re: History question re: banks

It depends on what you mean by "bank."

I did one of my very first blog posts on here about the oldest known fractional-reserve lending in the world was at the Temple of Shamash at Sippar in Mesopotamia. But this was a state treasury-temple hybrid that collected state gold and made a few loans on it to certain individuals.

I'm pretty sure the ancient Greeks were the first to have what we might call merchant banks, which a few centuries ago were the forerunners to investment banks. This is the type of stuff you see in The Merchant of Venice and stuff, where syndicated businessmen get together to share risk in their investments for long trading voyages. I'm sure the Islamic traders around the Indian Ocean had them too.

The Romans were more sophisticated than most, and some even credit the emperor Tiberius with implementing the world's first banking bailout aimed at monetary stabilization in the 1st century A.D.

But it wasn't until the Crusades and the Knights Templar that you started having common banking services for the non-investing consumer looking to simply transfer money safely, with stuff like international "check" clearing and the like. The Republic of Venice established a bank in 1157, and then all the other Italian maritime republics soon followed, with the Bardi, Peruzzi, Medici, et al. Then finally we got publicly traded joint-stock companies with the English & Dutch around 1600.

The history of banking since then is well known and fairly easy to research, although certain nooks and crannies of that history, such as the history of banking in the pre-Revolution American colonies, can sometimes be difficult. It also gets confusing when you see all the various forms banks can take, each only slightly different from the others--savings & loans, thrifts, building societies, credit unions, etc. To a large extent, even in the 19th century thrifts where people stored their saved money were often separate from banks where investors pooled resources to make loans. Modern commercial banking evolved into the norm only relatively recently, I guess around the latter half of the 19th century.