Wonder Mag

Long before stock markets, credit cards, or central banks, finance had already begun. Its birthplace was not Wall Street or Renaissance Italy, but ancient Mesopotamia — among the Sumerians, over five thousand years ago. What makes this remarkable is not just how early it happened, but how familiar it feels. The Sumerians lived between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in a land where agriculture created surplus for the first time in human history. Surplus changed everything. When people produced more grain, barley, and livestock than they immediately needed, a new problem emerged: storage, protection, and trust. This is where banking was born. Sumerian temples and palaces functioned as the first financial institutions. They stored grain, silver, and goods on behalf of individuals and communities. In return, they issued clay tablets — recorded agreements written in cuneiform — detailing deposits, loans, interest rates, and repayment dates. These tablets were not symbolic. The...

Around three thousand years ago, something deeply unsettling happened in human history. Across a vast region stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Near East, powerful and long-established civilizations began to collapse almost simultaneously. The Hittite Empire vanished without a trace. Mycenaean cities were burned and abandoned. In Ugarit, the final clay tablets read like unfinished cries for help. Egypt survived, but only barely, stripped of its former dominance. For a long time, historians labeled this period a “dark age” and moved on. There was no single enemy to blame, no single catastrophe that could explain everything. But today, a more uncomfortable explanation has emerged: this was not a coincidence. It was a systemic failure. The Late Bronze Age world was far more interconnected than we once believed. Bronze production depended not only on copper, but on tin sourced from distant lands. Trade routes, ports, palace economies, and armies were tightly linke...