http://barnesreview.org/pdf/TBR2002-no3-4-8.pdf
Both in the Code of Manu (a law structure
governing the order of life of that India
which emerged from the Vedic period) and in
the laws of the Akkadian kings of Mesopo -
tamia, appear prohibitions of either goldsmith
workers in precious metals, or warehousers of valuables
of whatever nature, setting themselves up as in opposition
to the king—that is to say, the sovereign power. There
is little doubt that this had been effected by the circularization
of receipts indicating valuables on deposit with them as
for safe-keeping, which obviously would lend itself to
what clearly may have been with them already
an ancient practice, of the circulation of spurious
receipts; such as indeed, did the goldsmiths
of Lombard Street in London, Eng -
land, in the 16th and 17th centuries A.D.,
some 4,000 years later.
Thus, by this little piece of sleight-of-hand,
they could cause an unseen addition to such previous
“whole measure of value” as had existed
and as created by the discriminate and controlled
will of the temple and the king in his capacity of
being the viceroy of the god that ruled in the temple,
and thus they could stealthily undermine all
natural authority and ultimately all good order in
life itself.
That no such prohibitions seem to appear in the much
more recent times of the Greek and Roman worlds, so much
better known to us, is because the world that carried forward
from the decay of Sumeria following on the debilitating civil
wars therein, and that had ended in the death of most of that
which was Sumeria with the breaking of the remaining
threads which had held together its ancient life, was a world
in which the overt power of a private money creative force,
even if not understood as such, had come to be accepted as an
inevitability.1
Ultimately, indeed as in Greece and Rome, the situation
arose that the great temples (or sanctuaries), though still
drawing the prayers and bounty of the devoted, and offering
solace to downcast souls, were too often but fronts for the
activities of mysterious alien “bankers,” so-called, who by now
seem to have become an anciently established factor in the
current of history of civilizations as we know them.
Going back to ancient India and the Code of Manu (IX,
292) we find: “But the king [maharajah] should cause a worker
in gold who acts in an unlawful manner, he being the most
evil of all thorns infesting a kingdom, to be chopped up
into small pieces with sharp knives.”2
The above penalty, as prescribed in Manu,
being perhaps the most ferocious of all prescribed
in the code, thus leaves no doubt that
there is some special significance therein.
Thus long, long ago, it was clearly understood
that the fascination for gold, already having
been sought after all over the known world,
was as ancient as memory. Found in the bed of
streams as flaming yellow dust, it could be linked to
the idea of wealth; and wealth itself being already
linked to the idea of money, then it too, became linked
to the idea of money; money in its true definition necessarily
being an envincement of the will of the ruler
toward the creation of equitable exchanges.
This Law of Manu suggests that those miners and
prospectors and men of war, who brought gold to the city,
could be inveigled, in ancient times, as much as in modem
times, into leaving their gold with the goldsmiths; “on
deposit” against a negotiable receipt.
It did not take long, it may reasonably be presumed, for
such goldsmiths to realize the immense potentialities inherent
in such toward their own aggrandizement, and even, at
times the gaining of what may have amounted to a secret
control over the life of the kingdom itself.
P
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