Usury In Old Babylon and In the Roman Empire

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Queen of Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld, almost certainly the Goddess Inanna/Ishtar. Terracotta relief. Dated around 2000 B.C.E.
© S. Beaulieu, after Neumann Plate 126.


Sacred Tree, Horned Goddess, and Priest(ess). Cylinder seal impression. Dated about 2330-2150 B.C.E.
© S. Beaulieu, after Wolkstein and Kramer 1983: 3.
larger view of image
http://www.matrifocus.com/LAM05/spotlight.htm



http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/ ... l-tree.htm




Stele decorated with a bulls head Bethsaida, northwest of the Sea of Galilee,
9th – 8th century BCE  made of Basalt

The relief appearing on this stele is somewhat deceptive. At first glance, it appears to depict a pole surmounted by a bull's head. Closer examination, however, reveals a pair of arms and legs, suggesting a human figure. This impression is strengthened by the sword suspended diagonally across the figure's torso. The ambiguity of the image reflects the difficulty in identifying the deity it represents

In the Ancient Near East, the bull's head – the one indisputable feature of the relief – was a symbol of both the storm god, Hadad, and the moon god. The moon god was responsible for the swelling of the rivers and the herds of cattle, and was therefore also a god of fertility and abundance. He shared the latter role with Hadad, responsible for rainfall, the fecundity of all living things, and the fruitfulness of the soil (which accounts for Hadad ' s association with the bull, a beast that played a vital role in agriculture). Since both deities were symbolized by the bull, it is difficult to determine which one is represented by the relief; the image may have stood for both of these great gods

Excavations at Bethsaida have revealed a strong, fortified city. Next to the city gate stood a courtyard, in which this stele was found in scattered pieces, along with other ritual objects, suggesting that the courtyard was used for cultic purposes.

http://www.english.imjnet.org.il/htmls/ ... x?c0=13091


Financing Civilization
© William N. Goetzmann, all rights reserved


This is the first chapter of a book about the finance and its impact upon civilization. It is provided for academic use, and may not be copied. Comments on this draft are welcome. I thank Marc Van der Meiroop, Denise Schmandt-Bessert and Rick Antle for their suggestions. All errors are the sole responsibility of the author. Please contact me with corrections and suggestions. Feel free to link to parts if you are interested. If you know of relevant maps or graphics I may link on the internet, please tell me. I have written captions for a number of figures which are linked in the text, but out of respect for copyright law, I have not provided pictures.

Contents

The First Steps out of Eden
The Origins of Finance
Ancient Contracts
Early Financial Accounts
The Urban Economy
The Idea of Lending
The Idea of Interest
Borrowing in Babylon
An Early Roadmap to Riches?
An Ancient Wall Street
The Merchants of Ur
"Clay Profits"
Debt is Good -- But For Whom?
Early Mutual Funds?
Government Regulations and the Great Crash
Mesopotamian Twilight
Finance Moves West
The Ancient Financial World

Sources

The First Steps Out of Eden

Warka today is a parched, tree-less mound in the Iraqi desert. Except for an occasional archaeologist or two, its only visitors are Arab shepherds grazing flocks of sheep and goats among the ruins. Few traces remain of the city wall built by its ancient ruler Gilgamesh(see also: Gilgamesh reference), or of the temple of his mate, the goddess Inanna. Five thousand years ago, Uruk was a lush metropolis of temples, houses and gardens; a powerful city-state whose cultural and political influence extended the length of the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. It has been argued that Uruk was the birthplace of urbanism, of monumental architecture, of written numerals, of written language and the world's first literature. Small wonder that it may have also been the birthplace of finance.

The Origins of Finance

We may never know when finance began, because financial contracts are as old as written language -- in fact, writing appears to have been invented for the purposes of recording financial deals. The first archaeological traces of financial activity appear in the earliest urban civilizations in the Near East. Where did the idea of borrowing and lending come from? How did the idea of interest payments evolve? Who first realized that "time is money?" The answers to at least some of these questions lie buried in ruins of Uruk, and her ancient sister-cities of Mesopotamia. In 1929 the German archaeologist Julius Jordan dug a deep trench into the legendary Inanna temple precinct. He made a spectacular discovery: The goddess' home and storehouse was elegantly decorated with a multi-colored colonnade, and nearby lay the stone steps of the temple -- exactly as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest literary composition. Given the extraordinary architectural finds, the more prosaic details of the Uruk excavations received scant attention. In his journals, Jordan recorded the recovery of a number of curious little tokens "shaped like commodities of daily life: jars, loaves and animals." Their importance went largely unnoticed until the work of professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Besserat showed that the clay tokens resembled pictographic inscriptions on clay tablets from Uruk.

These Uruk pictographic tablets have long been recognized as the first steps towards written language, however, no-one paid much attention to Jordan's little tokens -- until now. Professor Besserat found that the pictograph for cloth, for instance, could be traced to a round striated token. The symbol for sweet evolved from the token shaped like a honey jar, the symbol for food evolved from a token shaped like a full dish. Most of the tokens represented commodities from daily life: lambs, sheep, cows, dogs, loaves of bread, jars of oil, honey, beer, milk, clothing, ropes, wool and rugs, and even "abstract " goods, such as units of work, and land. Apparently, these were the items once contained in Inanna's "holy storehouse" at the time of Gilgamesh.

These tokens were, in Professor Besserat's terms, elements in "a system of accounting" used by the temple priests and perhaps even by Gilgamesh himself. It appears that they were kept in hollow clay envelopes, about the size of modern day softballs, called bullae. If this was an accounting system, it was a curious one indeed. The envelopes had to be broken each time the accountant wanted to check the figures! The Uruk accountants solved this problem by making marks on the outside of the bullae, indicating the number and types of tokens on the inside. Denise-Schmandt-Besserat used the similarities between the inscribed bullae and the earliest Uruk pictographic tablets to reconstruct the early evolution of written script. The bullae, she argues, were the forerunners of cuneiform tablets.

Ancient Contracts

Denise Schmandt-Besserat may have discovered the origins of writing on the surfaces of the clay bullae, but the mystery remains -- why did the ancient accountants of Uruk use a cumbersome bullae system for their records? Indeed bullae remained in use even after the full development of written script. The answer lies in the fact that they were more than accounting tools -- they were actual contracts.

Everything we think of as a financial instrument today is, in fact, a contract. A government bond, for instance, is a contract between the government and the bond-holder to guarantee a series of payments in the future. A share of stock is a contract between the shareholder and the corporation that guarantees participation in the profits of the firm, and a right to vote on management. Although contracts existed before the invention of writing, and even before the invention of bullae, the hollow clay balls and their tokens appear to be the earliest archaeological evidence of contracts. Each bulla found in the Inanna temple complex meant that someone -- and we don't know who, made a promise to give some commodities: jars of honey, sheep, cattle -- perhaps even days of work, to the temple. The writing on the outside of the bulla allowed the contracting parties to refer to the amount owed over the term of the contract, but the tokens inside, kept by the lender as evidence of the agreement, tangibly symbolized the obligation. This interpretation may explain other curious features of the bullae as well. Some of the envelopes are covered entirely in the impressions of cylinder seals -- the Mesopotamian equivalents of signatures. These undoubtedly represent a personal mark indicating the promise of the owing party. Bullae that are entirely covered in seal impressions seem to suggest that the owing party was concerned that the bulla holder might break open a small part of the bulla and insert some additional tokens.

We cannot really call the bullae the first financial instruments, because we do not know who the contracting parties were. We do not know whether the obligation is a return of a loan, or simply a tax or tribute to the temple. The bullae do not specify time (or at least Denise Schmandt-Besserat has not decoded the symbols for time) and they do not specify interest rates. All we know for sure is that they formalized commitments of future payments. The bullae were contracts that bridged a period of time -- from the moment when one party entered into an obligation, to the moment when the obligation was discharged.

Early Financial Accounts

Sometime before 3,000 B.C. the people of Uruk began to use pictographic tablets of clay to record economic transactions. The script for the tablets evolved from the bullae symbols, but their use went far beyond contracts. These tablets are important in their own right as further developments of an ancient financial system that was growing to accommodate the needs of the Uruk economy. While the bullae typically contained no more than a couple of dozen tokens, the Uruk pictographic tablets recorded much larger quantities of goods. They did this in an ingenious way -- they used a number system!

The pictographic tablets from Uruk are the first evidence that exists for an abstract number system like our own. Once economic quantities became large enough, it was been difficult to represent them one for one with tokens, or even pictographs. The Uruk tablets began to separate the pictographic representations of commodities from the abstract numbers. For instance (see illustration) one tablet represents five sheep by the symbol for sheep -- the crossed circle, and five impressed strokes in the clay -- the numeral for five. A round impression represented the numeral for ten. Thus, the Uruk accountants could represent thirty three by three round marks and three strokes.

The Urban Economy

People in the Near East began to live in towns more than 10,000 years ago, but the first true cities were built by the Sumerian people, the inhabitants of the region around the mouth of the Tigris and the Euphrates, in the period after 4,000 B.C. The economy of the Sumerian city of Uruk during the fourth millennium, the period to which the bullae date, was based upon herding and agriculture, supplemented with fishing and hunting. Although it is difficult to understand the Sumerian system of government without imposing our own political notions, it appears that the temple played an important role in allocation of economic resources. Apparently the first government was "big government." A ceremonial vase, "The Warka Vase" was found in the Inanna temple complex, and provides a simplified perspective of the Uruk social hierarchy. The ruler was the people's representative to the goddess, and he presented to her the fruits of Uruk's citizens's labor. Since most of these commodities were perishable, we must presume that the temple redistributed them in some fashion. The numbers from the Uruk tablets indicate that this was a big job -- taxing people and then redistributing the income. In fact, this economic system -- the reliance upon a central distribution center, may explain the movement of people into the cities, closer to the temple. Judging by the size of the city in its heyday around 3,000 B.C., Uruk was home to more than 10,000 people. The variety of goods and materials that survive from Uruk suggest that most of its ancient inhabitants had a distinct trade. Labor was specialized. Undoubtedly some of its citizens were shepherds, others were farmers, others were bakers, brewers, weavers, even accountants and scribes. It was in this urban milieu that financial instruments first developed.

The Idea of Lending

All people, urban as well as rural, tend to lend each other things. They do this even when the benefits to such helpful behavior are not immediately apparent. In small communities, people lend their tools and their time to each other. While they may expect reciprocity in the future, they do not explicitly write a contract to formalize it. Such co-operation is a form of insurance. You help out when you can afford to do so, and you call upon your neighbors when you find yourself in need.

When people started living in large communities like Uruk, they began to live with strangers as well as friends. It may have been possible to know everyone in a large farming village, but not in a vast city such as Uruk. What were once implicit agreements among neighbors now became explicit, contractual agreements among strangers. When everyone had the same profession and skills, neighborly help could always be repaid in kind. But when people developed different professions it must have been difficult to maintain neighborly reciprocity. Urban societies still needed cooperation, but limits to familiarity with fellow inhabitants, and difficulty with quantifying the units of such cooperation meant that people required more formal ways to insure a return on their helpful efforts. Cambridge University's Paul Millett traced this developmental relationship between urbanization and interest loans in ancient Athens in the first century B.C. In Greece, the pattern is clear -- urbanism necessitated explicit contracts, and gave rise to interest charges. Interest is a "sweetener" to induce someone to lend you what you need.

Neighborly cooperation appears to be a way for a community to respond to periods of crisis, but loans in which the "gift" is repaid with interest allows a lender to accumulate wealth -- to obtain repayment even when he or she isn't in need. This contrast between implicit and explicit contracts embodies civilization's ambivalence towards lending -- perhaps it just doesn't feel right to charge a friend or neighbor interest, because reciprocity was our pre-urban method of adapting to crises. The invention of interest lending, in the very shadow of the gates of Eden -- may have been humankind's original fall from grace.

The Idea of Interest

What gave the ancient Sumerians the idea of charging each other interest? Linguistic evidence provides a clue. In the Sumerian language, the word for interest, mash, was also the term for calves. In ancient Greek, the word for interest, tokos, also refers to the offspring of cattle. The latin term pecus, or flock, is the root of our word "pecuniary." The Egyptian word for interest, like the Sumerian word, is ms, and means "to give birth." All of these terms point to the derivation of interest rates as the natural multiplication of livestock. If you lend someone a herd of thirty cattle for one year, you expect to be repaid with more than thirty cattle. The herd multiplies -- the herder's wealth has a natural rate of increase equal to the rate of reproduction of his livestock. If cattle were the standard currency, then loans in all comparable commodities would be expected to "give birth" as well. The idea of interest seems to be a natural one for a pastoral society, but not so for other types of economies.

Ancient Sumerian society, in particular, the people of Uruk, "the city of sheepfolds," appears to have been the perfect setting for the evolution of the practice of lending money at interest. It was a pastoral society in which wealth, as measured by livestock, "begot" wealth. It had a system for recording contractual obligations, and a numerical system that could specify particular quantities of goods. It had a concept of the present versus the future. Indeed sometime during the Sumerian period, the Mesopotamian calendar was developed, and this allowed a mathematical link between lunar months and solar years.

Perhaps an even more fundamental tool was the Mesopotamian ability to symbolize goods and quantities. The Uruk accounting system made it easy for the Sumerians to imagine owning and exchanging quantities of goods. Even the act of wrapping the tokens up in a clay envelop implied ownership of them. Perhaps finance began in the ancient Near East because, for the first time it was possible to symbolically represent units of wealth.

Borrowing in Babylon

By the reign of the famous Babylonian king Hammurabi, about 1792-1750 B.C., an extraordinary literature had developed from the early utilitarian cuneiform script. Cuneiform texts record creation myths, poetry and even dramatic performances. Despite the versatility of cuneiform writing, however, the bulk of the half-million surviving documents from the ancient Near East continued to be economic texts. Ancient Akkadian, the language of the semitic peoples who succeeded the Sumerians around 2,500 B.C. and who adopted the cuneiform script as their own, is by far the largest of all the dead languages, in terms of surviving documents, as well as vocabulary. The ongoing Akkadian dictionary project at the University of Chicago is long past 20 volumes at last count! Unless you are an economist, however, most of these texts are of little interest. Writing in the ancient Near East was not only a by-product of economics and finance, but for most of its early history, remained closely associated with them. Nine out of ten tablets are accounting records. Of these, a considerable number are mortgages, land deeds, loan contracts, promissory notes and partnership agreements.

In the centuries following the Uruk period, mathematical and astronomical knowledge advanced dramatically. The well-educated Babylonian of the third millennium B.C. learned enough geometry to calculate the area within a triangle, enough astronomy to calculate the wandering of the planets through the ecliptic, enough algebra to solve a problem of how much grain to use to sow his fields, and enough about logarithms to be able to calculate compound interest!

An Early Roadmap to Riches?

The great cuneiform scholar, Otto Neugebauer translated used in a classsroom at about the time of Hammurabi. It is an interest rate problem for prospective students of the financial arts. It indicates that interest rates were quoted as fractions of principal -- much the same as bond yields are quoted today. The student is asked to figure out the number of years it would take for a sum of money, one mina of silver, that grows at 20% interest per year to reach 64 minae. The interest compounds in an odd way -- 20% of the principal is accumulated until the interest is equal to the principal, and then it is added to the principal. This is not exactly what we think of as compound interest, which is continuously added to the principal, but none-the-less, quite similar. The answer to the problem is 30 years. Neugebauer was fascinated by the cleverness of the solution to the problem -- it appears to prove a knowledge of base 2 logarithms. To students of financial history it is the term of the loan that stands out. Thirty years is an extraordinarily long term for a loan. Today's home mortgages in the U.S. are rarely more than 30 years. U.S. government bonds are generally less than 25 years. If the tablet problem bears any relation to business practices of the time, then it suggests the presence of a stable and reliable legal system, and the ability to contract over long horizons. But who was making these loans -- and why?

An Ancient Wall Street

In the 1920's, Sir Leonard Woolley, excavating the Mesopotamian city of Ur, the fabled birthplace of Abraham, found himself standing in the remains of what must have been an upper middle class neighborhood near the center of the ancient city. His Iraqi excavators uncovered the narrow walls and small rooms that signified domestic architecture -- rather than the majestic palace architecture that typically attracted the attention of Near Eastern excavators. In an area separated from the main temple complex by the main canal running through town, Woolley and his crew uncovered the mud-brick foundations of homes, shops, schools and chapels. He even found the business district and the waterfront, with piers and docks indicating that Ur was a harbor town -- the home of fishermen and maritime traders as well as farmers and herdsmen. Many of them buried their personal financial records, along with their ancestors, in the floors of their houses for safekeeping.

Professor Marc Van De Mieroop of Columbia University has used Woolley's careful excavation notes to match the dozens of excavated clay tablets to the homes where they were found. From these, he has been able identify what must have been a very early "Wall Street" -- a financial district in the ancient city that was the home of Ur's second millennium lenders and entrepreneurs. From their records, he has been able to reconstruct a fascinating story about one of the world's first financial centers.

Most of the cuneiform texts found in the financial district date from the early years of the reign of the King Rim-Sin (1822-1763 B.C.), who ruled from the capital city of Larsa, a few miles north of Ur shortly before Hammurabi's time. During this period, Ur was probably home to 25,000 to 40,000 people. Woolley's excavations revealed a large neighborhood of houses, both large and small, clustered around a central square. Two shrines faced this plaza, and wide thoroughfares and narrow alleys led away from the square to other parts of the densely populated city.

The Merchants of Ur

No.3 Niche lane (the names for all of the streets were borrowed by Woolley from England's town of Canterbury) was the office of the businessman Dumuzi-gamil. Although he left no personal records, only financial ones, we know something about Dumuzi-gamil's personality. He was educated, self reliant and careful with his money, keeping his own accounts in his own distinctive style, rather than hiring a scribe. Despite his training, however, Dumuzi-gamil avoided lavish prose in favor of what Marc Van De Mieroop calls "terse phraseology."

The activities of Dumuzi-gamil and other residents of the "Wall Street" of Ur reveal much about the role that financiers played in ancient Mesopotamia. In 1796 B.C. Dumuzi-gamil and his partner, Shumi-abiya borrowed 500 grams of silver from the businessman Shumi-abum. Dumuzi-gamil promised to return 297.3 grams on his share of 250 grams after five years. According to the manner in which the Mesopotamians calculated interest, this equalled a 3.78% annual rate. The term of the loan was a relatively long one -- five years. Sumi-abum turned around and sold the loan to a couple of well-known merchants, who successfully collected on the debt in 1791. Marc Van De Mieroop suspects that Dumuzi-gamil was acting as a banker -- taking in deposits at low rates of interest, and in the interim, making productive use of the money. Indeed, Dumuzi-gamil tried his hand, with great success at a number of business ventures. His principal trade was as a bread distributor. He invested in institutional bakeries that supplied the temple. In fact, he may even have supplied bread to the capital city of Larsa which lay a day's travel to the north. He was the "grain supplier to the King," -- one of his tablets was a receipt from the a monthly issue to Rim-Sin for more than 5,000 liters of grain!

There is little doubt that Dumuzi-gamil's loan represented the exploitation of the time value of money. When he borrowed the capital from Shumi-abum, he undoubtedly had a plan for increasing his wealth. Perhaps it was the entrepreneurial idea of setting up institutional bakeries. While his records are not complete , it appear likely that debt, in the hands of U's entrepreneurs like Dumuzi-gamil, could be a means to social and economic mobility. Without the ability to shift money through time -- to borrow against future income, Dumuzi-gamil might not have been able to set up shop. We don't know much about his lender, but, since he charged interest it must have been more than a neighborly gesture.

Dumuzi-gamil turned around and used at least some of the money to make short term loans. According to Marc Van De Mieroop, Dumuzi-gamil frequently lend silver to fishermen and farmers apparently in desperate need of silver to pay their temple rents. On some of these loans he exacted 20% interest for a single month! At that pace, one mina could grow to 64 in two and a half years! Of the fifteen loan records of Dumuzi-gamil's that survived, most of them were very short term -- one, two or three months. The price of time was high for citizens in debt to the Ur money-lenders.

The difference between the long term loan of Dumuzi-gamil and the short term loans to the fishermen is important. The short term loans were clearly for emergency purposes, while Dumuzi-gamil's was for productive purposes -- for developing the bakery business, and for lending activities. In fact, most loans in second millennium Ur were of the emergency variety, not the productive variety. Borrowing was more typically a response to emergency, and Dumuzi-gamil was probably not very popular with his creditors, given the usurious rates he charged.

The legal limit on interest rates for loans of silver was 20% over much of Dumuzi-gamil's life, but Marc Van De Mieroop demonstrates how Dumuzi-gamil and other lenders got around such strictures -- they simply charged the legal limit for shorter and shorter term loans! Curiously, while mathematics during this era was extraordinarily advanced, the government failed to understand, or at least effectively regulate the close link between time and money.

Dumuzi-gamil and lenders like him played an important role in the ancient economy of Ur. They supplied the silver money demanded by the temple -- they enlarged the money supply. The money supply is often cited as an indicator of the health of the economy. In the modern world, the money supply is measured by the currency in circulation, plus checking accounts, liquid bank deposits and negotiable financial instruments from large institutions. It is deemed by economists to be an index of society's buying power. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve bank uses money supply targets to loosen or tighten the reins of the economy. While the ancient Babylonian temples were a long way from being federal reserve banks, they may have performed some of the same functions. Temples injected silver money into the economy by making long-term loans to lenders like Dumuzi-gamil. Even at usurious rates of interest, the increase of the money supply created by Dumuzi-gamil's lending may have had a salutary economic effect. The temple in the second millennium B.C. may not have been able to allocate perishable goods as efficiently as it could when the city was smaller. Storage and spoilage must have been significant problems for a government that distributed, among other things, bread, milk and beer. A money economy solved these problems by allowing individuals to purchase the goods when and where they need them. Although the people of Ur did not use coinage, they used silver by weight, and often in the form of portable items like bracelets. By lending this silver, Dumuzi-gamil created vital liquidity.

"Clay Profits"

The ancient financiers increased the supply of "non-money" money in Ur as well. They, like other merchants kept running accounts. Among Dumuzi-gamil's records are indications that certain payments were credited to individuals. While not as sophisticated as credit cards, these "tabs" at various merchants and financiers minimized the need for hard currency. This accounting system may have mirrored the temple's own method of accounts, but its use in the dealings of individuals is a subtle but important advancement in financial thought. It meant that people could recognize "paper profits." You could become wealthy without having the silver hoard to prove it. This was the first stage in the development of "intangible" wealth, upon which all of our current financial system depends. Since the records were kept on clay tablets, the first paper profits should rightly be called "clay" profits! These intangible profits were like the tale of the emperor's new clothes. They only existed if people believed that they existed, and if a legal system existed to insure that creditors had secure rights to their loaned property.

From the end of the fourth millennium in Mesopotamia, legal codes guaranteed property rights even more than they guaranteed what we call human rights. For instance, a person had the right to sell himself into slavery, or pledge his liberty as collateral for a loan. In fact, not until the time of the Greek tyrant Solon was the right to enslave oneself abolished. Courts existed in Mesopotamia to adjudicate property disputes, and it was not unheard of for lawsuits to span decades! Evidently, it was part of the function of the local "chapels" in Dumuzi-gamil's time to notarize or witness the drawing up of important documents like deeds of sale. Such deeds of sale were necessary for even tiny plots of property. Marc Van De Mieroop found one transaction for four square yards! Neighborly lending appears to have been on the decline in second millennium Ur -- sales were recorded even between brothers. Almost all of these sales were denominated in silver.

In a world where "clay" profits were counted as real, Even the financier's debt could serve as money. The Ur documents reveal a remarkably liquid market for personal promissory notes. Shumi-abum, Dumuzi-gamil's lender, sold the note to two other investors -- Nur-ilishu and Sin-ashared. Apparently, Dumuzi-gamil and his partner's debt was easily transferable. Several other Ur records indicate that selling loans was a common practice. It appears that Ur had a functioning bond market, in which the promise of a loan repayment could be regarded as currency. Although no broad, macro-economic records exist to measure the effect of Ur's ancient financiers, it is likely that their money-lending activities encouraged commerce of all kinds.

Debt is Good -- But For Whom?

Second Millennium Ur may have been an early hothouse of capitalistic enterprize, but what of the borrowers mired in debt? The government may actually have preferred them this way. A study by the economist M. Darling of the rural economy of the Punjab in modern times suggests a disturbing thing about human nature -- people work harder and produce more when they are in debt. Darling found that crop yields for farmers in debt typically exceeded yields from unencumbered farmers. Farmers in the Punjab may have faced foreclosure, but for the ancient inhabitant of Ur, the motivation was even greater. Debtors were often forced to sell themselves into slavery.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, while the first loan contracts and the legal system that enforced them may have been good for the Mesopotamian economy, they made life miserable for the working man and woman. If lending began, as historian Paul Millet believes, as a process of neighborly reciprocity in rural societies, then it evolved into something quite different. In Babylonian times, short-term debt was a tool used to extract taxes from the population, and to increase the productivity of temple lands. It is almost as though the government had found a way to extract the residual "goodwill" from the economy, by allowing individuals to shift financial obligations into the future. Lending in ancient Ur was mostly for emergency purposes -- where the government created the emergency! The other side of the coin is that certain entrepreneurs such as Dumuzi-gamil achieved economic upward mobility through borrowing. Thus, while the system was harsh on the populace, it encouraged creative and productive enterprise. For those with the imagination to exploit it, the financial system of Ur offered limitless possibilities.

Financing Trade

Around the corner from Dumuzi-gamil lived Ea-nasir -- a like-minded entrepreneur. He made his fortune by organizing and financing maritime expeditions from Ur to Dilmun. Dilmun appears in earlier Sumerian texts as the home of the immortal Ut-napishtim who survived the great flood. According to legend, Gilgamesh himself journied to Dilmun in quest of the secret of eternal life, and Ut-napishtim revealed to the king that the "plant of life" lay at the bottom of the sea. Undaunted, Gilgameshed weighted his feet with stones and plunged to the depths to gather the sacred plant. Modern archaeological research points to the the shores of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia and Bahrain as the likey location of the fabled Dilmun, and the traditional Gulf pearl divers of Kuwait plied their trade by tying stones to their feet, in the manner of Gilgamesh.

Maritime expeditions to Dilmun, and ports south along the coast of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean appear to have taken place since Sumerian times, but by Ea-Nasir's time, Dilmun traders were the key middlemen between Mesopotamia and points south. Indeed, the Dilmunites may have been the Venetians of their time, establishing commerical communities in remote ports that allowed them to control trade. Their distinctive signatures, found at scattered points in second-millenium levels at Ur were cylinder seals bearing the stylistic echo of the Indus civilization -- including the image of the sacred bull. While there is no direct evidence that Ea-Nasir himself was Dilmunite, he was clearly a major player in the Dilmun trade. For one large expedition, Ea-nasir assembled 51 investors, who contributed money in the form of silver, as well as a variety of trade goods, including what were apparently the most desirable crafts of the city: Ur baskets. These were exchanged with the merchants in Dilmun for copper, precious stones and spices.

Ea-nasir's tablets indicate that considerable diplomacy was required to equitably partition the profits from the Dilmun trade. Unlike Damuzz-gamil's debt, many of the capital contributions to Dilmun expeditions were equity investments. The contributors expected to gain if the expedition was a success. While bond contracts limited the payoff to the lender to the explicit quantity of interest, there was no limit to the profits that could acrue to Ea-nasir's backers if they got lucky. They shared in the benefits according to the proportions of their investments. Another feature of Ur partnership contracts it also interesting -- loss was often limited to the amount of the contribution. In fact, in some expedition charters, this limited liability was an explicit condition of the investment.

The exciting thing to financial historians is these equity contracts represent concrete evidence of a limited partnership -- in which the limited partner assumed no liability beyond the value of the paid-in capital. It was a joint venture, with silent, but contributing partners. This is the same way that such risky things as oil-drilling ventures and real estate investments are financed to this day. Presumably, since Ea-nasir was the general partner who took the biggest risk, he made the largest profit. Unfortunately, we cannot calculate his return on investment -- the records did not survive.

Early Mutual Funds?

Many of the tablets deciphered by Van De Mieroop and other Assyriologists indicate that financial tools such as loans, mortgages and limited partnership ventures were collaborative ventures. The fact that several partners were involved in Ea-nasir's expeditions to the copper markets of Dilmun indicates that such enterprises were often beyond the scope of a single investor. Financial tools allowed very large projects. Just like the large-scale monumental palace architecture that the Babylonian kings build during this era, these financial projects encompassed the efforts of more than one source of capital. Interestingly, the palace was itself a frequent contributor to the expedition -- a curious foreshadowing of Elizabeth the First's contributions to the exploring expeditions to the New World that were themselves financed by limited partnerships and corporations. This governmental participation in the southern maritime ventures was nothing new. The temple of Nanna had been involved in financing the Dilmun trade for at least five centuries before Ea-nasir's time. The interesting thing about his partnership records is that ordinary citizens, some with only small contributions like a bracelet or two, could join in the profits of the venture. Enterprise was not only for the wealthy or the politically powerful. The financial technology of second millennium Ur made the power of time accessible to a broad number of citizens. Like modern-day investors in mutual funds, they did not have to be experts in the investment trade to enjoy financial growth. Neither did they have to commit their entire fortune to a risky venture. The effect of this business structure upon personal fortunes was profound. People were able to "insure" themselves against personal failure -- if their own venture collapsed, then the investment in Ea-nasir's might carry them through hard times. By repeatedly investing in what was one of Ur's key industries -- the Dilmun trade, they were able to participate in the general economic growth of their city -- that is unless complete disaster struck.

Government Regulations and the Great Crash

Dumuzi-gamil, Ea-Nasir and their fellow financiers became wealthy through banking and trading activities during the first half of Rim-Sin's reign, but their financial dealings were not without risks. In fact, in the year 1788 B.C. there was a financial catastrophe. The king Rim-Sin issued a royal edict declaring all loans null and void. Debtors rejoiced and creditors panicked! Dumuzi-gamil and the other lenders appear to have been wiped out. After Rim-Sin's edict, Marc Van De Mieroop finds little evidence of financial dealings -- with the exception of lawsuits. A number of parties sued in the wake of the edict to claim property pledged in security for loans. They were unsuccessful.

Loan forgiveness edicts were common both before and after Rim-Sin's reign, and they suggest that the government had an ambiguous relationship to the financial sector. The financiers indirectly provided silver to the temple and the palace, but they did so at a high social cost. The periodic voiding of debts suggests that the government regulation of interest rates was ineffectual. By allowing financial entrepreneurs, the palace opened a Pandora's box of possibilities, and it had difficulties controlling the result. Individuals gained control of things such as the copper trade, and they used money as a means of re-distributing goods. Some people did well, others didn't, and it did not depend entirely upon their allegiance to the king or the temple. The existence of legal limits on the charging of interest shows that king Rim-Sin intended to cap the money lenders profits, and perhaps exert some control over the burgeoning financial sector. He was only temporarily successful.

Although the debt edicts provided periodic relief to the citizens who had gotten themselves mired in debt, they had a negative effect on interest rates, and on the productive use of capital. The mere threat of an edict would be enough to limit long-term loans for investment. The risks of such a loan were too great, since the chances of it being forgiven by the king sometime over its tenure were high. Such uncertainty about the political future induced lenders to increase interest rates, in order to compensate for the increased risk of loss. Although meant to provide relief, the edicts effectively increased interest rates. Lenders played a kind of high stakes "Russian Roulette" with their capital. The short term returns were high, but the chances of complete loss were significant. To make matters worse, across the board debt forgiveness was the only kind of risk against which a lender could not protect himself by diversifying investments. Ea-nasir could insure against his Dilmun ship sinking by lending money to Dumuzi-gamil to invest in the bread-making business, for instance, but if all loans were wiped out, this diversification would not help. Perhaps it is no accident that there are virtually no documents relating to Dilmun trade for another thousand years Ur apparently ceased to be the flourishing maritime entrepôt it had been in its heyday. While scholars attribute broad political forces to decline of long distance maritime trade, we may look to financial reasons as well. At some point, the gains from long-range trade ventures could not offset the potential loss faced by investors. It such an economic environment, trade may grind to a halt.

We can only speculate on Ram-Sin's reason for eliminating all debt by royal decree. Perhaps he himself, or those close to him had gotten into debt -- or perhaps it was a political move to restore popularity with his subjects. The financial innovations that aided the throne and the temple in procuring silver and copper may suddenly have become a greater liability than an asset. Regardless of his reasons, the effects on the financial district of Ur were permanent. Marc Van De Mieroop conjectures that the "golden age" of finance in Ur drew to a close as the economic authority shifted to the capital city of Larsa. Perhaps Dumuzi-gamil and his comrades survived the great crash of 1788 B.C. and, ever vigilant for financial opportunities, moved with it.

Mesopotamian Twilight   

The temple mound of Nippur lies north of the ancient sites of Ur and Uruk, and like these other Mesopotamian cities, it was occupied over the course of several millennia. In 1889, American archaeologists tunneling deep the Nippur mound recovered a remarkable archive: the records of the financial transactions of one banking family over three generations. Their contracts, accounts, deeds and lawsuits extended over the era of the final flourishing of Mesopotamian civilization. Using this rich documentary source, the Assyriologist Matthew Stolper has pieced together the story of this clan, called the Murashu family. What he discovered about their role in the financial and political role of late Mesopotamian society reads like a modern mystery story full of intrigue, scandal and a web of secret financial deals that ultimately toppled the government from power.

In Persian times (626-330 B.C.), Nippur was prosperous and productive vassal of the Persian kings who build grand royal residences at Susa and Persepolis. The home of the Murashu family was a large private residence overlooking Nippur's temple precinct. Like the financial district in Old Babylonian Ur, it stood across the central city canal from the religious district -- perhaps symbolizing the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

Little is known about the patriarch of the Murashu clan who was born about 500 B.C., but his three sons and three grandsons were landowners, agricultural managers and active lenders to other landowners of Nippur. Through careful business dealings they amassed a considerable fortune, and the family business remained under their active control until about 417 B.C. Some years were better than others, but one particular date stands out as an important one for the Murasu dynasty.

423 was a turbulent year for the royal court of Persia. Court intrigue began shortly after the mid-winter death of king Atraxerxes. The eldest son Xerxes II seized the throne, only to be murdered 45 days later by his cunning half-brother Sogdianus, who, with one treacherous act suddenly held in his grasp the entire Persian Empire, from the Zagros mountains to the Mediterranean. While Sogdianus may have had the throne, another son of Artraxerxes had the support and sponsorship of some of Persia's most powerful landowners. Ochus, son of the Babylonian concubine Costmartidus, and Satrap of lower Mesopotamia, was living in a spacious rented residence in the ancient city of Babylon when his half-brother ascended to the throne. One of Sogdianus' first imperial acts was to summon his powerful half-brother to the imperial city of Susa -- perhaps to put him under the sword and consolidate his power.

When the summons came in the form of an official cuneiform tablet delivered by royal messenger, Ochus had to work fast. His supporters urged him to fight, but they could not immediately provide the means for him to do so -- they were land-rich but cash poor, and the mercenaries and supplies to fight Sogdanus could only be obtained with silver. With Sogdianus pressing for a reply, they turned to the Murashu family for help. The Murashu's were landholders like themselves, but they were also lenders. Ochus' backers mortgaged their vast property holdings in the Euphrates valley, and used the proceeds to hire an army. Deserters from the disaffected Persian regulars soon joined them, and when Ochus rode into the city of Susa, it was not at Sogdinius' prisoner, but as his successor. The usurper was himself usurped. Ochus took the royal title of Darius the second.

The overthrow of Sogdanus may be the first war we know to have been fought on borrowed money, but it certainly was not the last. The Persian rulers following Darius II frequently resorted to tax levies in later years to finance wars. The key is that a financial intermediary was a crucial link -- some firm or agent that could turn a contractual promise into money in a hurry. In the fifth century B.C., The Murashu firm provided this essential line of credit and it probably turned the tide of victory. But fate is not always kind. The landholders who supported Ochus remained mired in debt, and many faced foreclosure by the Murashu.

Like the financiers of Old Babylonian Ur, the lenders of Persian Nippur were a necessary evil, but unlike the second millennium B.C., they do not seem to have been easily dismissed by royal edict. The extraordinary thing about the Murashu family story is that finance had become integral to the political process. Perhaps we have Darius II to thank for the fact that the burden of loan-financed armies has continued with us to today.

One important thing to stress about the Murashu is that they were not bankers in the true sense. They were lenders, but most of their income resulted from land management and agriculture. They profited mostly from real property, rather than financial capital. A banker, strictly speaking, generates profits by lending alone -- either by using his own capital, or by borrowing from others at lower rates. While financial historians would like to project banking practices into the ancient Near East, the best evidence for the emergence of true banking comes from ancient Athens --what some have termed "The Barbarian West."

Finance Moves West

The Persian period was a cosmopolitan era for the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, and many of the ideas and insights we attribute to the Greeks were actually borrowed from the ancient Near East. For instance, the result we know as the Pythagorean theorem was actually written down on a cuneiform tablet years before Pythagoras was born. Near Eastern learning filtered in a fragmented way into Greek culture, through the efforts of educated travellers such as Anaxamander who lived and studied in Egypt and Mesopotamia, or of Pythagoras himself, who visited and studied in Egypt.

The Greeks at first lagged in financial technology. Long after Ea-nasir of Ur grew wealthy haggling over the limited partnership shares in copper trading expeditions to Dilmun, the Greek warrior Achilles was sulking in his tent on the shores near Priam's Troy, grieving over Agamemnon's miserly apportionment of the spoils of war. While the Mycenean Greeks of the second millennium B.C. adored the splendors of gold and silver, their approach to obtaining it was direct -- seizure and plunder, rather than lending and investment. Greek silver in the second millennium was booty, not capital.

By the fifth century B.C. however, the Greeks had caught up to their eastern neighbors in terms of financial sophistication. Athens was home not only to petty money lenders like Dumuzi-gamil, and major financiers like the Murashu family, but also to institutions that can truly be called banks.

The Athenian financial system differed in important ways from the Mesopotamian model. While emergency loans were still prevalent,. Most of the financial activities and institutions seemed to foster maritime trade. Banks, for instance, accepted deposits of money for safekeeping while seafaring merchants were away on their travels. The historian Paul Millett notes that many of the bank customers were merchants from out of town -- banking fostered inter-city and perhaps international trade. Maritime loans were the most common. Lenders invested money in trading voyages and if the ship returned safely, they received a handsome return -- as much as 25%. If the ship went down they received nothing.

One of the best known bankers from the fourth century B.C. in Athens was Pasion-- a former slave who learned the banking trade from his masters Antisthenes and Archestratus, two of Athens earliest bankers. Pasion earned his freedom, and gained control of the bank around 400 A.D. In turn, he passed the business on to his son Apollodorus, and his former slave Phormion. We know something of Pasion's success because Apollodorus and Phormion became embroiled in a bitter legal battle over the estate. Their disputes are not half so interesting as the fact that Pasion, the former slave,had amassed a fortune of more than seventy talents through his lending activities. Around 370 B.C., Pasion's was the largest of as many as seven banks in Athens. The financial industry had provided Pasion the means to advance through the social hierarchy from slave to the top of Athenian society. At his death he was the richest citizen of Athens.

While we may look back at Pasion's career as a model of social advancement, it is important to realize that it was also evidence of finance as a destabilizing cultural phenomenon. Pasion, along with other bankers of his time were resented by fellow citizens. Athenian dialogues are full of diatribes against money lenders. Socrates himself describes moneylenders as parasites, who live by:

..inserting the sting of their money into any...who do not resist, and harvesting from them in interest as it were manifold offspring of the parent sum, foster the drone and pauper element of the parent state.

Athenians, like Babylonians, were constantly getting themselves in debt, and at least in Athens, the people that held this debt were typically former slaves, or people from lower social classes. This class distinction between the bankers and their clients may have been used to justify periodic debt forgiveness, just like the edict of Ram-Sin. Socrates cautions against this governmental policy as well however. Debt forgiveness he warned, is the tool of the demagogue.

What is interesting in these Greek accounts is the moralistic attitude towards lending. The money lender was regarded as a predator on other peoples' misfortunes; the capitalist lender who lives off the fruits of his money, rather than personal efforts. Nothing is mentioned in the surviving accounts -- or even in the philosophical writings of the period, about the extraordinary benefits of finance. "cap17.html">Athenian maritime insurance was indispensable to the expansion of her maritime trade, and the banks provided security for the shipowner's fortunes. Finance had become an important part of the Greek engine of commerce, but contemporary critics and philosophers (with the possible exception of Thales) were blind to its benefits. The technology of finance seemed to contradict the natural "neighborliness" of mankind, and it upset the social order. The ability to lend and borrow made rich men out of slaves. It destroyed the natural hierarchy of which Socrates and Plato were so fond -- a hierarchy with politicians, not bankers at the top of the social ladder.

The Ancient Financial World

The most important lesson learned from the emergence of finance in ancient Mesopotamia and Greece is that financial instruments from their very inception could be tools of both enterprise and control. At their best they expanded the realm of Mesopotamian contacts and trade to distant shores of Dilmun, and undoubtedly to Africa and India. They allowed Greek shipping to flourish throughout the Mediterranean. At its worst finance became an institutional tool used by the government to extract taxes and rents from its citizenry, and a way for a group of entrepreneurs to exploit the working class mired in debt. We saw that, at times, the techniques of finance could be turned on the government itself. The power of financial technology worried kings and irritated philosophers. Individuals like Dumuzi-gamil, Ea-nasir, Sogdanus, Pasion or even the roguesh philosopher Thales who had a plan or vision for the future could use financial contracts to profit from that plan. Borrowing multiplied the temporary financial power of the individual, and allowed him or her great feats of economic strength. This strength at times challenged the power of the state itself, the power of human compassion, and even the power of moral reason.

Finance is not like other technologies. It is not something that, once discovered, becomes a permanent cultural fixture. From the very beginning, governments saw it as both good and evil, and alternately supported and suppressed it. Finance may thrive on stability, but it is threatened by situations in flux. Throughout human history, financial instruments have frequently been re-invented as a way to solve certain human problems. In the centuries since the era of the Mesopotamian and Greek financiers, the financial world has become increasingly complex, but the fundamental principles and tools they discovered several millennia ago have remained the root of all investment contracts. In all likelihood, we must thank an ancient Uruk accountant for the discovery of the time value of money -- and we must also not forget to thank the generations of financiers that followed in his wake for the ingenious means to exploit it.

Sources

Homer, Sidney and Richard Sylla. A History of Interest Rates. 1991. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. 1976. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Finnegan, Jack. Archaelogical History of the Ancient Middle East. 1979. New York: Dorset Press.
Menninger, Karl. Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers. 1969. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Millett, Paul. Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens. 1991. Cambradge: Cambridge University Press.
Neugebauer, O. The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. 1969. New York: Dover Press.
Roaf, Michael. Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. 1990. Oxford: Equinox Books.
Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. Before Writing. 1992. Austin: The University of Texas Press.
Stolper, Matthew W. Entrepreneurs and Empire. 1985. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosen.
Thureau-Dangin, F. "Textes Mathématiques Babyloniens," Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale. 1936. 33:2. 9-75.
Van De Mieroop, Marc. Society and Enterprize in Old Babylonian Ur. 1992. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.

http://viking.som.yale.edu/will/finciv/ ... tm#profits


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The Tree of Life and the Owl


viewtopic.php?f=41&t=10229





The Tree of Life column, World Naval, Axis Mundi image carved by the Maltese Temple Builders. Notice the Owl also at the bottom of the Tree of Life. legends and myths describe the all seeing Owl and the tree of life (world naval - Axis Mundi). Here the owl sits beneath the Tree of Life

The Tree of Life (Axis Mundi, World Naval, World Pillar etc) is a main symbol of the ancients. It appears in most old civilisations. Either they were all in contact with each other or the same event inspired them all to paint, carve, build and remember the Tree of Life. The Axis Mundi would seem to be a variation of the Squatting Man, another stage of a Peratt instability. How many "Squatter Mans" have there been in the sky? One for each Catastrophe to hit the Earth?


The growth of the sacred Trees of Life

carving assyrians/babylonians images of the Tree of Llife (World Axis, Maypole, Axis Mundi). Love the Godbags. Palace of Nimrud (Nimrod) - Assyria/Babylonia?Iraq now found at the British Museum - tree of life (babylonians / assyrians) Hebrew Sefiroth (Sephirot or enumerations) is a tree of life symbol in Kabbalah of Judaism

The Tree of Life is a sacred image for most long gone civilisations. The ancient culture of Malta included. Not only is the Axis Mundi found on the column but also seen on pottery. One vase/jug in particular has a number of images of a Squatting Man Tree of Life. What is fascinating about the images on it are the dots or nodes on every part of the extensions. If it is argued they are branches of a tree then why are they so straight and why do they cross?. Similar to the Assyrian/Babylonian idea of the Tree of Life, with its nodes. Almost like plasma lightning flowers. The top half of this plasma lightning tree is also similar to the Chi Rho.

Solar Disk (Ashur) and the Tree of Life seal - Assyrians tree of life photographed in the palace of king sargonII at dur-sharrukin - assyrian / iraq Maltese Tree of Life with similar nodes to the Assyrian Tree of Life (Axis Mundi) - photographes at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta Tree of life images of ancient assyrians / babylonians Tree of Llife (World Axis, Maypole, Axis Mundi)

The first 2 Tree of Lifes show the simplified version, maybe more like the orginal one seen, than later sacred Trees of Life.



The third image is a photograph of a sectiong from a bowl/vase at the Maltese National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta (see below). This appears to show the Tree of Life with nodes along the "branches". It looks like a mixture of the Tree of Life, the Squatting Man and the Chi Rho. Also note the angled lines pattern, similar to the Axis Mundi images above and the Hebrew Sefiroth Tree of Life.

plasma discharge or electrical discharge seen on malta archaeology pottery. Is this the Squatting Man (Squatting Man), Tree of Life or large versions of Red Sprites?

The Trees of Life Bowl, Malta. Multiple Tree of Life images and it may also show the crazy spikey head seen on some Squatter Man images and individual petroglyphs.

===========

Usury In Old Babylon and In the Roman Empire

Bernard Pyron

Matthew 6:24 says: " No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the
one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise
the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

Mammon is Strong's Exhaustive Concordance number 3126, which Strong's
says means confidence, i. e, wealth personified...avarice deified.
Mammon means having confidence or reliance upon money, and greed for
more money personified or deified,

At http://houlton.net/monk Strong's number 3126, or mammonas,
of Aramaic origin, is said to mean what is trusted in, riches, where
it is personified and opposed to God.

Exodus 22: 25 begins the Bible texts opposed to the practice of usury,
and Leviticus 25: 36-37, Deuteronomy 23: 19, Nehemiah 5: 1- 10, Psalm
15: 5, Isaiah 24: 2, and Ezekiel 18: 8 say usury is wrong. Then,
Ezekiel 22: 12-22 says
that usury was one of the sins of the nation of Judah for which God
punished the people. In addition, Matthew 21: 13 where Christ threw
out the tables of the money changers is a text that broadens the sin
of usury to some other forms of extortion of the money of the common
people.

In Daniel 9: 27 Christ "Shall make it desolate" because of "the
overspreading of abominations." Usury is one of these abominations
that the Lord hates.

Practicing usury especially on people of low incomes - who are below
or near the "poverty line" - is a violation of God's moral law.
Therefore those who practice loaning money for interest and the
governments that protect this practice are anti-God, or even have the
spirit of antichrist (I John 4: 3).

Ancient Babylon which includes the nearby cities is the model for the
Babylon of prophecy, the city of mammon.

"Behold the land of the Chaldeans: this people was not, till the
Assyrian founded it for them that dwell in the wilderness: they set
up the towers thereof, they raised up the palaces thereof, and he
brought it to ruin (Isaiah 23: 13)."

Isaiah 30: 25 says "And there shall be upon every high mountain, and
upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the
great slaughter, when the towers fall."

Going to Zephaniah 1: 16 it says "A day of the trumpet and alarm
against the fenced cities , and against the high towers." Zephaniah
3: 6 adds that "I have cut off the nations; their towers are
desolate. I made their streets waste, that none passeth by: their
cities are destroyed, that there is no man, that there is non
inhabitant."

In describing the fall of Babylon Revelation 18: 9-10 says
"And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived
deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament her, when they
shall see the smoke of her burning. Standing afar off for the fear of
her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty
city! for in one hour is thy judgment come."

New York City is the capital of word trade, the United Nations and
usury banking - along with the City of London. Many credit card banks are
in Wilmington, Delaware, Citibank is in South Dakota and I think Bank of America
is in Charlotte, North Carolina. Three of New York
City's towers fell on September 11, 2001, and ships off some miles to
the east could have seen the smoke of their burning, as Revelation 18:
10 predicts. But the fall of the towers on September 11, 2001 was
not the complete fulfillment of these prophecies on the fall of the
towers and the destruction of cities. It was only a preliminary,
small fulfillment of that prophecy. The third tower that fell then
was Building Number Seven, which was not hit at all by an airplane
like the twin towers or something from the air. It was "pulled."

Usury banking and the love of money as the root of evil (I Timothy 6:
10) will be one of the abominations that will evoke the wrath of God
in the Indi

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Usury Remains Untouched - bring back Torquemada

Leaders and Followers of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, all once abhorred
usury.  The Old Testament, the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, all
abhorred and prohibited the evil practice (except the TALMUD--CSR).  
Today we in the US are stuck
with paying endless interest on debts going back to WW1, which by the way
could never have occurred without first creating the privately-owned Federal
Reserve.  The people in the UK still pay interest on our war for
Independence.  I imagine all European countries have unpaid debt going back
many hundreds of years, accruing unearned wealth to unnamed families who,
like our Rockefellers never have to file 1040s.  

So, before the whole world gets foreclosed upon, let's have a Jubilee Year
NOW.  There are hundreds of street demonstrations in American cities today
over the money scam.  There are hundreds of American, Canadian, German, etc.
communities establishing their own honest monetary systems to replace the
vacuum about to be left by failing national monetary scams.  Forget about
politicians; you can't afford to own them.  Let's get rid of the banking
system that buys and sells politicians like livestock, and be rid of
governmental systems that permit and promote such practices.

Most important article here based on a Harper's article on usury by Thomas
Geoghegan, born in Cincinnati though now a Chicago lawyer.  Coming from the
town that produced Wm. Howard Taft, who blocked the Federal Reserve in 1909,
I'd bet Geoghegan would do the same had he the chance.    He'd peel back the
permissiveness applied to old usury limits, which is a step in the right
direction.   He credits the Ford-Rockefeller administration with much of the
dirty work.  

It may be remembered that Nelson Rockefeller was called on the carpet for
failure to have ever filed a 1040, by his naive senatorial peers (if a
Rockefeller can ever have peers).  The truly wealthy don't own, they
control.  Back when the income tax laws were written, trusts and foundations
sprang up to hide ownership.  A low-level Geithner has to "cheat" on taxes,
a Rockefeller never!

Of course there has been a string of immoral laws removing restrictions from
the usurers and victimizing the public unmercifully.  I heard today that
churches are now falling to the foreclosure hammer.  One lender has
confiscated seven so far, with more expected.  If this isn't about the final
nail in the coffin of Christianity which five hundred years ago still stood
as a bulwark against shylockery.  That was the day of Torquemada and his
Inquisition against Marrano jewry.  After Isabella hired Columbus - perhaps
himself a Marrano - to remove her money-lending friends beyond reach of the
Inquisition, the bulk of the Marranos removed themselves northward, largely
to Hamburg, London and Amsterdam (which became then the largest jewish city
in the world for a time).  The older Britannicas still have much in the way
of non-PC history.  Be it remembered, the first national debt-bank was
hatched in Amsterdam, the second in London, there was no NYC at the time..

Geoghegan mentions the banking scam arising in ancient Babylon,  even
Britannica doesn't know how it got there.  Probably off-world I'd imagine.
Anyway when the kingdom of the Khazars adopted the Babylonian Talmud in the
8th century CE, they apparently acquired the money scam as a dividend.
After the Turks dispersed Khazaria, while the bulk of the lower-classed
Khazars fled northward to asylum in Poland (probably the then-largest
country in Europe), the moneyed Khazars preferred warmer climes in Italy,
with their wealth, from whence they married and murdered their way northward
through decadent christian nobility and royalty to where there's scarcely a
noble family left in Britain of untainted blood.  I was surprised, but not
shocked, to recently read that the Warburg family came not from Germany but
from Venice or some such.

Geoghegan would peel back usury to less immoral levels.  When something is
wrong in principle, how can it ever be right in practice?  It can't!  It
needs to be abolished as much as our whole immoral national structure, the
1787 Con-Job and all.  The entire practice of usurious, fractional reserve
bankstering must go.   We need a Jubilee Year NOW.  Instead of bailing out
the high-rise money crowd with trillions, the millions of indebted
home-owners should be forgiven.  Imagine the fast recovery of the world's
economy if home mortgages should vanish.  Instead of a surplus of goods,
there'd be incredible shortages.  This would cost the banksters nothing,
merely eliminating equal assets and liabilities on their balance sheets,
amounts created out of nothing but key-strokes on thousands of
money-lenders' computers.  Along with removing all this imaginary monetary
flatulence from the false values on real assets, we'd be relieved of any
endless ADDED expansion to the monetary system.  This nonsense out of
government about economic growth should end.  All it is is expansion of the
monetary supply.  Please remember that three years ago this month, March,
2006, the Treasury ceased reporting M3, total money supply.  They'd rather
you not dwell on the hyper-inflation they are a-building. It's just none of
your damn business!

 <http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=74897>
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/ar ... read=74897
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
AESOP


Usury Remains Untouched

Jim Kirwan

3-24-9

 "We [have] dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against
usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of
the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter's term."  From: Infinite
Debt, Harpers' Magazine - How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed the
Economy." By Thomas Geoghegan

THOMAS GEOGHEGAN: In the article, that appeared in Harper's, I've talked
about the fact that we've not focused enough on the big deregulation that
precedes all other deregulations, and that's the ceiling that has existed on
the financial sector since time immemorial on the amount of interest that
banks can get from their clients, their customers, their depositors.
Historically, and even up through movies like It's a Wonderful Life with
Frank Capra and Mr. Potter and George Bailey, the interest rates in this
country were capped at eight percent, nine percent. In the 1970s, we began
to deregulate this, and then we had a massive big bang with a Supreme Court
case that effectively knocked out all the interest rate caps. And we have
today, taken as common, that banks can charge 17, 18, 19, 30, 35 percent,
not to mention payday lenders charging 200, 300, 400 percent in states like
Illinois, California."

"If you're able to charge 30 percent or, in a payday lender case, 200 or 300
percent, you don't care so much if the loan-in fact, you actually want the
loan not to be repaid. You want people to go into debt. You want to
accumulate this interest. And this addicted the financial sector to very,
very, very high rates of return compared to what investors were used to
getting in the real economy, the manufacturing sector, General Motors, which
would give piddling five, six, seven percent returns.

So the capital in this country began to shift in the financial sector.
That's why the financial sector began to bloat up. That's why we ended up,
by 2006, having a third of all profits going into the banks and the
financial firms and not into the real economy."  (1)

These cords of dynamite that blew the lid off interest caps; have taken away
our freedoms and insured that, like our money, our financial options have
nearly been destroyed. This all began with the appointment of Gerald R. Ford
and the 25th Amendment that made his administration possible. Ford did a lot
more than just officially pardon Nixon: because he also appointed
Rockefeller as his VP, who was able to quietly connect all those secret
decisions that linked corporate banking to the
military-congressional-industrial-complex; which opened the way for the
formal creation of the New World Order, and simultaneously unplugged the
public from any role in this entire travesty, as depicted in the 1974
illustration above.

The recent changes in the Bankruptcy laws, penalize individuals far beyond
what most people can afford: while at the same time Congress liberalized the
Business Bankruptcy Laws to the point where when a business goes bankrupt
today; this amounts to taking a brief shower that allows them to shed all of
their most painful obligations while retaining all their assets. In other
words; Bankruptcy for Businesses is the exact opposite of what happens to
individuals, when they are forced into personal Bankruptcy. And it is this
form of bankruptcy that awaits the automotive industry, and probably almost
every major corporation that still has labor contracts or social obligations
to their employees, such as retirement accounts, or medical guarantees. So
when you hear about how dire things will be if one or more of our major
industries is about to be forced into bankruptcy, you might want to run it
through this simple lense-before deciding as to "what will be lost."

The 'Bankruptcy Card' now belongs completely to the owners, just like their
"get-out-of-jail-free" Card. There are so many different facets to their use
and abuse of Usury that it literally boggles the mind. But then that is why
'Usury Laws have existed in some form in every civilization from the time of
the Babylonian Empire,' except for now, under the watchful eye of the
Illuminati and the New World Order.

For instance; 'the problem' that Obama and Geithner supposedly addressed was
"toxic housing stocks" when the real problem is still "toxic banks, and
their thoroughly criminal practices and procedures. By the end of January of
this year the FED had already dispensed $11.5 Trillion to the shadow
government of this country-yet MSM is currently claiming that only $4
Trillion plus has been allocated thus far (about a third of the actual
amount). Until government begins to level with the public this monstrosity
will only get bigger because the real causes of all our problems are in the
details of everything they say they're doing; and are not mentioned in any
of the endless press conferences that Obama continues to give. (2)  

Yesterday's announcement offered this "deal" to the taxpayers. 'We put up
94% of the investment while the private financial institutions put up 6% of
the investment: Then we and the "vulture capitalists" each get 50% of the
profits, if there are any. This is the brilliant plan that Geithner and
Obama would not reveal the details of, the first time they tried to force
this down our throats. Yesterday was a re-run, nothing new, except that this
time they were comfortable with telling us about this, as they were certain
that none of the idiots in the public would understand what is really going
on.

There are no real changes in the way that bonuses are paid either, except
for AIG. They failed to mention this part of that deal as well. The changes
only apply to AIG, and not to any of the other obscene bailouts or the
outrageous bonuses paid to their executives-because as usual they haven't
fixed the system: They have only tinkered with one instance of 'a problem'
that managed to seriously anger a great many people. What happens when and
IF the public ever learns the truth about the entire monetary collapse that
is continuing without interruption in the real world? I'd love to hear about
what happened to that $11.5 Trillion (as of 1-31-09) that has since been
added to, no doubt: How about you, aren't you even curious?

There is a 'solution' floating around out there in the shadows: it's called
the 28th Amendment and could, if enacted, eliminate the corporate personhood
status, that has caused all this criminality to have such a hugely
successful run through this lawless place that it has structured, since that
travesty was successfully created out of the 14th Amendment.

The 14th Amendment was used by the corporations to acquire personhood. But
the 14th Amendment was intended to protect the then recently-freed
African-American slaves from racism-just one more example of the strong-arm
legal tactics used to alter this Republic and turn it into just another
fiefdom of, by and for, the Super-rich! (3)

If we do not begin to protect ourselves from this government, then we shall
become the new slaves that the Illuminati and the New World Order were
formed to create here, in the first place.

 <mailto:kirwanstud...@sbcglobal.net> http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/24/t ... inite_de...

2) Delusion & Denial
<http://www.kirwanesque.com/politics/articles/2009/art17.htm>
http://www.kirwanesque.com/politics/art ... /art17.htm

3) Proposed Amendment to Article 28
<http://www.realdemocracy.com/28web.htm>
http://www.realdemocracy.com/28web.htm

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[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Some interesting finds in this Document:

Hidden History of Money and the Feudal Order Usury Secrets

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4249131/The-H ... ry-Secrets


Also a very interesting look at Jewish Talmudic Usury with a modern Talmudic Book "The Richest Man in Babylon":

http://www.marcus-baker.com/wp-content/ ... abylon.pdf



Product Description

THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING CLASSIC

Read by millions, this timeless book holds the key to success-in the secrets of the ancients. Based on the famous "Babylonian principles," it's been hailed as the greatest of all inspirational works on the subject of thrift and financial planning.

ACHIEVE PERSONAL WEALTH...

This celebrated bestseller offers an understanding of-and a solution to-personal money problems.This is the original classic that reveals the secrets to acquiring money, keeping money, and making money earn even more money. Simply put: the original money-management favorite is back!
http://www.amazon.com/Richest-Man-Babyl ... 0451205367

The Richest Man in Bablyon has 7 basic principles:

1) Start thy purse to fattening - save/invest
2) Control thy expenditures - watch out for self serving brokers
3) Make thy gold mutiply - use powerful investments
4) Guard thy treasures from loss - watch out for brokers with
their hot tips.
5) Make of thy dwelling a profitable investment - rental properties, your own home---but stay within your means.
6) Insure a future income - do work that you love to do. Become excellent at it.
7) Increase thy ability to earn - education never stops.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Sefirot in Jewish Kabbalah

Kabbalists believe the Tree of Life to be a diagrammatic representation of the process by which the Universe came into being. On the Tree of Life, the beginning of the Universe is placed at a space above the first Sephirah, named Kether ("crown" in English). It is not always pictured in reproductions of the Tree of Life, but is referred to universally as Ain Soph Aur (Ain - Without, Soph - End, Aur - Light). To the Kabbalists, it symbolises that point beyond which our comprehension of the origins of Being cannot go; it is considered to be an infinite nothingness out of which the first 'thing' (thought of in science and the Kabbalah to be energy) exploded to create a Universe of multiple things. [2][3] Kabbalists also do not envision time and space as pre-existing, and place them at the next three stages on the Tree of Life. First is Kether, or the Crown in English, which is thought of as the product of the contraction of Ain Soph Aur into a singularity of infinite energy or limitless light. In the Kabbalah, it is the primordial energy out of which all things are created. The next stage is Chokmah, or Wisdom, which is considered to be a stage at which the infinitely hot and contracted singularity expanded forth into space and time. It is often thought of as pure dynamic energy of an infinite intensity forever propelled forth at a speed faster than light. It is considered to be the primordial masculine energy, which is also referred to in Chinese Taoist philosophy as Yang. Next comes Binah, or Understanding, which is thought of as the primordial feminine energy, the Supernal Mother of the Universe which receives the energy of Chokmah, cooling and nourishing it into the multitudinous forms present throughout the whole cosmos. [4] It is also seen as the beginning of Time itself. It is analogous to the Chinese concept of Yin, which together with Yang are considered to be the basis of all of Creation. There are many parallels between Taoist philosophy and the Kabbalistic conceptions of the Tree of Life. [5]

Numbers are very important to Kabbalists, and the Hebrew letters of the alphabet also have a numerical value for the Kabbalists. Each stage of the emanation of the Universe on the Tree of Life is numbered meaningfully from one, or the Sephiroth of Kether to ten, or the Sephiroth of Malkuth. The nature of each number is thought to express the nature of its Sephirah. [6]

The first three Sephiroth, called the Supernal Sephiroth, are considered to be the primordial energies of the Universe. The next stages of evolution on the Tree of Life are considered to exist beyond a space on the tree, called the Abyss, between the Supernals and the other Sephiroth, because their levels of being are so distinct from each other that they appear to exist in two totally different realities. The Supernal Sephiroth exist on a plane of divine energy. This is why another correspondence for Binah is the idea of suffering, because the Supernal Maternal energy gives birth to a world that is inherently excluded from that Divine Union. After Binah, the Universe gets down to the business of building the materials it will need to fulfill its evolution, and creating new combinations of those materials until it is so dense that, by the stage of Malkuth, the initial pure limitless energy has 'solidified' into the physical Universe. Since its energies are the basis of all Creation, the Tree of Life can potentially be applied to any area of life, especially the inner world of Man, from the subconscious all the way to what Kabbalists call the higher self.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Arabs and the Jews
Part I: The Pre-Islamic Period
Fact Paper 43-I

ada yg mau terjemahkan nggak yah ? Panjang sih ! Disingkat aja, diambili yg penting2 aja ... gua udah gempor nih  ...
Nih, udah gua singkatin dibawah ini ...


http://www.hebrewhistory.info/factpaper ... eislam.htm

--------------




An ongoing contact, commercial and otherwise, between these peoples can be interpolated from the biblical accounts. "Most scholars [accept] the likelihood of an Israelite presence In Southern Arabia from Solomonic times."

An Assyrian king, Shalmaneser, provided solid confirmation of the close relationship between the Jews and the Arabs that was already in existence shortly after the date of the biblical account. It is the earliest direct documentary record of a fraternal association between the two peoples.

...

Following the freeing of the Jews by Cyrus in Babylonia in 538 B.C.E., a substantial Judaic presence on Dilmun (now Bahrain)becomes evident.

Judaic Colonization in Arabia

Some of the Babylonian Jews freed by Cyrus returned to Judah to renew Judaic life and rebuild their sacred Temple. Most of the Jews stayed behind in Babylonia (Irak sekarang), for they had become a vibrant, productive element in the ancient Land of the Two Rivers. Great Jewish trading and banking houses developed, and triggered an expansion of Babylonian agriculture and industry, and, to an extraordinary degree, international commerce.

Jewish traders were instrumental in pioneering the so-called "Silk Route" to the Far East from the fifth century B.C.E.9 It did not take long before intrepid traders from Babylonia, having conquered the formidable Gobi desert to China's capital, Kaifeng, branched out across the equally challenging Arabian Peninsula. Bustling colonies were established at a string of oases that provided havens for caravans destined for Himyara. At these oases they continued to befriend and carry on a mutually beneficial commercial relationship with the nomadic Bedouin Arab tribes of the desert lands.



Excerpt from an ink and watercolor rendering by William Henry Bartlett of the "Principal Range of Tombs," Petra, 1845-48. The scene might well have been depicted 2000 years earlier!
Ilustration courtesy of Aramco World, 5/6/94

Archaeological evidence indicates that both Jewish and Nabatean traders were active in the area well before the Common Era (Era Masehi). The Nabateans, of Arabic origin, whose main center at Petra is one of today's archaeological marvels, composed a viable civilization at that time. Petra lay along one of the main routes into Arabia. "The Nabateans were the immediate eastern neighbors of the Jewish people during the fateful centuries of Maccabean, Herodian, and Roman rule, and who had very close relations with the Jews, both friendly and hostile.