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[This is the second of a series of essays on debt, prompted by recent revelations about how the issue was handled in ancient Mesopotamia.]
Western civilization began to flourish about 6,000 years ago, not long after agriculture replaced hunting-and-gathering as the occupation of most humans, on the fertile ground between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The region is known in history as Mesopotamia, a cradle of civilization, and is known today, with terrible irony, as Iraq and Syria, war-ravaged graveyards of civilization.
One of the earliest systems of writing (cuneiform) began here, the wheel was invented here, the Semitic languages — Hebrew and Arabic — arose here, metalworking — the Bronze Age — began here, as did mathematics, astronomy and codified law. These were smart, creative people, who among many other things experimented with forms of government: city-states, kingdoms, elements of democracy, empires.
Very early on, shortly after it was invented, they all seem to have recognized the toxicity of debt. Modern historians discovered this only recently, because of breakthroughs in the decoding of ancient languages. For some time the revelations about debt were particular to some time frame or ruler being studied, but a few scholars began to see and pursue a wider pattern. The foremost among them, Dr. Michael Hudson of the University of Missouri, has spent 30 years fleshing out this pattern, with mind-blowing results.
By 4,500 years ago, it seems, virtually every king, emperor and warrior priest in all of Mesopotamia had come to understand that an economy based on agriculture cannot thrive — cannot even survive — if the people who do the farming are disaffected. And for over a thousand years by that time they had seen debt run out of control, over and over again, to turn the hardscrabble farmers into either rebellious slaves or wandering migrants, to the extreme detriment of their countries.
This, the leaders realized, is the nature of debt — to swell and spiral out of control until the debtor inevitably defaults, and the creditor gleefully takes ownership of the farmer’s land, wife, daughters and his person. (This, Dr. Hudson has learned, seems to have been the point of early money-lending: not the interest earned, but the land and people to be confiscated.) Thereafter, this is not going to be a happy or productive farmer.
Now, it is not the case, as we might suppose, that these farmers got themselves into trouble by profligate spending. Their economies were based on credit, but not on loans. Their income was the harvest, and it happened once a year, so in the interim the brewer of beer, the baker of bread, and the other providers of necessities kept accounts to be settled with payments of grain made on the threshing floor. They extended credit, not loans, and no interest accrued.
It was not a large beer bill that made a loan necessary; it would be a bad harvest, or a sudden tax levy by a greedy king, or some such misfortune threatening the ability of the farmer to keep his land. In his need he would find all too many lenders able and willing to make him a loan, secured by his land, his wife, his daughters and his person. All too often, the loan turned out to be his final misfortune.
What the leaders understood (by about 2500 BCE) was that their survival depended on the welfare of the farmer, and that any system that failed to keep the farmer’s head above water would fail. (Wouldn’t it be special if we had a few more national leaders today who expressed that understanding?)
And so they fixed it. In the ancient kingdoms of Sumer, in the empires of Akkadia and Assyria and Babylonia, they cured the cancer of debt, they lifted its yoke from their subjects and because they did, they survived for two thousand years to nurture the civilizations whose descendants today bestride much of the world and embody all the hardwon lessons of life in ancient Mesopotamia.
Except one. What they learned and did about debt has been almost completely expunged from history, even from the Bible, in what amounts to 28 centuries of fake news.
[Next in the series: “Jubilee: This Changes Everything.”]
Jubilee is covered in the Bible – I think only in the O.T. though.
The Children of Isis-Ra-El inherited the jubilee tradition from their Mesopotamian roots, rather than from their Egyptian experience. This is grounded in the fact that the Mesopotamian nation-states were less economically and politically stable than Egypt, and would therefore have been more likely to have developed governmental means to deal with the potentially disruptive effects of excessive debt.
The “wandering migrant”, Abraham, was himself a Mesopotamian, having lived in Ur and Haran before severing his bonds with civilization for a purely nomadic lifestyle. While he dispensed with the Mesopotamian pantheon (with the notable exception of the sky-god, El) he kept many of the traditions, laws and language that he was brought up in – including jubilee…In fact, Abraham even forgave debts of foreigners and potential adversaries when political expediency called for such action.
I don’t see a cover-up here. Obviously, the compilers of the ‘Literature of the People’ had an agenda – who doesn’t? But we can often learn as much or more about a society by studying the mythic biases of its official history rather than only the factual information therein…I believe this applies to our own society as well.
Agriculture underpins everything in the U.S. economy. The vicissitudes of Nature can ruin a farmer and bring a society to ruin, if society doesn’t support the farmer’s ability to come back from bad circumstances (foul weather, blight, over- or under-production, etc.). Since we will always need to eat, we will always be indebted to our farmers, and farm subsidies are essential to stable existence in the modern economy.
Unfortunately, smart debt management only gets you so far.
It’s a shame so much time had to pass before Malthus’s realization…