The Naruqqum Contract
Some twenty-three thousand clay tablets have come out of Kanesh, the trading city in Anatolia. Among them are contracts in which several investors pool their funds into a «money bag» — a naruqqum — and entrust it to one merchant for ten years, twelve years, splitting the profit at an agreed ratio. Capital and management had been separated three thousand years before medieval Italy. And half of this business was carried by the wives who stayed at home. While husbands and sons walked the six-week caravan road, the women of Assur wove large textiles, and those textiles became the main export of the trade. Their letters carry instructions about deadlines and quality; they appear as creditors lending their own silver, and as investors in the naruqqum. They made the goods and they put up the capital — antiquity's trade was not a story about minding the house. There are also records of investors suing because their money never came back. Investment disputes are four thousand years old too.
The myth, corrected
The naruqqum was the world's first joint-stock company
The naruqqum — the word means «money bag» — really did separate the people who put up capital from the man who traded. But what sits at the heart of a joint-stock company — legal personality that outlives any one investor, and a market where shares change hands freely — cannot be found in the tablets. Mogens Trolle Larsen, who studies them, notes that the naruqqum form faded after the early colony period and gave way to simpler venture-by-venture partnerships. Seeing the shape of modern capital markets in antiquity — the same thing happens once more in the band right next door (see Tax Farming).