A History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homer, Rutgers University Press, 1963

Credit is sometimes considered a modern device or even a modern vice. It is true that a few new credit forms have been developed in our century and statistics reflecting the growth of the volume of credit during recent decades are impressive. But a glance through the pages of financial history will dispel the notion of novelty. Credit was in general use in ancient and medieval times. Credit long antedated industry, banking and even coinage; it probably antedated primitive forms of money.

For example, about 1800 B.C., Hammurabi, a king of the first dynasty of ancient Babylonia, gave his people their earliest formal code of laws. A number of chief provisions of this code regulated the relation of debtor to creditor. The maximum rate of interest was set at 33 1/3% per annum for loans of grain repayable in kind, and at 20% per annum for loans of silver by weight.

Twelve hundred years later, around 600 B.C., the legal history of classical Greece began with the laws of Solon. Drastic reforms were then called for by an economic crisis in Athens stemming in part from excessive debt and widespread personal slavery for debt.

The Romans also began their legal history with a body of laws regulating credit. This, too, was forced by a crisis characterized by excessive debt.

These three examples from the earliest days of historic Babylon, Greece and Rome are enough to support the conclusion that credit at interest was widespread enough to create major political problems before the emergence of written history.

Usury, or interest, was fundamental to the economics of these great civilizations, driving its unsustainable growth and eventual epochal collapse. 

Form of Money Series