[paxys]

Interest, risk, insurance etc. are such intrinsic economic concepts that it is hard to believe they didn't naturally originate in some form in the earliest human societies. While I'm sure the word risk and formal methods of actuary can be traced to the era mentioned by the author, I'm more hesitant to believe that the "idea of risk" was invented there.

[bidivia]

Ancient greeks had actually a very similar system of participation on maritime endeavors.

They even supported poets in order to create fiction and propaganda about the amazing things and riches that were abroad. Making young people travel also relieved demographical pressure.

If you lost a ship by shipwreck, you lost it all, but it was very profitable if the ship returned. Like anything in life, the were "naturals" that will return and succeed, people that were really good at it for whatever reason.

[5040]

There's some interesting details from Rome too. Take this on Cato:

>As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships. He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.

[nikprasad]

Perhaps we didn't have as much economic activity in the earlier human societies or perhaps those methods have been lost to time (just like those societies). As an ex actuary student what I can tell you is that at least from a mathematical tools perspective, we didn't have those available till around the 17th century.

[sushsjsuauahab]

There are Babylonian tablets where merchants are complaining about other merchants not delivering on their contractual obligations :)

[FranzFerdiNaN]

One of them even became a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir

[BoxOfRain]

There's something incredibly surreal about a dispute over trading standards between two people who have been dead for literal millennia and couldn't possibly have conceived of the internet and the technology that makes it possible becoming a meme. I wonder if there's any correspondence out there today which will amuse people 3500 years in the future?

[geoduck14]

>I wonder if there's any correspondence out there today which will amuse people 3500 years in the future?

I really hope RickRolling is still a think in 3500 years

[BoxOfRain]

I wonder how it might get translated into future languages? There's dozens of Bible translations and while they all say the same thing the tone of the text can be quite different between them, the Valley of the Shadow of Death (KJV) conjures a much more vivid picture than the darkest valley (NIV) for example.

The idea of a future historian painstakingly translating and trying to figure out the "deeper significance" of each phrase in Never Gonna Give You Up makes me smile! Maybe we should print out Wikipedia on the kind of paper the ancient Israelites were using to give them a hand.

[ovi256]

Most probably it will be as alien to people in 3500 years as the babylonian gods are to us.

[nikprasad]

Haha I had forgotten about this meme! I wonder if they had insurance for merchants back then and if so how did they even figure out the premium on it...