Table Of ContentJ )
ebt and
E R
c o n o m ic enewal
A N E
in the ncient ear ast
Volume III
in a series sponsored by the
Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends
and the International Scholars Conference on
Ancient Near Eastern Economies
A Colloquium Held at Columbia University, November 1998
Edited by
Michael Hudson
Marc Van De Mieroop
CDL
Bethesda, Maryland
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Cover Art: Inscription of Enmetena, ruler of Lagash c. 2400 BC (AO 24414).
Photo by M. Chuzeville. Courtesy of the Louvre Museum.
Copyright © 2002 by CDL Press
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, re
cording or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be
invented, without permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Debt and economic renewal in the ancient Near East / edited by Michael Hudson
and Marc Van De Mieroop
p. cm
At head of title: The International Scholars Conference of Ancient Near East
ern Economies, vol. 3.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-883053-71-4
1. Debt-Middle East-History. I. Hudson, Michael, 1939- II. Van de
Mieroop, Marc. III. The International Scholars Conference of Ancient Near
Eastern Economies.
HG3756.M628 D43 2002
336.3,433394-dc21 2001052915
Typsetting and design: Lynn Yost
Type: 11/13.2 Adobe Garamond with customized diacritics
9c s is
6 /*> /o
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Reconstructing the Origins of Interest-Bearing Debt
and the Logic of Clean Slates
Michael Hudson
2. A History of Near Eastern Debt?
Marc Van De Mieroop
3. “Debt” in an Archaic Palatial Economy:
The Evidence from Ebla
Alfonso Archi
4. Money-Lending Practices in Ur III Babylonia:
The Issue of Economic Motivation
Piotr Steinkeller
5. Royal Edicts of the Old Babylonian Period —
Structural Background
Johannes Renger
6. Credit as a Facilitator of Exchange
in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia
Marc Van De Mieroop
7. Debt and Debt Remission at Nuzi
Carlo Zaccagnini
8. Debts and Indebtedness in the Neo-Babylonian Period:
Evidence from the Institutional Archives
Michael Jursa
9. Debt, Interest, Pledge and Forfeiture
in the Neo-Babylonian and Early Achaemenid Period:
The Evidence from Private Archives
Cornelia Wunsch
10. Loans, Credit and Interest in Ancient Egypt
Edward Bleiberg
11.Fiscal Renewal in Ancient Egypt:
Its Language, Symbols, and Metaphors
Ogden Goelet, Jr. 277
12. General Discussion
Edited by Michael Hudson 327
Bibliographic Short Titles 357
4
Acknowledgments
The papers published here were presented at the fourth colloquium of
the International Scholars Conference of Ancient Near Eastern Economics
(ISCANEE), sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Long-term Eco
nomic Trends (ISLET), that was held at Columbia University (New York)
on November 11-13, 1998. In addition Professor A. Archi was invited to
submit a paper on the topic of debt as attested in the Ebla texts, and in
vited guests participated in the discussions.
We would like to thank C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky and the American
School of Prehistoric Research at Harvard (Peabody Museum), the Rob
ert Schalkenbach Foundation and the Henry George School of New York
for funding the November 1998 colloquium and its publication in this
volume.
Thanks are due to Columbia University for hosting this event. We
were provided with a meeting space by the Director of the Heyman Cen
ter for the Humanities, and with generous help by the administrative
staff during the meeting. We are also grateful to David Cohen, Vice-
President of Arts and Sciences, for his assistance.
As with our earlier volumes, we would like to thank Anne Robertson
for transcribing the oral discussion from audio tapes made at the meeting
by Lynn Yost.
Michael Hudson (ISLET)
Marc Van De Mieroop (Columbia)
17 September 2001
5
1.
Reconstructing the Origins of Interest-Bearing Debt
and the Logic of Clean Slates
Michael Hudson
ISLET
This third volume in our ISCANEE/ISLET series places the phenom
enon of interest-bearing debt in its historical context by tracing its
dynamics from Sumer down through the Neo-Babylonian epoch, and
relating what is known about early Egypt, Nuzi and other neighboring
regions. Our objective is to explain how commercial and agrarian debt
came to be incorporated into the “DNA” structure of modern economies.
Also examined is the logic underlying the Clean Slates that liberated
bondservants and restored to cultivators the rights to the land and crops
on which creditors had foreclosed. By annulling the overhang of crop
debts and related personal indebtedness, these royal edicts reversed the
most adverse consequences of agrarian usury. Their prototypes are found
in Lagash proclaimed by the rulers Enmetena c. 2400, Urukagina c. 2350
and Gudea c. 2150, but such edicts are found above all in second-millen
nium Babylonia to rescue debtors whose family members had been reduced
to bondage or who had lost their lands to foreclosing creditors. These
“restorations of order” became quite elaborate, culminating in the Edict
of Ammisaduqa in 1646. Their echoes are found down through the Jubi
lee Year of Leviticus, by which time the initiative was taken out of the
hands of kings and placed at the center of religious law as part of the
Mosaic Covenant. Kindred Egyptian policies are reflected in inscriptions
as late as the Ptolemaic-era Rosetta Stone (196 BC). Rather than show
ing a common pattern of development, however, the Judaic and Egyptian
material shows how unique Mesopotamian practices were.
If the Sumerians and Babylonians had been more considerate of
modern desires to understand the logic that underlay their practices, they
might have left a treatise explaining them for our benefit. But they ne
glected to do so, probably believing that their way of dealing with problems
was so obvious as to be self-evident. Their documents state what hap
pened or what was supposed to happen, but not why things were done in
the way they were. Anyone setting out to translate the cuneiform records
therefore is obliged to fill in the gaps where they are silent. Some degree
of inference is required — and where there is inference, modern biases
tend to raise their head as to what seems “natural.”
Nowhere is modernist bias stronger than in the interpretation of in
terest-bearing debt. Yet few have ventured beyond the direct evidence to
create a plausible hypothesis of how rural usury evolved alongside of com
mercial credit in the third and second millennia BC. The result is that
debt relations remain one of the least analyzed and most problematic
Bronze Age phenomena, despite the major social, economic and even
military and religious role they played. Economists have found it easier
to assume that the motivations (and identities) of Sumerian and
Babylonian creditors and debtors were those described by modern eco
nomic theory. To promote this assumption, it helps simply to ignore
Mesopotamia’s experience altogether, and to pick up the analysis of debt
in an epoch when it had come to exhibit more modern attributes, in
classical antiquity. Anthropologists for their part look to surviving tribal
practices for ideas of how the Bronze Age world may have functioned.
Assyriologists and classicists have tended to rely on modern economic
and anthropological models rather than developing a new set of catego
ries from their own field. Yet it should be the economists and anthropologists
who rely on the cuneiform record, however sketchy it is, rather than
skirting the topic by looking at how debt practices have ended up in
today’s world.
To ward off modernist preconceptions, it may be helpful to establish
what did not happen in early Mesopotamia so as to dispose of some of
the most anachronistic theories of how the interest charges originated.
Merely translating what the terse records say is not sufficient to explain
the social structures that produced them. Fortunately, the records are
sufficiently informative to show a world that operated on different prin
ciples from those that most modern economists assume to have been
primordial.
A major outstanding economic question, for instance, concerns
whether the charging of interest began in a public-sector context or was
developed by well-to-do individuals acting in their own private capacity.
Sumerian records suggest that temples advanced the earliest assets at in
terest, but northern Mesopotamian records reflect less centralized practices.
In seeking to explain what came first, economic theory offers a deduc
8 D ebt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient N ear East
tive, a priori logic drawn from the modern world. This logic is so indi
vidualistic as to hold that centralized planning is inherendy unstable.
Sumerian reality shows that this logic must be missing something impor
tant, for administered interest rates remain stable century after century.
The discipline of anthropology provides comparative material from
surviving low-surplus tribal communities, but none of these possesses the
outward-reaching commercial dynamics of ancient Mesopotamia. What
is necessary is to explain how the region’s takeoff from the fifth to the
third millennium BC occurred along lines different from the usual an
thropological as well as economic models.
Anthropological gifi exchange, mutual aid and reciprocity
Anthropologists have shown how omnipresent the debt phenomenon is.
Wergild-type compensation debts to heal breaches of the peace caused by
manslaughter and other personal injury probably extend back to the ori
gins of civilization, and webs of mutual aid must have developed even
prior to the Neolithic. Such obligations survive in modern social interac
tion among friends, family members and neighbors, and as “debts to
society” to make restitution for having caused injury. These kinds of debt
are payable, and help bind society together, not polarize it. There is no
stricdy economic basis for charging interest on them, as they are not
commercial in character.
How did interest originate?
In The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss sought the source of interest in the
customary overplus given by people reciprocating a present. As a proxy
for supposedly universal customs that led to the charging of interest in
Greece and Rome, he described the podatch ceremonies of the Kwakiud
on Canada’s Pacific Coast, treating their eccentric practices as an ana
logue for civilization in its infancy. Underlying this view was the Victorian
assumption of a singular progression based on stages of development as
an inevitable sequence.
But like the great majority of surviving tribal communities, the
Kwakiud show culture contact replete with borrowings and adaptations.
Anthropologists who rely on what has been observed in tribal communi
ties in the modern world make an implicit working assumption that these
communities have remained pristine rather than adopting practices that
have mutated over the centuries and, indeed, millennia. Few anthropo
logical studies address Mesopotamia’s pivotal role in shaping civilization’s
economic institutions. (Curiously, there has been more anthropological
M. Hudson 9
