Debt and economic renewal in the ancient Near East : a colloquium held at Columbia University, November 1998 PDF
Preview Debt and economic renewal in the ancient Near East : a colloquium held at Columbia University, November 1998
J ) 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 H G - 3 ']5 (c 6 c' ' 3 1 'Ho 0 -'2 t' 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
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