Significance of ancient Mesopotamia in accounting history

              The Accounting Historians Journal Vol. 11, No. 1 Spring 1984
Douglas Garbutt
CONSULTANT
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA IN ACCOUNTING HISTORY
Abstract: The article draws attention to the vast archive of accounting records from ancient Mesopotamia available to historians, and the advances in Assyriology which have taken place since the revival of interest in the origins of recorded his-tory. Understanding of the materials has been advanced, in part, by specialists from other fields, such as mathematics and astronomy, yet accounting historians do not seem to have been attracted to the problems of interpreting the elegantly simple records and the societal context within which they were made and used.
To exemplify the challenges facing the accounting historian, the author consid-ers evidence on the Dreham archive, the temple as a financial institution, and the use of loans, interest and banking. Finally, the author suggests that the records of Ancient Mesopotamia offer a rich field of research in accounting history.
Ancient Mesopotamia and Modern Iraq
There is some confusion in the terms applied to the civilisations of ancient Mesopotamia. The name, which is Greek, means the land between two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates—which rise in the mountains of Turkey and flow south to the Gulf where they meet at the Shatt-el-Arab near Basra. The Euphrates takes a longer course, and almost joins the Mediterranean near Jerablus, but it then takes a vast curve inland. At Baghdad the two rivers nearly meet; only twenty miles separate them.
Babylonia covered the southern half of modern Iraq to the Gulf of Basra, and was centred on the ancient city of Babylon, a city ferociously denounced in Jeremiah 50 to 52 because Nebuchad-nezzar took the Jews to captivity there. Babylonia was divided into Akkad in the north and Sumer in the south. Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian are Semitic languages akin to Hebrew and Arabic. Sumerian has so far resisted all attempts to relate it to any language living or dead.1 Famous Sumerian cities were Ur, Uruk, Nippur, and Kish.
The author is grateful to Professor D. J. Wiseman of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Professor R. H. Parker of the University of Exeter, and Mr. David A. R. Forrester of the University of Strathclyde for their helpful comments. The author makes the usual confession of responsibility for such errors as remain.