Documentary Sources in Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman Economic History

Methodology and Practice

Heather D. Baker, Michael Jursa, Michael Jursa

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781782977599
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume breaks new ground in approaching the Ancient Economy by bringing together documentary sources from Mesopotamia and the Greco-Roman world. Addressing textual corpora that have traditionally been studied separately, the collected papers overturn the conventional view of a fundamental divide between the economic institutions of these two regions. The premise is that, while controlling for differences, texts from either cultural setting can be brought to bear on the other and can shed light, through their use as proxy data, on such questions as economic mentalities and market development. The book also presents innovative approaches to the quantitative study of large corpora of ancient documents. The resulting view of the Ancient Economy is much more variegated and dynamic than traditional 'primitivist' views would allow. The volume covers the following topics: Babylonian house size data as an index of urban living standards; the Old Babylonian archives as a source for economic history; Middle Bronze Age long distance trade in Anatolia; long-term economic development in Babylonia from the 7th to the 4th century BC; legal institutions and agrarian change in the Roman Empire; papyrological evidence for water-lifting technology; money circulation and monetization in Late Antique Egypt; the application of Social Network Analysis to Babylonian cuneiform archives; price trends in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, as well as the effects of locust plagues on prices.

1

Introduction

Michael Jursa

This collection of papers is the result of a conference in Vienna in 2008 that brought together scholars of different periods of Mesopotamian history and classicists working on Greco-Roman sources. The conference was held under the auspices of the START project ‘The Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC’ which was directed by M. Jursa at the University of Vienna between 2002 and 2009. Correspondingly, the objective of the conference was to explore the potential of interdisciplinary approaches to ancient economic history on a methodological and a factual level, a research programme that has since led to the establishment of a joint project of classicists, papyrologists, Islamic historians and Assyriologists exploring aspects of ancient administrative history.¹ In fact, similar agenda are being pursued also elsewhere, e.g., by the ‘Legal Documents in Ancient Societies’ group.²

The Vienna conference aimed not only at establishing a dialogue between different academic fields that might eventually broaden the protagonists’ perspective as they pursued their respective interests; it was also intended – as this volume intends – to address methodological points of contact in the study of Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman documentary sources, and to investigate the potential commensurability of the results of such investigations. More specifically, the conference’s agenda was informed by the – admittedly very old – question of whether it should be accepted, following in the footsteps of Moses Finley, that the basic structure of the Ancient Mesopotamian economies, in which institutional households and redistributive bureaucracies played an important role, precludes making useful comparisons with the economic systems of the Greco-Roman world, in which such institutions generally did not have an important function.³ While this position continues to be held in the field of Greco-Roman history, it is – increasingly, it would seem – at odds with the perception of Assyriologists that the nature of the Mesopotamian economies is not captured sufficiently by the institutional household model which informed Finley’s thesis. Nowadays a much more important role is ascribed to the economic agency and the economic interdependence (on the basis of commercial exchange) of individuals and nuclear households. The papers presented by Charpin and especially Dercksen in this volume can serve as an example for the state of research on the first half of the second millennium BC.⁴ A ‘modernist’ or ‘formalist’ view of the Mesopotamian economy is especially prevalent among the specialists in the Mesopotamian Iron age, where, as can now be demonstrated, from the sixth century BC at least, a strongly monetized economy experienced phases of noticeable aggregate and per capita growth on the strength of agricultural intensification and efficient institutions, which include fairly well performing commodity markets and, at least in part and for some time, also factor markets.⁵ Incidentally, at the same time some students of the Greco-Roman economy have turned against what used to be minimalist or primitivist readings of the evidence, emphasizing the remarkable performance especially of the Roman economy, and seeing evidence for economic growth that is structurally not dissimilar (albeit happening on a much larger scale) from the model that can be posited for the economic development in Mesopotamia’s imperial phase of the Iron Age.⁶ However, while the ‘formalist’ reading of the Mesopotamian economy of the first millennium BC can be supported not only by a rich body of qualitative information extracted from thousands of economic documents, but also by an irregular, but still quite abundant flow of quantifiable data (see, e.g., the contributions of van der Spek, Pirngruber and Jursa in this volume), such data are largely lacking for much of Greco-Roman antiquity – and archaeological data, which can serve as a proxy for textual data, is quite often ambiguous.⁷ It comes thus as no surprise that opinions on the Roman (and Greek) economy still differ widely and that a reviewer might state that a book on “The Roman Market Economy” did “a good job of persuading me that there was really nothing resembling an integrated Roman market economy”,⁸ that “there are no ancient statistics” and that “as Finley insisted, the crucial point is that the Romans simply did not conceive of their “economic” activity (buying, selling, lending) in what we would think of as economic terms at all.”⁹

The specific contribution of this volume, beyond the methodological level, lies in its offering a point of comparison that may cause the Greco-Roman data to appear in a new light. Ancient Near Eastern data, once they are demonstrated to be commensurable with corresponding Greco-Roman information, can serve as proxy-data to compensate for the lack of data on the Greco-Roman side (providing this comparison is done with some control over the different cultural settings, obviously). Two examples: it may potentially be conceded that Romans, or perhaps some Romans, thought about their economy “not in terms of commerce, contracts and profits, but obligations, benefits, and reciprocity,” rendering this a “moral economy”¹⁰ – but Ancient Near Eastern data can show that this is quite probably a misleading contrast in that, for instance, “a characterization of Old Assyrian merchants as profit-driven private entrepreneurs is correct, but ignores the all-permeating influence of religious, legal, and other institutions into which the trade and the traders (as in other periods and places) were embedded” (Dercksen, this volume): the market is evidently as culturally embedded as any other institution of socio-economic life. While this is perhaps by now a commonplace among economic historians and economic anthropologists,¹¹ it is satisfying to note that the Old Assyrian evidence as discussed by Dercksen contains, if not the Assyrian equivalent of the lost work *De opibus gentium by a putative Roman Adam Smith,¹² then at least explicit textual data that refer to the Assyrian merchants’ awareness of the economic rules of the socio-economic environment in which they operated. A second example: the mere fact that Rathbone, van der Spek and von Reden are able to make a meaningful comparison between grain prices in Seleucid Babylonia, Ptolemaic Egypt and Rome is a remarkable first, especially as the robust Babylonian data lend considerable additional weight to the argument: “We seem to be dealing with a world where regional factors of production and consumption set normal ranges of grain prices but there was sufficient overarching market integration to link these ranges in patterns of fairly stable relationships” (Rathbone, this volume): a conclusion not easily squared with a Finleyite view of the Mediterranean economy.

Two papers present the extraordinarily rich information from Middle Bronze-Age Mesopotamia. Drawing on evocative anecdotal information and quantitative data alike, Dercksen presents a nuanced picture of Old Assyrian trade and the workings of the embedded markets he posits, and of the institutions that governed their functioning.¹³ Charpin offers a survey of the even more vast and more variegated, but also more dispersed Old Babylonian corpus. This is a background article to an ongoing project directed by Charpin that aims at building an online database of Old Babylonian texts (http://www.archibab.fr/). The article explores some of the aspects of the corpus that are of relevance for economic history, e.g., institutional record-keeping, accounting and the forecasting of institutional resources, all of which was done in a controlled and rational manner. There are structural parallels here to the estate accounts from Roman Egypt studied, e.g., in Rathbone 1991: the implications of such functional parallels in accounting systems for the reconstruction of their socio-economic setting have yet to be explored.

Three papers pursue an explicitly methodological interest. Kehoe brings the approach of New Institutional Economics to bear on legal and economic data relating to agrarian conditions in the Roman Empire. This institutional approach – which implicitly informs Dercksen’s contribution too – is demonstrably also fruitful for Ancient Near Eastern studies (Jursa 2013) and can be expected to elicit a considerable degree of interest. While Kehoe draws on recent developments in economics and economic history, Waerzeggers finds her inspiration in the social sciences. Exploring the possibility of applying Social Network Analysis to ancient data – in this case, Late Babylonian private archives, – she introduces into Assyriological discourse a potent methodology that is certain to be taken up elsewhere in the field. The prosopographical data offered by the vast Mesopotamian tablet archives from the late third millennium, the first half of the second millennium and from the seventh and sixth century BC are well-suited for a quantifying analysis of this kind.¹⁴ There is significant potential for dialogue between Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Papyrology here, as can be shown by a comparison of Waerzeggers’ work (or of the studies cited in note 14) with, e.g., the work of Ruffini (2008) on Byzantine Egypt (see Kehoe 2013, 13–14). By drawing on both archaeological and textual data for the study of house sizes and their implications for household structure in first millennium BC Babylonia, and by attempting quantification on the basis of this information, Baker demonstrates not only that such an approach is possible on the basis of the information that can be culled from the tablet archives of the period and from the archaeological record, but that it is in fact the only way to overcome the inherent bias of any single type of source material we possess. By correlating dwelling sizes and textual data bearing on the size of households, the resulting investigation is also a contribution to the comparative study of living standards and social status in antiquity as well as an important corrective to the tendency in the study of urban demography to adopt all too simplified models for calculating population densities.

The remaining papers address some core issues of the economic history of the Iron Age and the Eastern Mediterranean world of Late Antiquity. Tost offers a nuanced reading of the evidence for money use in the Egyptian countryside from the fifth to the eighth century, i.e., from Late Antiquity to the early Islamic period. The documentary record does not support the thesis of a lesser degree of penetration of money into the rural economy in comparison to exchange in urban contexts, thus supporting at least one aspect of Banaji’s view of Late Antique economic development (Banaji 2007). The paper argues against considering Egypt, and thus Egyptian evidence, of Late Antiquity as in any way exceptional in comparison to the rest of the Roman empire. This point has also been emphasized by others, e.g., Rathbone (2007, 698–699), while for Finley (1992, 98), at least for conditions in the countryside, Egypt was still “extreme and untypical.” The value of using Egyptian data for extrapolations valid for the Empire as a whole is apparent also in Malouta’s paper on the evidence for water-lifting devices in Roman Egypt (see also Malouta and Wilson 2013), in that the Finleyite vision of a Greco-Roman economy hamstrung by static productivity levels and the absence of technological development is implicitly under review here. Another aspect of the same vision, viz., the fundamental difference between the Mesopotamian economy and the economy of the Greco-Roman world, is addressed by the implications of Jursa’s contribution. Summarizing some of the main results of the START Project, this paper demonstrates that the Babylonian economy in the sixth century experienced sustained economic growth through agrarian and commercial expansion within the context of an increasing monetization of exchange. It is argued that structurally, this stage of economic development in Mesopotamia displays many points of similarity with later Greco-Roman economies which at the same time distinguish it from the (alleged) continuum of ‘the’ Mesopotamian economy from the Early to the Late Bronze Age. In this sense the paper can be seen to set the stage for Pirngruber’s paper and for the joint contribution of van der Spek, von Reden and Rathbone. Drawing on what is probably the best, or at least the most coherent, source on commodity prices from all of Antiquity, viz. the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries, Pirngruber studies the impact of natural catastrophes, in this case, locust plagues, on the commodity market in Babylonia,¹⁵ demonstrating thereby the high volatility of this market under the influence of exogenous shocks. V...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: House Size and Household Structure: Quantitative Data in the Study of Babylonian Urban Living Conditions
• Chapter 3: The Historian and the Old Babylonian Archives
• Chapter 4: The Old Assyrian Trade and its Participants
• Chapter 5: Economic Development in Babylonia from the Late 7th to the Late 4th Century BC: Economic Growth and Economic Crises in Imperial Contexts
• Chapter 6: Legal Institutions and Agrarian Change in the Roman Empire
• Chapter 7: The Papyrological Evidence for Water-Lifting Technology
• Chapter 8: Plagues and Prices: Locusts
• Chapter 9: On Payment Transactions and Monetisation in the Rural Region of Late Antique Egypt: the Case Study of Small-Format Documents
• Chapter 10: Social Network Analysis of Cuneiform Archives—a New Approach
• Chapter 11: The Volatility of Prices of Barley and Dates in Babylon in the Third and Second Centuries BC
• Chapter 12: Wheat Prices in Ptolemaic Egypt
• Chapter 13: Mediterranean Grain Prices c. 300 to 31 BC: the Impact of Rome
• Chapter 14: Mediterranean and Near Eastern Grain Prices c. 300 to 31 BC: Some Preliminary Conclusions