This is Eve. Michael Hudson has regularly explained how a shift towards putting creditors’ rights above the debtors’, indeed societal, needs occurred in the Greek and Roman era, giving rise to oligarchy. Modern studies of excessive debt have found that excessive personal debt causes financial crises, and that personal debt is economically unproductive. Yet, despite our modern economic obsession with generating growth, our debt cancellation systems generally address the problem on a case-by-case basis, through bankruptcy, or, in the United States, through complex schemes that seem designed to eliminate participation, which are complex and expensive to implement at the household level (and are not cheap for businesses, either). Below, Hudson reminds readers and would-be scholars that ancient debt relief was intended to maintain social stability, specifically to prevent servitude and preserve the nation’s ability to raise its military.
Michael Hudson is an American economist, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and a research fellow at the Levy Institute for Economics at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. For more on Hudson’s economic history, see At the observatory. Produced by Human Bridge
Why was a clean slate so important to Bronze Age societies? Mesopotamia recognized from the 3rd millennium that debt pressures, if left unchecked, would distort normal financial and land ownership patterns to the detriment of communities. They recognized that debts grew autonomously with their own dynamics, driven by an exponential curve of compound interest, rather than adjusting to reflect the debtor’s ability to pay. This idea has never been accepted by modern economic theory, which assumes that disruptions will be resolved by automatically self-correcting market mechanisms. This assumption hampers discussion of what governments can do to prevent economic destabilization from debt overhead.
The cosmic dimension of clean slate
The Mesopotamian concept of divine kingship was key to the practice of the Clean Slate Proclamation. Prefaces to Babylonian edicts cited promises by rulers to serve the city god by promoting equity in the land. Myth and ritual were integrated with economic relations and were seen as forming a natural order that rulers were obliged to oversee. In this context, debt forgiveness served to fulfill a sacred obligation to the city god. These pardons, commemorated in year names and by donations of temple funds, were likely proclaimed at great festivals filled with rituals, such as the raising of sacred torches by Babylonian rulers to mark the regeneration of socio-cosmic order. The Romanian historian Mircea Eliade called this the “eternal return,” a cyclical concept of time that formed the context in which rulers restored their ideal society. Maintain the status quoBy integrating debt cancellation into social cosmology, the image of the ruler restoring economic order became central to archaic ideas of justice and fairness.
(Mis)interpretation of the meaning of “freedom”
In Leviticus 25, the Hebrew word for the Jubilee year is maliciousHowever, it was not until cuneiform became readable that it was recognized as a cognate language with Akkadian. AndularamBefore the earlier meaning was revealed, the King James Version of the Bible translated this phrase as: “Declare. freedom “To the whole land and all its inhabitants,” but Andularam It can be either moving freely like flowing water, or (in the case of humans) being freed and becoming a slave returning to one’s family.
Modern interpretations of keywords such as Sumerian are many and varied. AmargiAkkadian Andularam and Mishalmand Hurrian Shudhutu It functions as an ideological Rorschach test, reflecting the translator’s own beliefs. The first reading was by François Thureau-Danghen.(1)Associating Sumerian terms Amargi Akkadian Andularam Ten years later, Scholl (1915) compared these acts to Solon’s SeisakuteiaThe “Abandonment of Burdens” which cancelled rural debts in Athens in 594 B.C. Canadian scholar George Barton(2) Translated the use of the terms Urukagina and Gudea Amargi Jesuit Anton Deimel calls it “liberation”(3) He described it rather vaguely as “security.”
Maurice Lambert(Four) Initially, Urukagina’s Amargi It served as a tax exemption because most of the debts to be cancelled were owed to the palace. Later, in 1972, he discovered a similar decree from Enmetena some 50 years earlier, Amargi As meaning debt forgiveness. FR Klaus(5) He followed this view in 1954 and expanded his research into Babylonian decrees in a much more detailed 1984 study of rulers “raising the torch” as a signal for debt forgiveness.(6)
In the United States, Samuel KramerHistory begins in Sumer (New York, 1959) interpreted these laws as tax cuts. The New York Times On his first day in office in 1981, President Reagan urged the next president to follow Urukagina’s example and cut taxes. Amargi It gained popularity among American liberals who wanted an older precedent for tax protests.
Kramer(7) He also denigrated Urukagina’s reforms as “gone with the wind,” “too little, too late,” and a failure that did not permanently solve the debt problem.(8)The 19th century saw the Babylonian debt forgiveness as invalid because it required repeated enforcement: “The necessity for the repeated enactment of the same clause is Mishalm“It provided relief but did not remove the difficulties that necessitated it. … What was needed seemed to be reforms which would remove all need for such adjustments.” He did not suggest what could have been done to create an economy free of credit cycles.
A practical solution
Mesopotamian rulers did not seek a debt-free utopia, but instead dealt pragmatically with the worst consequences of top-heavy rural debt. Usury was not prohibited, as in the Jewish Exodus Code, but effect These royal edicts maintained the basic structure of the economy: the palace did not prevent the accrual of new debts and continued to rent land to tenant farmers, who were owed the usual rate of crops and were obliged to pay the usual interest penalties for default.
Igor Dyakonov(9) “words Andularam It does not mean “political liberation.” It is a translation of the Sumerian word. Amargi “Return to the Mother,” or “return to the original state,” does not mean liberation from any supreme power, but the cancellation of debts, obligations, etc.
The Assyrian word for “washing the slabs” (Hubram Masam;(Ten) It may refer to dissolving the stone tablets in water, similar to breaking or crushing them. Kemal Balkan likens this to the Babylonian word for “killing the stone tablets.”(11) The idea, he explained, was to wipe out grain debts by physically destroying the records.(12) He likens the idea of ”cleansing” to the rituals of purifying the people from injustices that displeased the Sumerian and Babylonian patron deities. Thus, Urukagina’s edict is thought to have cleansed Lagash from the moral stain of injustice.
An anachronistic, creditor-centric, clean-slate view
Sumer and Babylonia maintained their economic survival through the Clean Slate, instead of enforcing debt contracts at the expense of social and military instability.Today’s creditor-oriented ideology denies the success of the Clean Slate in subverting free market relations.It portrays the ancient past as much like our world, as if civilizations developed by individuals with modern orthodox thinking, interest rates were determined simply by market supply and demand, and the risk of insolvency was appropriately adjusted.
Modern economic theory assumes that debt is usually repayable and that interest rates reflect the borrower’s profits. That is, the decline in interest rates from Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome is due to falling profit rates and/or increased safety of investments. In this view, debt forgiveness would only have made the debt problem worse by increasing risk and interest rates for creditors.
Modernist assumptions distract from what actually happened. No ancient writer is known to have linked interest rates to risk, or to the use of seeds or breeding cattle to produce offspring. One can well wonder whether it was fortunate for Babylonian society’s survival that its rulers were not modern “advanced economic theorists.” If they had not declared a “clean slate,” creditors would have enslaved their debtors and irreversibly seized their lands. But by canceling crop debts, the rulers acknowledged that the palace had taken all it could without destroying the foundations of the economy. If they had demanded that cultivators repay outstanding debts by offering their families and land rights to royal tax collectors (who were trying to keep the debts for crop yields for themselves), the palace would not have been able to send these debtors into forced labor or into the military to resist foreign attacks.
As economies polarized in antiquity, markets certainly became more unstable, but it wasn’t until late antiquity that Diodorus of Sicily (I.79) explained the most practical rationale for the Clean Slate. Describing how the Egyptian pharaoh Bakenranef (720-715) abolished debt slavery and canceled undocumented debts, Diodorus wrote that the pharaoh’s guiding logic was:
“The body of the nation should belong to the state in order that it may make available to it the services which it owes to its citizens both in time of war and in time of peace. For we considered it absurd that a soldier about to go out to fight for his country should be detained in prison by his creditors for the repayment of a debt, and that the greed of civilians should thus endanger the safety of all.”
Early Mesopotamian rulers probably thought so: forcing soldiers to pledge their land to creditors and then stripping them of this basic means of self-sufficiency through seizure would rob a community of its fighting power or lead to desertion and defection. By the 4th century BCE, a Greek military writer known as Tactics suggested that a general attacking a town could promise to forgive debts if the inhabitants switched to his side. Similarly, a town’s defenders could bolster resistance by agreeing to forgive debts.
This emergency military tactic no longer reflected the king’s obligation to restore economic independence as the guiding principle of the overall order. Gone was the ability to release debtors from their debts and to cancel the sale or confiscation of land when natural disasters hindered their ability to repay or when a new ruler came to the throne. The era of oligarchy came, and the public power to cancel the excessive growth of debt across society was abolished.
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(1) Sumerian and Akkadian inscriptions1905, pp. 86-87
(2) Royal inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad1929.
(3) The economy of Urukagina and the temples of the precursors in the Sumerian period1930, p. 9.
(Four) “The Reformation of Urkagina”, La Revue Archeology 60, 1956, pp. 169-184.
(5) Hymn of the Kings of Babylon (SD 5, (Leiden)).
(6) Fritz Rudolf Krauss, The royal cult of ancient Babylonia1984.
(7) Samuel Noah Kramer History begins in Sumer 1959, p. 49.
(8) Steven J. Lieberman, “The Amur Dynasty’s Royal Reforms,” Oriental Bibliography 46, 1989, pp. 241-259.
(9) “The Sumerian City-States” and “Early Despotism in Mesopotamia”, Early Antiquity 1991, pp. 67-97, 234.
(Ten) A. Kirk Grayson Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: From the Beginnings to Ashur-resha-ish INear Eastern Records Volume 1, Harrasowicz, 1972, p. 7.
(11)“Debt Cancellations Inscribed on the Cappadocian Tablets of Kultepe,” Anatolian Studies, submitted to Hans C. Guterbock, 1974, pp. 29-36, 33.
(12) Raymond Westbrook, “Social Justice in the Ancient Near East,” in Morris Silver and K. D. Irani, eds. Social Justice in the Ancient World1995, pp. 149-163.
