Herodotus on how to cope with a recession

[ewx]

[2.136] The priests told me that Asychis succeeded to the Egyptian kingdom after Mycerinus. He built the eastern gateway of the sanctuary of Hephaestus, which is the most magnificent and by far the largest. All the gateways have figures carved on them and countless other marvels of construction, but this eastern one easily outdoes the others. They said that during his reign there was a severe financial recession and so a law was passed that a person might use his father’s corpse as security to take out a loan. There was a rider to the law, however, to the effect that the lender also became proprietor of the whole of the borrower’s burial plot, so that if the mortgagee refused to pay back the loan, as a penalty neither he nor any other member of his family could have access on their deaths to burial in the family tomb (or indeed in any other tomb either). They say that Asychis wanted to outdo the Egyptian kings who came before him, so he built as his monument a pyramid made out of bricks, and had the followed words chiselled in stone on it: ‘Do not compare me unfavourably with the pyramids of stone. I surpass the other pyramids as Zeus surpasses the other gods. For I was made out of mud, which was collected from a pole it had stick to when the pole was plunged down into a lake.’ So much for Asychis’ achievements.