The Money Mountain (V)

The central relationship that money crystallizes is between lender and borrower. Look again at those Mesopotamian clay tablets. In each case, the transactions recorded on them were repayments of commodities that had been loaned; the tablets were evidently drawn up and retained by the lender (often in a sealed clay container) to record the amount due and the date of repayment. The lending system of ancient Babylon was evidently quite sophisticated. Debts were transferable, hence 'pay the bearer' rather than a named creditor. Clay receipts or drafts were issued to those who deposited grain or other commodities at royal palaces or temples. Borrowers were expected to pay interest (a concept which was probably derived from the natural increase of a herd of livestock), at rates that were often as high as 20 per cent. Mathematical exercises from the reign of Hammurabi (1792 - 1750 BC) suggest that something like compound interest could be charged on long-term loans. But the foundation on which all of this rested was the underlying credibility of a borrower's promise to repay. (It is no coincidence that in English the root of 'credit' is credo, the Latin for 'I believe'.) Debtors might periodically be relieved - indeed the Laws of Hammurabi prescribed debt forgiveness every three years - but this does not appear to have deterred private as well as public lenders from doing business in the reasonable expectation of getting their money back. On the contrary, the long-term trend in ancient Mesopotamia was for private finance to expand. By the sixth century BC, families like the Babylonian Egibi had emerged as powerful landowners and lenders, with commercial interests as far afield as Uruk over a hundred miles to the south and Persia to the east. The thousands of clay tablets that survive from that period testify to the number of people who at one time or another were in debt to the Egibi. The fact that the family thrived for five generations suggests that they generally collected their debts.


It would not be quite correct to say that credit was invented in ancient Mesopotamia. Most Babylonian loans were simple advances from royal or religious storehouses. Credit was not being created in the modern sense discussed later in this chapter. Nevertheless, this was an important beginning. Without the foundation
of borrowing and lending, the economic history of our world would scarcely have got off the ground. And without the ever-growing network of relationships between creditors and debtors, today's global economy would grind to a halt. Contrary to the famous song in the musical Cabaret, money does not literally make the world go round. But it does make staggering quantities of people, goods and services go around the world.

The remarkable thing is how belatedly and hesitantly the idea of credit took root in the very part of the world where it has flourished most spectacularly.