Lending from the Temple

The temples of Babylonia were where offerings accumulated, and also the earliest institutions to keep records of lending. The temple of the sun god Shamash at Sippar holds loan records reaching back to the nineteenth century BC. The borrower's name, the amount, the date of repayment, the witnesses — and then the closing formula, sworn by Shamash. When interest could not be repaid, some arrangements allowed food to be brought to the temple instead, cancelling the debt. Interest and offerings ran into each other in those days. That said, «the world's first bank was a temple» is one hypothesis, from Bromberg's 1942 paper, not a settled view. Temple lending reads more as storage, redistribution and mutual aid than as profit-seeking, and what looks closer to banking — taking deposits and intermediating credit — appears in private houses more than a thousand years later. The Egibi family of Neo-Babylonian times left five generations and some seventeen hundred tablets; the Murashu family of Nippur left records of agricultural finance in the fifth century BC. Tracing the origin of finance to a single building was probably always a little hasty.