Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

We have already had occasion to note the predominance of credit money in Mesopotamia, the earliest urban civilization that we know about. In the great temple and palace complexes, not only did money serve largely as an accounting measure rather than physically changing hands, merchants and tradespeople developed credit arrangements of their own. Most of these took the physical form of clay tablets, inscribed with some obligation of future payment, that were then sealed inside clay envelopes and marked with the borrower’s seal. The creditor would keep the envelope as a surety, and it would be broken open on repayment. In some times or places, at least, these bullae appear to have become what we would now call negotiable instruments, since the tablet inside did not simply record a promise to pay the original lender, but was designated “to the bearer”—in other words, a tablet recording a debt of five shekels of silver (at prevailing rates of interest) could circulate as the equivalent of a five-shekel promissory note—that is, as money.5