Open Veils · Answer
Which group started interest payments?
Interest did not originate with bankers or merchants — it originated inside Sumerian temple complexes as an administrative tool of grain redistribution, conceptualized biologically as offspring. The Sumerian word for interest, 'mash,' literally meant the offspring of livestock, encoding a cosmological assumption that money, like animals, could breed. G. Edward Griffin and Michael Hudson have separately argued this sacred-administrative origin was later weaponized by private creditor classes to extract rather than redistribute surplus.
Evidence
- According to records surfaced by economic historian Michael Hudson, Sumerian temple administrators in the third millennium BCE created interest not as a profit mechanism but as a accounting device — temples lent grain and seed to subsistence farmers and expected a fixed return tied to natural yield cycles.
- The Sumerian cosmology embedded in the word 'mash' — meaning both interest and animal offspring — reveals the original conceptual frame: value was understood as inherently generative and alive.
- G. Edward Griffin's analysis in 'The Creature from Jekyll Island' traces the modern central banking system as a direct institutional descendant of this Babylonian model — temples replaced by chartered banks, mash replaced by compound interest, jubilee replaced by nothing.
- The 20% annual rate on silver loans and 33% on grain loans were not negotiated; they were decreed by temple and palace authority, as the clay tablet archive confirms.
- Hudson argues in his debt-jubilee research that when this administrative system migrated from temple bureaucracies into private merchant hands, the interest mechanism became extractive rather than cyclical, triggering the debt crises that necessitated ancient jubilee cancellations.