c. 2000 BCE–c. 1800 BCE
Assyrian merchant credit and debt tablets
Money, banking & finance · Crédito y comercio
In Assyrian trading colonies in Anatolia, tablets recorded silver loans, due dates, interest, witnesses, and disputes among merchants. The documentation reveals credit and accounting within long-distance exchange networks; it is not a modern bank and does not recover every term of ancient credit.
Precision, calendar, and review
- Start
- year · approximate
- End
- year · approximate
- Calendar and convention
- Historical-era years; the source calendar is not identified. No conversion of days is assumed.
- Year zero
- The scale goes from 1 BCE to 1 CE without year zero. Changing era names changes labels only.
- Documentary review
- Date not recorded
Reading the date: duration of a process.
Sources
- www.metmuseum.org (opens in a new tab)
Source provenance and scope
- Publication date
- Pending verification: the source could not be accessed
- Bibliographic date checked
- 2026-09-23
The correspondence between this reference and individual claims has not yet been itemized.
This record is an editorial synthesis. Consult the sources to check claims and their limits. Chronological relationships alone do not establish causation.