Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs

by A. H. Sayce

In the early days of Babylonia the interest upon a loan was paid in kind.

But the introduction of a circulating medium goes back to an ancient date, and it was not long before payment in grain or other crops was replaced by its equivalent in cash. Already before the days of Amraphel and Abraham, we find contracts stipulating for the payment of so many silver shekels per month upon each maneh lent to the borrower. Thus we have one written in Semitic-Babylonian which reads: “Kis-nunu, the son of Imur-Sin, has received one maneh and a half of silver from Zikilum, on which he will pay 12 shekels of silver (a month). The capital and interest are to be paid on the day of the harvest as guaranteed. [pg 153] Dated the year when Immerum dug the Asukhi canal.” Then follow the names of three witnesses.

The obligation to repay the loan on “the day of the harvest” is a survival from the time when all payments were in kind, and the creditor had a right to the first-fruits of the debtor's property. A contract dated in the reign of Khammurabi, or Amraphel, similarly stipulates that interest on a loan made to a certain Arad-ilisu by one of the female devotees of the Sun-god, should be paid into the treasury of the temple of Samas “on the day of the harvest.” The interest was reckoned at so much a month, as in the East to-day; originally it had to be paid at the end of each month, according to the literal terms of the agreement, but as time went on it became usual to reserve the payment to the end of six months or a year. It was only where the debtor was not considered trustworthy or the security was insufficient that the literal interpretation of the agreement was insisted on.

The rate of interest, as was natural, tended to be lower with the lapse of time and the growth of wealth. In the age of the Babylonian empire and the Persian conquest the normal rate was, however, still as high as 1 shekel a month upon each maneh, or twenty per cent. But we have a contract dated in the fifth year of Nebuchadnezzar in which a talent of silver is lent, and the interest charged upon it is not more than half a shekel per month on the maneh, or ten per cent. Three years later, in another contract, the rate of interest is stated to be five-sixths of a shekel, or sixteen and two-thirds per cent, while in [pg 154] the fifteenth year of Samas-sum-yukin the interest upon a loan of 16 shekels is only a quarter of a shekel. At this time Babylonia was suffering from the results of its revolt from Assyria, which may explain the lowness of the rate of interest. At all events, six years earlier, Remut, one of the members of the Egibi firm, lent a sum of money to a man and his wife without charging any interest at all upon it, and stipulating only that the money should be repaid when the land was again prosperous.

At times, however, money was lent upon the understanding that interest would be charged upon it only if it were not repaid by a specified date. Thus in the ninth year of Samas-sum-yukin half a maneh was lent by Suma to Tukubenu on the fourth of Marchesvan, or October, upon which no interest was to be paid up to the end of the following Tisri, or September, which corresponded with “the day of the harvest” of the older contracts; but after that, if the money were still unpaid, interest at the rate of half a shekel a month, or ten per cent., would be charged. At other times the interest was paid by the year, as with us, and not by the month; in this case it was at a lower rate than the normal twenty per cent. In the fourteenth year of Nabopolassar, for example, a maneh of silver was lent at the rate of 7 shekels on each maneh per annum—that is to say, at eleven and two-thirds per cent.—and under Nebuchadnezzar money was borrowed at annual interest of 8 shekels for each maneh, or thirteen and one-third per cent.

Full security was taken for a loan, and the contract relating to it was attested by a number of witnesses. [pg 155] Thus the following contract was drawn up in the third year of Nabonidos, a loan of a maneh of silver having been made by one of the members of the Egibi firm to a man and his wife: “One maneh of silver, the property of Nadin-Merodach, the son of Iqisa-bel, the son of Nur-sin, has been received by Nebo-baladan, the son of Nadin-sumi, and Bau-ed-herat, the daughter of Samas-ebus. In the month Tisri (September) they shall repay the money and the interest upon it. Their upper field, which adjoins that of Sum-yukin, the son of Sa-Nebo-sû, as well as the lower field, which forms the boundary of the house of the Seer, and is planted with palm-trees and grass, is the security of Nadin-Merodach, to which (in case of insolvency) he shall have the first claim. No other creditor shall take possession of it until Nadin-Merodach has received in full the capital and interest. In the month Tisri the dates which are then ripe upon the palms shall be valued, and according to the current price of them at the time in the town of Sakhrin, Nadin-Merodach shall accept them instead of interest at the rate of thirty-six qas (fifty quarts) the shekel (3s.). The money is intended to pay the tax for providing the soldiers of the king of Babylon with arms. Witnessed by Nebo-bel-sunu, the son of Bau-akhi, the son of Dahik; Nebo-dîni-ebus, the son of Kinenunâ; Nebo-zira-usabsi, the son, Samas-ibni Bazuzu, the son of Samas-ibni; Merodach-erba, the son of Nadin; and the scribe Bel-iddin, the son of Bel-yupakhkhir, the son of Dabibu. Dated at Sakhrinni, the 28th day of Iyyar (April), the third year of Nabonidos, King of Babylon.”

In Assyria the rate of interest was a good deal higher than it was in Babylonia. It is true that in a contract dated 667 B.C., one of the parties to which was the son of the secretary of the municipality of Dur-Sargon, the modern Khorsabad, it is twenty per cent., as in Babylonia, but this is almost the only case in which it is so. Elsewhere, in deeds dated 684 B.C., 656, and later, the rate is as much as twenty-five per cent., while in one instance—a deed dated 711 B.C.—it rises to thirty-three and a third per cent. Among the witnesses to the last-mentioned deed are two “smiths,” one of whom is described as a “coppersmith,” and the other bears the Armenian name of Sihduri or Sarduris. The money is usually reckoned according to the standard of Carchemish. That the rate of interest should have been higher in Assyria than in Babylonia is not surprising. Commerce was less developed there, and the attention of the population was devoted rather to war and agriculture than to trade. It seems to have been the conquest of Western Asia, the subjugation of the Phœnician cities, and above all the incorporation of Babylonia in the empire, which introduced a commercial spirit into Nineveh, and made it in the latter days of its existence an important centre of trade. Indeed, one of the objects of the Assyrian campaigns in Syria was to divert the trade of the Mediterranean into Assyrian hands; the fall of Carchemish made Assyria mistress of the caravan-road which led across the Euphrates, and of the commerce which had flowed from Asia Minor, while the ruin of Tyre and Sidon meant prosperity to the merchants of Nineveh. Nevertheless, [pg 157] the native population of Assyria was slow to avail itself of the commercial advantages which had fallen to it, and a large part of its trading classes were Arameans or other foreigners who had settled in the country. So large, indeed, was the share in Assyrian trade which the Arameans absorbed that Aramaic became the lingua panca, the common medium of intercommunication, in the commercial world of the second Assyrian empire, and, as has been already stated, many of the Assyrian contract-tablets are provided with Aramaic dockets, which give a brief abstract of their contents.

A memorandum signed by “Basia, the son of Rikhi,” furnishes us with the relative value of gold and silver in the age of Nebuchadnezzar. “Two shekels and a quarter of gold for twenty-five shekels and three-quarters of silver, one shekel worn and deficient in weight for seven shekels of silver, two and a quarter shekels, also worn, for twenty-two and three-quarters shekels of silver; in all five and a half shekels of gold for fifty-five and a half shekels of silver.” Gold, therefore, at this time would have been worth about eleven times more than silver. A few years later, however, in the eleventh year of Nabonidos, the proportion had risen and was twelve to one. We learn this from a statement that the goldsmith Nebo-edhernapisti had received in that year, on the 10th day of Ab, 1 shekel of gold, in 5-shekel pieces, for 12 shekels of silver. The coinage, if we may use such a term, was the same in both metals, the talent being divided into 60 manehs and the maneh into 60 shekels. There seems also to have been a bronze [pg 158] coinage, at all events in the later age of Assyria and Babylonia, but the references to it are very scanty, and silver was the ordinary medium of exchange. One of the contract-tablets, however, which have come from Assyria and is dated in the year 676 B.C., relates to the loan of 2 talents of bronze from the treasury of Istar at Arbela, which were to be repaid two months afterward. Failing this, interest was to be charged upon them at the rate of thirty-three and a third per cent., and it is implied that the payment was to be in bronze.

The talent, maneh, and shekel were originally weights, and had been adopted by the Semites from their Sumerian predecessors. They form part of that sexagesimal system of numeration which lay at the root of Babylonian mathematics and was as old as the invention of writing. So thoroughly was sixty regarded as the unit of calculation that it was denoted by the same single wedge or upright line as that which stood for “one.” Wherever the sexagesimal system of notation prevailed we may see an evidence of the influence of Babylonian culture.

It was the maneh, however, and not the talent, which was adopted as the standard. The talent, in fact, was too heavy for such a purpose; it implied too considerable an amount of precious metal and was too seldom employed in the daily business of life. The Babylonian, accordingly, counted up from the maneh to the talent and down to the shekel.