Chapter 2. Literature: Clean Slates, Law Collections, and Rules for Bad Years

2.1The clean slate as an institution

The best-known recent statement of the ancient clean slate is an anthropological history of debt. Graeber argues that credit and debt came before coin and barter in the history of exchange, that debts have repeatedly been tied to violence and to moral obligation, and that history includes many episodes of debt cancellation, from the clean slates of ancient Mesopotamia to the cancellations of the biblical jubilee, set against periods in which debt bondage grew. He uses these episodes to question the idea that debts must always be repaid (Graeber 2011). His reading note describes the book as a wide-ranging interpretive essay and records that specialists have criticised some of its historical claims.

Hudson's argument concerns the Near East more specifically. He argues that rulers there periodically cancelled debts and restored lands and persons held for debt, in proclamations of a clean slate, and that the practice helped keep society stable. He sets this against the later tradition of Greece and Rome, where such cancellations were not routine and debt led to the concentration of land and to dependence, and he links the Mesopotamian practice to the biblical jubilee (Hudson 2018). His note, too, describes an interpretive account, and says that some of its claims about the extent and meaning of the cancellations are disputed by specialists.

In the words of Hudson's note, rulers periodically cancelled debts and restored lands and persons held for debt. Three features follow from that wording for what this article tests. The release is periodic. It restores lands and persons to those who had lost them. And, as this article infers from a ruler's proclamation of a clean slate, it reaches debts as a class rather than a particular debtor's bad year; the notes do not use that phrase. Hudson's contrast between the Near East and Greece adds a fourth feature: in Greece, on his account, cancellation was not routine.

2.2The law collections and practice

The other side does not appear in the reading notes as an argument against the first. It appears as a set of tools. Westbrook's two-volume History of Ancient Near Eastern Law gathers chapters by specialists on Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia and the Levant, and on the sources, institutions and branches of law. Its note says that it discusses the legal collections, among them Hammurabi's, the practice shown in contracts and records, and debt, security and the royal edicts that remitted debts (Westbrook 2003). Roth's Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor translates the law collections from Ur-Namma to the Hittites and Assyrians, with introductions and notes; her translation of Hammurabi's laws, including the provisions on debt, loans and pledges, is described in its note as reliable, and the book discusses the nature of these collections (Roth 1995). It is a modern companion to older translations, of which King's is one.

What these works offer the debate here is a set of distinctions. A law collection is one kind of text; a contract is another; a royal edict remitting debts is a third. Westbrook's note names all three, and Roth's note says she discusses what the collections are. A clean slate in the sense of the first side would be found, if it is found anywhere, in the third kind of text; a standing rule would be found in the first; and whether either was carried out would be found in the second. The two Skeptron records studied here make the same separation in their own words, as Sections 4 and 5 show.

2.3Rules, escape clauses and bad times

Two literatures framed for modern policy bear on how a relief is written. Kydland and Prescott showed that a policy plan that is best from today's standpoint may not remain best when the future arrives, because a policy maker, once private agents have made their decisions on the basis of the plan, has an incentive to depart from it; they concluded that discretionary policy can produce worse results than a fixed rule and argued for rules in place of discretion (Kydland and Prescott 1977). Bordo and Kydland read the gold standard as a rule of this kind, one that contained an escape clause: in emergencies such as war or a financial crisis a country could suspend convertibility temporarily, so long as the public expected a return to the old parity (Bordo and Kydland 1995). Their subject is money, not debt, and their cases are modern. What they supply here is a vocabulary: a rule fixed in advance, a contingency written into it, and the expectations of those who act on the rule.

Tomz, studying sovereign borrowing and default from the 1820s to the 2000s, argues that lenders judge borrowers by their record and by the circumstances of past defaults, so that governments are more likely to be forgiven when default follows bad times and are punished when they default in good times (Tomz 2007). His borrowers are states and his evidence is modern. The likeness drawn below between his finding and a Babylonian rule that excuses a debtor whose crop was destroyed by storm or drought is a likeness of logic only: in both, the excuse depends on whether the failure to pay came from bad times outside the debtor's control.

Gross and Ní Aoláin, in a study of law in times of crisis that deals chiefly with terrorism and threats to national security, set out models of response to emergency: that ordinary law applies fully, that emergencies lie outside the law, and that emergency powers can be accommodated within it (Gross and Ní Aoláin 2006). The fit to ancient debt is loose, since their subject is the suspension of rights in modern states. Their three models nonetheless give names to a difference that the two cases show: a relief written into the ordinary law for a recurring bad event, and a relief made once by a person given extraordinary authority for a crisis.

Finally, Reinhart and Rogoff's long-run catalogue of crises documents that sovereign defaults and restructurings recur, and their note describes the book as a catalogue on which later debates about debt relief and default draw (Reinhart and Rogoff 2009). Their eight centuries, as the title gives them, do not reach antiquity. They are cited here only to mark that the question of recurrence, which the first side of the debate answers for antiquity, is answered for later periods with counts that the ancient texts cannot provide.

2.4The debates side by side