How Did Ancient Humans Invent Insurance

What if insurance is 5,000 years older than you think? Long before modern insurance companies, monthly premiums, actuarial tables, and policy contracts, ancient civilizations were already developing ways to pool risk and protect against catastrophic loss. In this video, we travel from ancient Mesopotamia and Babylon to Phoenicia, Rhodes, Greece, and Rome to uncover the surprising origins of insurance. We explore the ancient bottomry contracts used by merchants whose ships faced storms, pirates, shipwrecks, and lost cargo. We examine how the Code of Hammurabi, written around 1750 BC, regulated these financial arrangements and even recognized situations where catastrophic events could eliminate a debt. Then we follow the evolution of risk-sharing through ancient maritime trade, including the remarkable general average principle of Rhodes, where losses from saving a ship could be distributed among the merchants whose cargo remained aboard. But ancient insurance wasn't only about ships.