1823 BC
Silver loan from the Shamash temple at Sippar
Money, banking & finance · Crédito e instituciones
A Babylonian tablet dated 1823 BCE documents a silver loan from the Shamash temple, with principal and interest due at harvest. It illustrates that temple institutions could participate in documented credit. One surviving contract is not enough to turn all temples into banks or to establish this credit’s relative weight in the local economy.
Precision, calendar, and review
- Start
- year · no uncertainty qualifier in this record
- 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: point event.
Sources
- www.britishmuseum.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.