The Old Babylonian Loan Contract: Its History and Geography.

• Author: Van De Mieroop, Marc

This book presents a study of the terminology used in Old Babylonian loan contracts, with special attention paid to changes over time and place. The work is extremely detailed and systematic, and seems to have identified all the relevant texts published before 1992. The author progresses gradually through the clauses in these documents, attempting to explain their meaning and identifying when and where they occurred. He does not treat the witness lists, since they are common to all Old Babylonian contract documents (p. 27), or sealing practices, to which he does not refer. This reflects the fact that the book is a study of legal terminology in the tradition of Koschaker and San Nicolo, not a study of the function of the loan and of credit in Old Babylonian society.

The author steps beyond these limits but rarely. This is because the problem of the role of credit must be dealt with through an archival approach, and this is a massive task involving the consideration of thousands of documents. An exception is his discussion of the question whether the interest charged was calculated on an annual basis or was added in its entirety to the principal of the loan, however short the loan's duration.

Skaist arrives here at the same conclusion as I have in an article unavailable to him ("Old Babylonian Interest Rates: Were They Annual?" in Immigration and Emigration within the Near East: Studies in Honour of E. Lipinski, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 24 [Leuven: Department Orientalistiek, 1995], 357-64): the full amount of the interest stated in the contract was added when the loan was due, even if that were only ten days after its issue. Skaist's approach is quite different from mine. He bases his conclusion primarily on a negative argument: a great many loan contracts are dated no more precisely than by the year; how then could one have established the exact duration of the loan and determined what fraction of the stated interest was due (p. 135)? This conclusion is extremely important for any study of credit transactions, since the financial burden imposed on the debtor depended in part on the duration of the loan. It is to be hoped that this will be acknowledged by all working with this material.

A study of this type, where the texts and clauses within them are regarded in a total vacuum, has two important problems. First, the author investigates the variation of clauses entirely according to time and place, without looking at the context in...