...the translations of the Sumerian and the Babylonian, in every language are completely different.
In America, it’s a tax reduction. Samuel Kramer, who wrote the most popular book on Sumer, wrote a letter in 1981 to The New York Times urging newly elected President Reagan to do what Urukagina did in Lagash in 2350 BC and lower taxes. That’s not what happened. The esteemed professor was projecting his own right-wing economic beliefs onto the ancient past.
The English thought – how English can you get – that these were free trade agreements.The Germans got much closer to the reality, and said they were debt cancellations. Finally came the French translations. They got it right: Dominique Charpin translated the Sumerian term as a restoration of order. The word for the clean slate in Sumerian was “amargi” and the root is “ma”: The “mother” of all situations.
The rulers had what we would call an economic model.....
...So they knew how the tendency of every society was that people would run up debts. Now when they ran up debts in Sumer and Babylonia, and even in in Judea in Jesus’ time, they didn’t borrow money from money lenders. People owed debts because they were in arrears: They couldn’t pay the fees owed to the palace. We might call them taxes, but they actually were fees for public services. And for beer, for instance. The palace would supply beer and you would run up a tab over the year, to be paid at harvest time on the threshing floor. You also would pay for the boatmen, if you needed to get your harvest delivered by boat. You would pay for draught cattle if you needed them. You’d pay for water. Cornelia Wunsch did one study and found that 75% of the debts, even in neo-Babylonian times around the 5th or 4th century BC, were arrears.
Sometimes the harvest failed. And when the harvest failed, obviously they couldn’t pay their fees and other debts. Hammurabi canceled debts four or five times during his reign. He did this because either the harvest failed or there was a war and people couldn’t pay.
What do you do if you’re a ruler and people can’t pay? One reason they would cancel debts is that most debts were owed to the palace or to the temples, which were under the control of the palace. So you’re canceling debts that are owed to yourself.
Rulers had a good reason for doing this. If they didn’t cancel the debts, then people who owed money would become bondservants to the tax collector or the wealthy creditors, or whoever they owed money to. If they were bondservants, they couldn’t serve in the army. They couldn’t provide the corvée labor duties – the kind of tax that people had to pay in the form of labor. Or they would defect. If you wanted to win a war you had to have a citizenry that had its own land, its own means of support.
The Land Belongs to God | Michael Hudson
https://michael-hudson.com/2017/01/the-land-belongs-to-god/
