There were money lenders (argentarii) but they were just individuals setting up stall in the local forum. If you exhausted your credit with one argentarius you just went and found another who didn't talk to the first.
They had… bank-like things, but in general they’d have been quite local; if your city is in the process of being destroyed, the prospects of your bank are poor.
Roman bank offering geo redundance is probably not what I was thinking about this morning.
"italia-south-1 was hit by a volcano yesterday, we are failing over to dalmatia-west-1 until issues are resolved. There may be some latency with obtaining coins today."
It is hard to build a distributed banking system without reliable accounting, and reliable accounting in Europe only became possible with the import of Indian/Arabic positional numeric system.
We underestimate just how much of a burden on arithmetics the previous systems were. Too unwieldy.
On a similar note, I believe that for the same reason, the Chinese language will never achieve mass adoption in the rest of the world. The script is too complicated and reaching effective literacy takes much longer than with Latin characters.
That is precisely the problem. Abacus sorta works, but arithmetics is much more efficient for the same purpose, and gives you ability to do calculations that can't be done using an abacus.
It is a difference similar to the one between a horse and a car.
That's interesting that it implies that they had concepts of zero and place-value number systems. I can imagine Romans complaining about people sticking with the Roman number system as they converted numbers to and from their abacus.
So they did not really have place value system. Or at least logical leap from abacus to place value. Instead they had 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 and summed or deducted these. Sometimes in stylistic ways.
Romans produced so many coins that you can buy genuine Roman coins relatively cheaply online. They are found absolutely everywhere in the ancient port cities and Rome itself, every construction project will unearth a ton of lower denomination coins.
The bronze age wasn't. The way it worked seems to be that there was a guy who knew what you wanted, knew what you produced, and knew people who could produce what you wanted, and he supplied you with it, and wanted what you could produce in return. Acting as a sort of intermediary between everybody else.
Because somebody claimed that you can't have organized society without banking, while for a long part of history there were organized societies without MONEY.
You can definitely have organized society without banking, but AFAIK there was no organized society without some form of taxation, and few organized societies without long-distance trade (only in isolated places).
While, with the exception of China, Bronze Age civilisations didn’t have _coins_, they did sometimes have some concept of money.
From the Code of Hammurabi (~1750BCE):
> If a man rents a boat of 60-[kur] capacity, he shall give one-sixth [of a shekel] of silver per day as its hire.
At this point, a shekel is a unit of weight, not a coin, but is already being used as, effectively, money. Coins were initially more a convenience thing than anything else.
Primitive banking-type activity is also showing up in this time period; institutions, mostly temples, taking deposits and lending with interest. And really, for most of the world (Ancient India did have some _slightly_ more sophisticated bank-like behaviour), that’s more or less where it stayed til the 17th century or so.
I suppose the translations may have a strong modern bias. Even the languages were only learned indirectly. First Old Persian in an unknown script had to be deciphered, then phonetic values for that script had to be used to decipher Akkadian, based in its similarity to other known languages. Sumerian was deciphered based on some education materials in Akkadian, and its translations seem like it's little more than a delusion that anything is unserstood at all.
There is simply nothing among the finds that could be money, and contracts seem to be in the form of I gave you 18 measures of wheat for three fat sheep. You gave me 7 jugs of oil, and I will make you 8 pairs of sandals" (all numbers and everything made up right now)
I do not understand Akkadian so I must defer to the work of Adolf Leo Oppenheim, the editor of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago for over 20 years and the translator of that tablet.
He asserts multiple times the existence of banks, money lenders, and multiple written records of persons demanding payment of money in his book Letters from Mesopotamia, Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia: https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared...
