The Mimbres School for the Humanities

The Mimbres School is an intellectual community and interdisciplinary school for the humanities

[The Mimbres School for the Humanities @MimbresSchool]

Curious about the Mimbres School?

Your questions and more answered in the Student Handbook.

https://t.co/GvkCbqqHMj

[Andrew Young @SpartanVTyranny]

Next week! Still time to sign up: https://t.co/TpYN1Hz6if

[Jared Baxter @thecrystalwheat]

My next reading group for @MimbresSchool is July 15, 5:30p PDT! In my research into conspiracy theories, this book has been the most-cited text on offshore banking. Join to learn about the role of shady finance in keeping developing countries poor, the rise of Israel, Iran & more

[drumm colin @drumm_colin]

I'm very pleased to announce that Mimbres School is now accepting applications for our Research Program and Advanced Research Program, intended for students who wish to pursue original research on topics of interest to our Faculty.

See link below for details.

[Ethan Buchman (🐝,🦇) @buchmanster]

I'll be hosting a reading group on Aug 19 on Usher's Early History of Deposit Banking (1943).

A very important book that set straight a lot of misconceptions about the history of banking and grounded pretty much all future work

[drumm colin @drumm_colin]

General Admission passes for Monsoon Session 2026 are now open for reservation. Spots are limited, so reserve yours today!

Five days of reading, discussion, and intellectual community in a scenic high-desert location. Slow down and think a little.

See thread for more info.

[unexceptional politics @emolahh]

join me on June 10th @ 5:30pm @MimbresSchool for a reading group on Copjec's book Read My Desire where together we can explore what it might mean to theorize a subject against freedom

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

There's a clay tablet with the founding charter of a 12-partner company on it. Twelve merchants pooled 33 pounds of gold to start the firm. The contract has the partner names, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for cashing out early.

The tablet is nearly 4,000 years old. It was found at a site called Kanesh, in central Turkey. Archaeologists have dug up 23,500 of these clay records there, most of them business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, lawsuits. The houses they were stored in eventually burned. The fire baked the clay solid and preserved every record.

The merchants came from Assur, in modern-day Iraq. They loaded donkeys with tin and cloth and walked them 1,000 kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta. Each donkey carried about 180 pounds and the trip took two to three months. They came home with silver and gold.

The company ran for twelve years under a merchant named Amur Ishtar. A third of the profits went back to the investors. Pull your share out early and the firm gave you four kilos of silver per kilo of gold, half the normal rate. Locked-up money was meant to stay locked up.

That one company was just a tiny piece. The tablets show a complete economy with partners suing each other in commercial court, husbands writing home about prices, and wives writing back complaining the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum quietly lent silver to four different men over nine years. People bought up other people's loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans, the same thing Wall Street does today with mortgage-backed securities. One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax.

In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, Chicago, and Virginia ran the tablet numbers through a gravity model, the math economists use today to predict how much two countries will trade based on size and distance. The Bronze Age numbers matched modern trade numbers almost exactly. Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate it does between countries today. The paper ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

There was no economic theory yet. The idea didn't even have a name. The word "capitalism" wouldn't be coined for another 3,800 years, and Adam Smith was 3,700 years away from writing a sentence about markets. Just a guy named Pushu-ken writing a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth, and a woman in Assur recording who owed her how much silver. Capitalism was already there, doing its full job, almost four thousand years before anyone wrote down a theory of how it worked.

[Ethan Buchman (🐝,🦇) @buchmanster]

"One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax."

4000 years ago.

And here I thought the 12th century AD century was a decent place to start. Gotta go back a few more millennia

[The Mimbres School for the Humanities @MimbresSchool]

@baroquespiral I'm afraid we don't accept applications (via tweet or any other way!)

But you could just offer it yourself and see what happens!

[drumm colin @drumm_colin]

Coming Soon...

[a relentless necessity @CapenerSean]

Syllabus for "Evil"
w/ me

Mimbres School Summer 2026

[Ethan Buchman (🐝,🦇) @buchmanster]

Stagflation is when the number of articles you read about stagflation and your confusion about the topic both go up

[s-m sorentino @smsorentino]

Leah Kaplan's Tourism as Mastery: https://t.co/ul7PwQN4oj

[drumm colin @drumm_colin]

High Finance in the Low Countries
w/ Jan Delaeter

Mimbres School Summer 2026

[drumm colin @drumm_colin]

https://t.co/jaWXb7pSlt

[Angelica 🌐⚛️🇹🇼🇨🇳🇺🇸 @AngelicaOung]

Did YOU want to watch CCTV's AI Martial Arts cartoon about the Straits of Hormuz crisis? Complete with fighting Persian Cats? Well I subtitled it for you so you can enjoy it in all its trope-laden glory! Remember kids, the mountains will stay standing while the green water flows, and the true art of war is not figuring out how to fight, but how to stop!🥷😼🦅

[a relentless necessity @CapenerSean]

i would like to see a contemporary critique of carl schmitt's thesis re: the theological function of political concepts that actually engages the question of what it means to say that they're functionally theological