Our entire financial and monetary system has run amuck. Greed and the intense concentration of wealth and money have led us to unprecedented inequality. The wealthy are writing our laws to create profits and land ownership for themselves. Money is being created and goes to the non-productive financial markets. The rich pay fewer taxes, and profits are put into secretive accounts outside our jurisdiction. The farmers are in debt and mostly have lost the land they once owned and worked upon.
The above statements describe our situation today. However, they could be equally applied to Ancient Rome and as a central cause for its downfall and disintegration. Can we learn from history and save our civilization?
Michael Hudson’s Temples of Enterprise describes the overall money, land tenure, and economic system of the earliest temples of Babylonia and Sumer. From the outsider’s perspective, these temples can be seen as destined to grow and can appear as a “utopian Eden” (p. 158). Hudson quotes the Roman historians Seneca and Virgil (p. 158-9) to make the point:
“No ploughman tilled the soil, nor was it right,
To portion off the boundaries of property.
Men shared their gain, and earth more freely gave
Her riches to her sons who sought them not.”
“There was once a fortune-favored period when the
boundaries of nature lay open to all, for men’s
indiscriminate use, before avarice and luxury had
broken the bonds that held mortals together.”
In Temples of Enterprise, Hudson has collated over two decades of writings and research from the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. This work provides the reader with a treatise on the concerns and workings of ancient administrators to proactively keep society cohesive and bolster surpluses to expand society’s development and culture. The core principle for these early temples was that a society’s wealth, well-being, and resilience came before private wealth accumulation! The three sections of the book cover the themes of:
I: Money’s Origins: Fiscal Account-Keeping and Credit
II: Land Tenure: From its Fiscal Origins to Financialization
III: Urban Origins, Social Cosmology and Privatization
While money’s origins is the most prominent section and perhaps most important for today’s readers, there would be little harm done starting with chapters nine and ten. Chapter nine provides an excellent introduction to Hudson and his work. Chapter ten covers human and urban development before the Neolithic and Bronze Age, giving historical context to the rise of the Early Mesopotamian temples. As a reviewer with an archeology and cultural anthropology background, I particularly enjoyed this reach back into early human urbanization. With either chapter order, the book reads perfectly well.
In the 1970s, I was a student immersed in cultural anthropology. I calculated about two million hours of digging and research that Sir Charles Woolley and his team put into uncovering the rise of civilization and biblical history. I remembered reading about Woolley telling his team to keep digging under one civilization and going through seven feet of sterile soil before finding cultural artifacts of an earlier civilization and stating that this could be a reference to the Great Flood in the Old Testament. There were other biblical references, but this one stood out to me.
It was not until now, decades later, with Hudson’s Temples of Enterprise, that I fully gained a relatively complete historical economic picture. Hudson communicates a vital understanding of ancient society administrators. These administrators successfully grew their civilizations, operating with a god-like purpose, knowing that society could not economically tolerate greediness and debt accumulation. Today’s goal of keeping our civilization economically healthy might well be served by embracing some similar central administration (spiritual in nature?) responsible for all citizens to live a healthy, abundant life free from the accumulation of debt with its unhealthy consequences.
Throughout the book, Hudson often compares the past to today’s world. He gives particular attention to the armchair economist philosophers John Locke, Adam Smith, and Alfred Menger, who, in a variety of ways, postulated that early bartering in a free market of individuals was the precedent economic explanation to justify today’s contract law, indebtedness, and owning land as property. Hudson brings the weight of specialists in the field – archaeologists, assyriologists, anthropologists, historical linguists – to scientifically counter the theorizing of these armchair philosophers.
Hudson focuses in each of the three sections on the early temples of Babylonia and Sumer, starting around 3500 BC, and what becomes clear is that debt forgiveness and land restoration are crucial for these early civilizations. These societies also learned to avoid going to war to gain resources and instead to develop trade with foreign powers. Beginning in 2100 BC, there is a transition, the Middle Bronze Age, which goes to 1600 BC. Hudson asserts this is “one of the most important transition periods in the history of civilization…” where there is “the dissolving of centralized institutional ownership, creating a power vacuum that enabled land and enterprise to become increasingly private in character” (P. 184).
However, there is only a partial fall off of centralized institutional authority that provides a balancing mechanism between the poor and the developing rich oligarchies. Hudson goes forward in time covering the Middle East and Egypt, followed by Pre- and Classical Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine period until around AD 1025 in Constantinople. During these later 2600 years, Hudson highlights the vestiges of debt forgiveness and land restoration. For example, at the end of this period, in AD 996, Basil II was the last emperor in Constantinople who declared that lands would be restored to their original owners, including those the church had taken over (p.195). However, in Ancient Rome, the affluent oligarchic families didn’t know how to give up their greed to save Rome. Will we do better today? For an in-depth yet accessible historical treatise and modern-day warning, put Temples of Enterprise on your must-read list!
Steven Walsh
Educator and Head Steward, American Monetary Institute
As museum and classroom educators, we need to reconsider how we teach bartering, often with a sense of profit, as the only natural way to make exchanges in a civilized society. Reading Temples of Enterprise teaches us a crucial alternative: caring for everyone so all humans can enjoy life. The Roman historians Seneca and Virgil suggest that if we can distinguish our wants from our needs and concentrate on our needs, we might find the earth bountiful for all.
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