The Richest Man in Babylon Summary & key ideas explained

A chariot builder sits outside his workshop, staring at a chariot he should be finishing. The family's flour is nearly gone, and his wife knows it. Bansir has worked hard for half his life, and he doesn't have two coins to rub together.

Then his oldest friend, Kobbi the musician, wanders by and asks to borrow two shekels. Bansir laughs bitterly. If he had two shekels, they'd be his whole fortune.

So the two friends ask the question you may have asked yourself: we earn, we work hard, so why is our purse always empty? And they decide to put it to the one man who might know, their boyhood friend Arkad, now the richest man in Babylon.

That's the setup of The Richest Man in Babylon. George S. Clason, a Denver map publisher, wrote these Babylonian tales as pamphlets in the 1920s, and banks and insurance companies handed them out by the thousands. Gathered into a book in 1926, they have stayed in print ever since.

The stories are dressed in robes and camel caravans, but the rules inside them are the same ones you need today: how to keep money, grow it, guard it, and earn more of it. And the first one is so simple that Arkad's friends almost laughed at it.