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

344 Pages·2014·5.661 MB·English

by  Heather D. Baker, Michael Jursa

DOCUMENTARY SOURCES IN
ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN AND
GRECO-ROMAN ECONOMIC HISTORY
M P
ethodology and ractice
edited by
Heather D. Baker and Michael Jursa
Oxbow Books
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Documentary sources in ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman economic history : methodology and
practice / edited by Heather D. Baker and Michael Jursa.
1 online resource.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
ISBN 978-1-78297-759-9 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-78297-760-5 (mobi (kindle)) -- ISBN 978-1-78297-761-2 (
pdf) -- ISBN 978-1-78297-758-2 1. Economic history--To 500. 2. Babylonia--Economic conditions. 3.
Rome--Economic conditions--30 B.C.-476 A.D. 4. Rome--Economic conditions--510-30 B.C. 5. Egypt--
Economic conditions--332 B.C.-640 A.D. I. Baker, Heather D. II. Jursa, Michael.
HC31
330.935’5--dc23
2014027386
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Cover details: P.Vindob. G 2119 Recto (Papyrus, Hermupolis, 6th/7th century AD): SPP III2 97. Receipt for
the payment of rents as share of an inheritance. SPP III2 97. © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Papyrussammlung. BM 77394 (Cuneiform tablet, Babylon, 494 BC): H.D. Baker, The Archive of the Nappāḫu
Family. Vienna, 2004, p. 401, no. 66a. Promissory note for silver with temple prebend as security. © H.D.
Baker and the Institut für Orientalistik, Universität Wien.
Table of Contents
Preface v
Contributors vi
1. Introduction 1
M. Jursa
2. House Size and Household Structure: Quantitative Data
in the Study of Babylonian Urban Living Conditions 7
H. D. Baker
3. The Historian and the Old Babylonian Archives 24
D. Charpin
4. The Old Assyrian Trade and its Participants 59
J. G. Dercksen
5. Economic Development in Babylonia from the Late 7th
to the Late 4th Century BC: Economic Growth and
Economic Crises in Imperial Contexts 113
M. Jursa
6. Legal Institutions and Agrarian Change in the Roman Empire 139
D. Kehoe
7. The Papyrological Evidence for Water-Lifting Technology 154
M. Malouta
8. Plagues and Prices: Locusts 163
R. Pirngruber
9. On Payment Transactions and Monetisation in the Rural Region of
Late Antique Egypt: the Case Study of Small-Format Documents 187
S. Tost
10. Social Network Analysis of Cuneiform Archives—a New Approach 207
C. Waerzeggers
iv Contents
PRICES IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN AND NEAR EAST
11. The Volatility of Prices of Barley and Dates in Babylon
in the Third and Second Centuries BC 234
R. J. van der Spek
12. Wheat Prices in Ptolemaic Egypt 260
S. von Reden
13. Mediterranean Grain Prices c. 300 to 31 BC: the Impact of Rome 289
D. Rathbone
14. Mediterranean and Near Eastern Grain Prices c. 300 to 31 BC:
Some Preliminary Conclusions 313
D. Rathbone
Index 323
Preface
This volume comprises the proceedings of an interdisciplinary conference held in
Vienna in 2008 to mark the final phase of the START Project “The Economic History
of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC” funded by the Fonds zur Förderung der
wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Austrian Science Fund). The preparation of this book
has benefitted from the assistance of a number of individuals, to whom the editors
owe their grateful thanks. With exemplary care and efficiency, Daniela Niedermayer
and Georg Tanzler took care of the preliminary formatting of most of the contributions,
and we thank Judith Pfitzner for preparing one article and especially for her work on
compiling the Index. We are also greatly indebted to Emmanuelle Salgues and Elvira
Wakelnig, who translated the articles by Dominique Charpin and Sven Tost from their
respective original French and German. Finally, we thank Julie Gardiner and her
colleagues at Oxbow Books for accepting this volume and seeing it through to
publication.
Heather D. Baker and Michael Jursa
Vienna, October 2013
Contributors
Heather D. Baker (Vienna University)
Dominique Charpin (Paris)
Jan Gerrit Dercksen (Leiden University)
Michael Jursa (Vienna University)
Dennis Kehoe (Tulane University)
Myrto Malouta (Oxford University)
Reinhard Pirngruber (VU University Amsterdam)
Dominic Rathbone (King’s College London)
Sitta von Reden (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau)
R. J. van der Spek (VU University Amsterdam)
Sven Tost (Vienna University)
Caroline Waerzeggers (VU University Amsterdam)
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
1 http://imperiumofficium.univie.ac.at/ (accessed 22.8.2013).
2 http://www.ldas-conf.com/ (accessed 22.8.2013). See now Faraguna 2013, where some issues
related to ancient archival documentation from the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world
that are at stake also in the present volume are explored.
2 Michael Jursa
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
3 See below the contribution by Jursa, notes 5–7.
4 For a nuanced view of the data from the third millennium BC, which lend themselves best to
the traditional ‘household model,’ see Garfinkle 2012.
5 Van der Spek et al. (forthcoming).
6 See, e.g., Morris et al. 2007, Bresson (2014) and Jongman (2014).
7 As can be shown by the divergent interpretations of the huge amphora mound (Monte Testaccio)
outside Rome as evidence for long-distance trade in olive oil or for state-controlled distribution:
e.g., Thonemann 2013, 10–11 (to which Jongman (2014) can be added).
8 While, according to Rathbone 2007, 719, “the main stimulus to economic development in
Roman Egypt came from the Roman creation of a peaceful and open Mediterranean market, and the
boom in demand caused by empire-wide urbanization.”
1 Introduction 3
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
9 All quotes from Thonemann 2013.
10 All quotes from Thonemann 2013.
11 In direct opposition to Polanyi’s view of the market, in fact. This is relevant because Polanyi
is still frequently invoked with respect to the Ancient Near East (Dale 2013), but it does not seem
that there is still much to be gained here.
12 Who, according to Thonemann 2013, 11, is literally inconceivable.
13 Note that a recent systematic survey of the structure of the documentary record which
Dercksen uses can be found in Veenhof 2013.
4 Michael Jursa
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
14 See now also, for instance, Brumfield 2013 and Bamman et al. 2013