Relief of debt is an emergency act of a special kind. A suspension of payments or the closing of a bank stops something that was running; relief of debt changes what is owed, and so it moves a loss from one party to another. A creditor who is not paid this year waits. A creditor whose claim is cancelled loses it. A debtor whose person can no longer be pledged gains a protection, and a would-be debtor loses a way to borrow. Any document that grants relief therefore says, or leaves unsaid, three things that a later reader needs: who receives the relief, who pays for it, and for how long it holds.
This article asks what two sets of ancient documents say on those three points. The first set is a group of provisions in the laws of Hammurabi, king of Babylon; Skeptron's record gives his reign as 1792–1750 BC and notes that the date of any single enactment is undetermined. The second set is the two main ancient accounts of the measures of the Athenian lawgiver Solon, whose archonship Skeptron's record places in 594 BC: Plutarch's Life of Solon and the Athenian Constitution attributed to Aristotle or his school. Both sets are among the oldest written witnesses to public decisions about debt, and both appear, in the wider literature, as early cases of what is often called a clean slate.
The contribution is to the debate over that phrase. On one side stand interpretive histories that read the ancient world as one in which rulers recurrently cancelled debts and restored persons and lands held for them, and that build on those episodes an argument about what debt is and whether it must always be repaid (Graeber 2011; Hudson 2018). On the other side stand the reference works and editions through which specialists read the law collections themselves, with attention to what kind of text a law collection is, to the practice that contracts and records show, and to the royal edicts that remitted debts (Westbrook 2003; Roth 1995). The notes on the first two books record that specialists dispute some of their claims about the extent and meaning of the cancellations; the notes on the second two say nothing about the first. The placement of these four works on two sides, and the application of all the works cited here to the two cases, are this article's own; what each work argues is given only as far as its reading note in the parent study goes.
The article does not decide the debate. It puts a narrower question to the debate's own witnesses: what, in the surviving words, is released, from whom, on what condition, and for how long? The answer differs sharply between the two cases. The Hammurabi provisions at hand are not a clean slate. They are standing rules that relieve a debtor of one year's payment when the crop fails for reasons outside the debtor's control, and that limit to three years the service of a debtor's household sold for debt. They name their own condition and their own term. The Solonian accounts describe something closer to the clean slate of the literature, a general cancellation of existing debts, but they describe it as a single act joined to a permanent prohibition on lending against the person, they disagree about whether the cancellation was a cancellation at all, and they name, with a care rare among the records of emergency acts, the people who bore its cost. A second, smaller finding concerns Skeptron's two modern records of these cases. They keep the conditional character of the first and keep the measures of the second apart, which is what a reader who keeps a law collection apart from contracts and edicts needs from them; but they say nothing of who bore the cost in either case, although the texts behind them say a great deal.
Two further debates run beside the first. One is the economists' argument over rules and discretion: whether a policy fixed in advance does better than one decided when the moment comes, and whether a rule can carry an escape clause for emergencies (Kydland and Prescott 1977; Bordo and Kydland 1995). Hammurabi's law 48 is a rule written in advance with a contingency inside it; Solon's cancellation is a discretionary act announced once. The other is the legal argument over how emergency powers relate to ordinary law (Gross and Ní Aoláin 2006). Both debates were framed for modern states, and the article uses them as lenses, saying where they fit badly.
Section 2 lays out the debates. Section 3 describes the texts and records and the ledger of the parent study. Sections 4 and 5 read the two cases, and Section 6 sets them side by side. Section 7 states the contribution, the limits and what further work could do.