made by the advancing army, timber being cleared and a highway thrown up for the purpose.
As road-makers the Assyrians seem to have anticipated the Romans. Both their military and their trading instincts led them in this direction. It was only when they came to the water that their career was checked. Excellent as they were as soldiers, they never became sailors. The boats of the Tigris and Euphrates were either rafts or circular coracles of skins stretched on a wooden framework. When Sennacherib wished to attack the Chaldeans of [Beth-Yagina] in their place of refuge on the Persian Gulf, he had to transport Phœnicians from the west to build his galleys, and to navigate them afterwards. It was the Babylonians 'whose cry was in their ships;' the Assyrians fought and traded on shore.
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 10s. 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.
It was only in the case of the monarch himself that the signatures of attesting witnesses were dispensed with. The British Museum possesses a sort of private will made by Sennacherib in favour of Esar-haddon, when the latter was not as yet heir-apparent to the throne. In this no witnesses are mentioned, and it is considered sufficient that the document should be lodged in the imperial archives. It runs as follows: 'I, Sennacherib, king of legions, king of Assyria, bequeathe armlets of gold, quantities of ivory, a platter of gold, ornaments and chains for the neck, all these beautiful things of which there are heaps, and three sorts of precious stones, 1-1/2 manehs and 2-1/2 shekels in weight, to Esar-haddon, my son, whose name was afterwards changed to Assur-sar-illik-pal by my wish. I have deposited the treasure in the house of Amuk. Thine is the kingdom, O Nebo, our light!' Payments, it must be remembered, were still made by weight, coined money not having been introduced until after the time of Nebuchadnezzar.
The business-like character of the trading community of Nineveh will best be gathered from the documents themselves which have been left to us. It will, therefore, not be out of place to add here translations of some of the contract tablets:—
I. 'Ten shekels of the best silver for the head of Istar of Nineveh, which Bil-lubaladh has lent on a loan in the presence of Mannu-ki-Arbela [here follow three seals]; the silver is to have interest paid upon it at four per cent. The silver has been given on the third day of the month. (Dated) the third day of Sebat, in the eponymy of Rimmon-lid-ani. The witnesses (are) Khatpi-sumnu, Rahu, Ziru-yukin, Neriglissor, Ebed-Nebo of Selappa, Musezib-Assur, Nebo-sallim-sunu, Khanni, and Bel-sad-ili.'
Then follow two lines and a half of Aramaic, the first of which contains the name of Mannu-ki-Arbela.