Given these background conditions, it is hardly surprising that money and credit
transactions of many different kinds make up a large part of the surviving written
record. Straightforward lending of money at interest, however, was not a typical entre-
preneurial business, although it is of course attested. More frequently such business-
men extended loans in money or in kind to agricultural producers who had to pay
them back, invariably in kind, at harvest time – thereby allowing the money-lenders
to profit from the lower post-harvest prices. The normal interest rate for loans was
20 per cent per annum during the sixth century; earlier it was more flexible and
frequently lower, from the fifth century onwards there was a tendency towards higher
interest, reaching often as much as 40 per cent per annum. In the third century BC,
genuine deposit banking developed in Babylonia for the first time.
The role of money-lending in the realm of agriculture was increasingly important
from the fifth century onwards, when the Persian government extracted more and
more of the taxes in cash. In Nippur, the Murasˇû family ‘firm’ specialised in lending
money to holders of service land (sometimes called ‘fiefs’), thus enabling them to pay
their dues to the king.^17 In return, the Murasˇû took control of the pledged estates
of these men, exploiting them with their own personnel and selling the produce
presumably in Nippur, thus earning the money they needed to pay the taxes the king
demanded. Elsewhere in Babylonia, and already in the sixth century, various forms
of tax farming developed in a similar way, thus creating another sector of the economy
in which private entrepreneurial activities and the realm of the institutions, in this
case the royal administration, were inextricably linked.
‘LOWER’ STRATA OF THE URBAN POPULATIONThe mass of the urban population appears only indirectly in the sources, so generalisa-
tions are difficult to make. However, it is likely that the majority of the city dwellers
in northern cities such as Babylon, Borsippa and Sippar (but maybe not to the same
extent in Uruk) were not directly affiliated to one of the temple households and were,
at best, indirectly dependent on the royal administration (for instance, as beneficiaries
of land grants connected to service obligations). Both private and institutional archives
attest to the availability of free labour for hire.^18 In a rural context, these workers
will have come primarily from independent villages, in a city environment, they must
have been recruited from the lower strata of urban society.
The important question to be asked is the extent to which these people depended
on hiring themselves out for their livelihood, and if they had other, supplementary
means of sustaining themselves, such as modest holdings of land. The available data
are not sufficient to answer this question directly, but, as already mentioned above,
some indications point towards the existence of a class of people for whom wage
labour was the primary source of income. Newly available texts suggest that the
large-scale building activities under the Neo-Babylonian kings were, to a significant
extent, financed on a monetary basis and depended primarily on hired labour, not on
conscripted workers.^19 This means that a large urban work-force must have found
continuous employment in these undertakings for years on end, earning money wages.
These men would then not have been available for primary food production and would
have had to be supplied through a market since their employer, the state, did not
normally supply them directly with rations. Urban market places, either in the area
— Michael Jursa —