Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

PRIMORDIAL DEBTS 65
were in financial trouble on collateral and begin to appropriate their
possessions if they were unable to pay. It usually started with grain,
sheep, goats, and furniture, then moved on to fields and houses, or, alternately
or ultimately, family members. Servants, if any, went quickly,
followed by children, wives, and in some extreme occasions, even the
borrower himself. These would be reduced to debt-peons: not quite
slaves, but very close to that, forced into perpetual service in the lender's
household-or, sometimes, in the Temples or Palaces themselves.
In theory, of course, any of them could be redeemed whenever the borrower
repaid the money, but for obvious reasons, the more a peasant's
resources were stripped away from him, the harder that became.
The effects were such that they often threatened to rip society
apart. If for any reason there was a bad harvest, large proportions of
the peasantry would fall into debt peonage; families would be broken
up. Before long, lands lay abandoned as indebted farmers fled
their homes for fear of repossession and joined semi-nomadic bands
on the desert fringes of urban civilization. Faced with the potential
for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings
periodically announced general amnesties: "clean slates," as economic
historian Michael Hudson refers to them. Such decrees would typically
declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts
were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all
debt-peons to return to their families. Before long, it became more or
less a regular habit for kings to make such a declaration on first assuming
power, and many were forced to repeat it periodically over the
course of their reigns.
In Sumeria, these were called "declarations of freedom"-and it
is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word
for "freedom" in any known human language, literally means "return
to mother"-since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed
to do.55
Michael Hudson argues that Mesopotamian kings were only in
a position to do this because of their cosmic pretensions: in taking
power, they saw themselves as literally recreating human society, and
so were in a position to wipe the slate clean of all previous moral obligations.
Still, this is about as far from what primordial-debt theorists
had in mind as one could possibly imagine.56
I I I I I
Probably the biggest problem in this whole body of literature is the initial
assumption: that we begin with an infinite debt to something called