Establishing Value

Weight Measures in Early Mesopotamia

Vitali Bartash

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781501517143
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501510328
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Economic History

Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records (SANER) is a peer-reviewed series devoted to the publication of monographs pertaining to all aspects of the history, culture, literature, religion, art, and archaeology of the Ancient Near East, from the earliest historical periods to Late Antiquity. The aim of this series is to present in-depth studies of the written and material records left by the civilizations and cultures that populated the various areas of the Ancient Near East: Anatolia, Arabia, Egypt, Iran, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Syria. Thus, SANER is open to all sorts of works that have something new to contribute and which are relevant to scholars and students within the continuum of regions, disciplines, and periods that constitute the field of Ancient Near Eastern studies, as well as to those in neighboring disciplines, including Biblical Studies, Classics, and Ancient History in general.

1 Approaching the topic

1.1 Object and scope

My aim in this book is to offer the first comprehensive analysis of weighing as an economic practice in early Mesopotamia and to see how this cultural phenomenon at the same time reflected and shaped the socioeconomic relations during the 3rd millennium BC.1 It is an original study that relies on the first-hand analysis and synthesis of data.

In this introductory chapter, I clarify the main concepts, delineate the scope of the study, discuss its principal concepts and methods, provide an overview of the previous research in this area, and concisely present what is found in the following chapters.

First, it is necessary to define the major concepts: weighing as an economic practice and as a cultural phenomenon.

Mentioning weighing in early Mesopotamia immediately conjures up in people’s minds images of cheating with weights and scales in the Bible, duck-shaped weights, or the concept of “metrology.” I deliberately use the latter as little as possible in this book. The reason for that is not so much the monstrous Greek-English mongrel “metro(n)+logy” itself as its origins in the scholarly milieu of the “Western world” of the nineteenth century, which obviously had nothing to do with weighing in early Mesopotamia.

Weighing in this book refers first and foremost to an action and a practice that ancient Mesopotamians performed for some reasons. Clarifying this rationale behind the weighing and the question how did they do it and who were these “they” is the object of this study.

Weighing as a cultural phenomenon included various interrelated aspects: units of weight and their system (“metrology”) and how they were put in script (writing), goods that were measured by weight, tools that were used for this purpose, people who acted as weighmasters and supervised the process of weighing, the economic significance of the weighing, and, finally, the socioeconomic driving forces behind these factors and their influence on the society, the “why” of the phenomenon.

One of the most important parts of the book is concerned with weight measures and their system. Traditionally, it is believed that this aspect belongs to the realm of ideas: It is an idea that a unit of weight must have such and such a mass. However, this static view does not consider that a measure was a practical tool and not an abstraction of a learned mind. Besides, the data I discuss indicate the origins of the system of weight measures in unrelated “primitive measures” comparable to the “ell,” “cubit,” etc. I argue that each measure passed necessarily through evolutional stages in its development: the prototype, the primitive unit, and the standardized unit. We will see that the latter half of the third millennium witnessed several state-run attempts to standardize the weight metrology.

Writing is another aspect of this study. Without writing we would have been left only with actual weights, most of which are very hard to date. In contrast, written records offer precisely datable data sets that cover all the above-mentioned aspects of weighing as a cultural phenomenon.

By ca. 3350 BC, early Mesopotamian accountants of central urban households (traditionally interpreted as “temples”) had developed a complicated system of writing that included about 1,000 signs. Originally, they were logograms and numbers only. Logograms represented those parts of objective reality that accountants (“scribes”) in these central urban households perceived as valuable and that somehow were related to these households in terms of property or services. These goods had become so abundant due to the communal irrigation-based agriculture and the advanced animal husbandry that a need to record receipts and issues in and out of these households had led to the emergence of writing. As the result, accountants recorded cattle and sheep, human resources, land, grain, tools, cloths, and various types of food. The numbers quantified the amounts of these goods and of people and animals and provided temporal anchoring of the transactions. Some numbers, like our decimal numbers today, referred to the quantity in pieces. The 4th mill. BC texts used sexagesimal and bisexagesimal numerical systems. The 3rd mill. BC written records gradually abandoned the bisexagesimal system and retained only the sexagesimal one, which remained the main system of numeration until the end of the cuneiform tradition.

The 3rd mill. BC records evidence for the first time the use of weight measures, which functioned in the framework of the sexagesimal system of numeration. The texts of each period provide various scribal conventions and idiosyncrasies for writing individual weight measures – the mina, the shekel, etc. – and their fractions. These notations may be very confusing to a newcomer and even to cuneiform scholars of the later periods because these conventions changed repeatedly throughout the 3rd mill. BC. My aim here was to reduce all these idiosyncrasies to several general concepts and, if possible, trace the temporal and regional limits of every scribal practice. However, the main interest in this is not writing in itself but writing as a means to portray the system of weight measures.

Bearing in mind that weighing is an economically driven activity brings us to the rationale behind the weighing. Why would one need weight measures? Of course, they were necessary to measure those types of goods that could not have been measured in any other manner. Undoubtedly, ancient Mesopotamians devised measures for grain much earlier than measures for metals. Capacity metrology must be as old as the so-called “Neolithic revolution.” In contrast, weight measures are the “children” of a different economic activity. If the measurement of grain may be linked to the communal management of grain in Neolithic villages and towns, the roots of the weighing practice lie elsewhere. The data suggest that metals, wool, and luxury goods triggered the use of weighing in early Mesopotamia. As will be seen in the following, these three types of goods were embedded in various socioeconomic contexts: (a) production, (b) “money,” (c) luxury goods and elites, and (d) far-distance trade.

Let us take “money” as an example. This was one of the principal applications of the weight measures in the 3rd mill. BC Mesopotamia. Copper and silver were the metallic goods used for payments of a varying nature. “One shekel silver” meant not simply “8.3 g silver” as a material but represented an exchange means and embodied value. The origins of weight metrology are inseparable from the origins of money in ancient Mesopotamia.

An extra comment on the use of the word “money” in the context of ancient Mesopotamia is unavoidable here. Many scholarly spears have been broken in an attempt to define what money is and how it came about. Many historians of money support the view that Mesopotamians has money as early as the third millennium BC.2 We probably need to lower the time scale to the late fourth millennium BC certainly in the case of barley.3 However, other historians and economists are either more cautious or deny this. The same applies in the field of Assyriology. Some scholars interpret silver and barley in Mesopotamia as money. The most prominent among them is Marvin Powell (1996). Others are more cautious and prefer other definitions depending on the context, for example, “financial tools,” “measures of value,” “means of exchange,” etc.4 I follow Powell who argues that money or, better, monies did exist in ancient Mesopotamia before coinage. Powell speaks about barley as “cheap money” and silver as “expensive money.” Considering the data discussed in this book, copper belongs to the same category. This metal was regularly used as a means of payment during the Early Dynastic period.

Everyone who has spent some time studying historical records from Mesopotamia will undoubtedly see that silver and barley and, for some periods, copper and gold appered in the economic life of Mesopotamia in a manner qualitatively distinct from other commodities. As the reader will see in Chapter 10, loans around 2400 BC at the city of Umma were issued by a large temple household in silver, copper, and barley but not in any other commodity. This fact is a clear indication that they were monies even if their material representations could be ground, cooked, and consumed as bread or porridge or cast into jewelry or pickaxes. As for the immaterial side, silver and barley often appear in transactions as standard monies to communicate the value of services, property, and goods without being materially present in these transactions. The so-called “balanced accounts” of the Ur III period epitomize this phenomenon.5 For example, a payment may be calculated in silver but paid in barley. This shows that early monies were “commodity monies” and “virtual” monies alike and resembled in this respect the virtual money on our banking accounts that may be transferred as $, €, £, ¥, etc.

Coming to the social aspect of the Sumerian system of weight measures, it is necessary to bear in mind that certain people required it for their economic purposes. They were agents of weighing. It is impossible to say precisely who arrived, when and where, at the idea of measuring goods by weights and scales. However, the data show us who performed the actual weighing and whose interests this process represented. The archival records are, of course, biased. Most of them present weighing on the level of central households: temples and palaces. Naturally, this process represented the interests of those at the top of the hierarchy of these social organizations that collected, recorded, and distributed goods according to the social proximity of individuals to these “VIP” individuals. However, legal sources (contracts and legal proceedings) show weighing in a different light: as an everyday routine practice.

The problem of the emergence and standardization of the system of weight measures is central to this study. Terms such as “correct stone” as early as 2450 BC and two sets of reforms by the Akkadian and Ur III states to reform the weight system are suggestive of attempts to add reliability to the whole economic practice. Obviously, the “state” was the agent that pursued this aim. This should not lead to the conclusion that weighing as an economic activity should be linked to central political authorities. The evidence suggests that the emergence of weighing should be linked in the first place to the advancement of metalworking and the international trade of metals.

Tools and goods are two no less important facets of weighing that this study analyzes. The first refers to the implements used to perform weighing. The second includes weighed or weighable goods and objects. My argument is that the need to measure specific sets of goods brought weighing into existence. The aim in the following will be to learn what these goods were.

Writing about early Mesopotamia leads inevitably to the use of the term “Sumerian.” As Gonzalo Rubio showed, 3rd mill. BC records exhibit no Sumerian ethnic consciousness whatsoever.6 Therefore, I use “Sumerian” in this book as a time and region marker, an abbreviation of “4th–3rd BC southern Mesopotamia,” and not as an ethnic or linguistic marker. Besides, as the reader will learn from this study, some aspects of early Mesopotamian weight metrology exhibit clear signs of Semitic “influences.” Nowadays it is a common opinion that Sumerians and Semites lived in close contact or even together in the earliest periods. Therefore, a form of pidgin Sumero-Akkadian, especially in the sphere of trade and commerce, is highly expected. This allows us to suggest that the system of weight measures was a cosmopolite “child” of the greater Near Eastern society of the 4th or early 3rd mill. BC. Therefore, the “Sumerian” system of weight measures was not an “achievement” of “Sumerian civilization” or Sumerians as an ethnic group.

1.2 Methods

This is a historical study. The historical method, to put it simply, is to uncover how a phenomenon changed over time and why it existed in the first place. The sources, the “bricks” for any historical study, are usually written records. The historical method applies diachronic and synchronic approaches to trace the development of the phenomenon and identify its roots. They sources for the present study are cuneiform texts of the late 4th and 3rd millennium BC.

This study of weighing in early Mesopotamia fits well into the broader subjects of social and economic histories. In general, “social history” is not common in the field of cuneiform studies. Traditionally, Mesopotamian history was and is heavily influenced by the narratives of elites found in “royal” and “literary” cuneiform texts.7 The modern period of the study of the social history of early Mesopota...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 Approaching the topic
• 2 From burden to talent
• 3 Mina: The cosmopolite
• 4 Shekel: A tiny axe
• 5 The missing link: NINDA2 × ŠE + N
• 6 Reforms and new measures
• 7 Stone weights
• 8 Weighing scales
• 9 Weighmasters and the context of weighing
• 10 Weighed goods
• A retrospect
• Bibliography
• General index
• Signs and Sumerian words
• Akkadian words
• Cuneiform texts