The Richest Man in Babylon

George S. Clason, an American map publisher, wrote a series of short parables about money set in ancient Babylon, which banks and insurance companies handed out as pamphlets in the 1920s. Collected as The Richest Man in Babylon, usually dated 1926, they became one of the best-known books on personal finance.

The first stories turn around Arkad, the richest man in Babylon, who teaches a few plain rules: keep at least a tenth of everything you earn, live on the rest, make your savings earn more, protect them by taking advice only from people experienced with money, own your home, provide for the future, and grow your ability to earn. Other parables apply these rules to luck, lending, debt and work: a debate about luck, the five laws of gold, a gold lender's chest of pledges, a camel trader who climbs out of debt and slavery, and a slave who works his way to freedom. The stories are told in an old-fashioned English, with "thee" and "thou".

Notes: the characters and events are Clason's fiction, set in a Babylon he imagined; they are not history, and this summary does not repeat the dates and measurements in his short sketch of the city. Amounts are in Clason's coins of copper, silver and gold. The advice is retold as Clason's, from his time, not as financial advice. The commonly reprinted text, which this summary follows, includes letters dated in the 1930s, so the book read today grew after the first pamphlets. The Dari quotes are our own translation of Clason's English.