Abstract

A large body of writing on ancient debt holds that rulers periodically wiped the slate clean, cancelling debts and freeing those held for them, and that this practice kept early societies stable. Other work, much of it by specialists in ancient law, attends to what the surviving law collections are and to how practice shows in contracts and records. This article tests the clean-slate thesis against the surviving words of two of its standard witnesses. It reads laws 48 to 52 and 113 to 119 of the Code of Hammurabi in L. W. King's translation of 1910, chapters 13 to 16 of Plutarch's Life of Solon in Bernadotte Perrin's translation of 1914, and Parts 6 and 12 of the Athenian Constitution attributed to Aristotle in F. G. Kenyon's translation of 1891, beside two records published by Skeptron, a studio of the RISCON family, which are modern summaries written in 2026 for a public platform and not archival documents. The reading finds that the Hammurabi excerpt contains no clean slate at all. It contains a standing rule of relief tied to an observable condition and limited to one year, and a term of three years on service for debt. The Solonian texts describe a single general cancellation joined to a permanent prohibition, written down long afterwards and disputed in its nature even by the ancient writers, and they name the people who bore its cost with unusual care. The modern records keep the conditional character of the first and the separateness of the measures in the second; they drop every bearer. The texts can test the clean-slate thesis only at the level of its two witnesses, and they cannot show enforcement.