 Food money in the shape of olives, dates, seeds or animals was lent out as early as c. 5000 BC, if not earlier, and records indicate rates of 10–25 percent for silver and 20–35 percent for cereals.Among the Mesopotamians, Hittites, Phoenicians and Egyptians, interest was legal and often fixed by the state.Among the Sumerians, loans were usually given with interest attached, at the rate of 20% per annum; this interest rate is almost always the one stated in surviving Sumerian contract tablets and was evidently still well known in first century Judaism, as it is the first interest rate to which the Babylonian Talmud refers.