Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Hammurabi was to put it when he abolished debts in Babylon in 1761 BC—“that the strong might not oppress the weak.”14 In the words of Michael Hudson, The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia’s financial slate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of “breaking the tablets,” that is, the debt records, restoring economic balance as part of the calendrical renewal of society along with the rest of nature. Hammurabi and his fellow rulers signaled these proclamations by raising a torch, probably symbolizing the sun-god of justice Shamash, whose principles were supposed to guide wise and fair rulers. Persons held as debt pledges were released to rejoin their families. Other debtors were restored cultivation rights to their customary lands, free of whatever mortgage liens had accumulated.15 Over the next several thousand years, this same list—canceling the debts, destroying the records, reallocating the land—was to become the standard list of demands of peasant revolutionaries everywhere. In Mesopotamia, rulers appear to have headed off the possibility of unrest by instituting such reforms themselves, as a grand gesture of cosmic renewal, a recreation of the social universe—in Babylonia, during the same ceremony in which the king reenacts his god Marduk’s creation of the physical universe. The history of debt and sin was wiped out, and it was time to begin again. But it’s also clear what they saw as the alternative: the wor...