Formal advances of working materials
A number of tablets deal with advances of wool or woollen yarn made by temple officials to weavers and dyers to work up. As a rule they contain a number of words connected doubtless with the weaver's craft which are not yet made out. The following is a fairly simple example:[662]
One talent of wool belonging to the palace, price ten shekels of silver, property of Utul-Ishtar the abi ṣâbê, which Ishme-Sin, son of Sin-bêl-aplim, Marduk-mushallim, son of Sin-idinnam, Ilushu-ibni and Bêlshunu, sons of Sin-eribam have borrowed. The day that the tax-collector of the palace demands it they shall pay the money of the palace.
Elsewhere the time of loan may be stated, two months for example.[663] The price is always reckoned at six minas of wool for a shekel. It seems that the borrowers were not obliged to repay until a certain date, or until a demand was made for certain taxes. They then must pay in silver.
Assyrian loans ana pûḫi
In the Assyrian examples of money-loans the same general features constantly recur. The most common are loans ana pûḫi, which may be taken to mean “for consideration,” as the word pûḫu means an “exchange.” But there is never any statement of what the consideration was. Some have thought, that as the bond was invariably given to the creditor to be broken up on the repayment of the loan, the exchange referred to was a restoration of the bond in return for the money. But the consideration, which is a legal presumption, may have lain in the fact that the borrowers were tenants on the metayer system and had a right to borrow of their landlord, free of interest, at seed-time and harvest. On such loans interest is only demanded when the debtor fails to repay at the fixed date.
Usual rate of interest
The rate of interest charged as a penalty for non-payment or late payment was twenty-five per cent. per mensem, three hundred per cent. per annum. This interest was intended [pg 256] to secure prompt payment, but was not unfair in view of the increase of value obtained by investing it in corn and then sowing that. Other rates were one-third and one-eighth, but there is no fixed rate of interest for the loan of money, except when it was ana pûḫi.
For the use of corn
The interest on corn was thirty ḲA per homer. Some think the homer had sixty ḲA, which would make the interest fifty per cent. But no case has yet been found which gives the number of ḲA in a homer.