Philosophy and Money: The Ancient Near East
摘要
The ancient Near Eastern cultures of Babylonia and Assyria have left behind the richest corpus of sources on the use of money in the ancient world. Those are documents of practice written in cuneiform script on clay tablets; and although they do not include theoretical reflections on its use, they allow us to reconstruct many details about how money functioned in society and what people felt about it. This chapter discusses the multiple forms money took, why it was invented, how it was considered a reliable source of wealth, and what the ethical considerations regarding its acquisition were.