Differences in landscape and demography had a strong influence on the local economic tendencies of the Late Bronze Age Syrian and Levantine states. The increasing lack of agricultural workforce and the rise of palace administrations to increasingly high standards caused a marked social, economic and political separation between palaces and villages. This division had never been as obvious in the previous, or even the following, periods. Nonetheless, palace economies ultimately relied on the productivity of the primary sector, which in turn provided for the palaces through their tributes.
Unfortunately, Syro-Levantine agricultural yields in this period were very low. For the Late Bronze Age, we have yields on a ratio of 3:1 or 5:1 between planted seeds and harvests. These low yields, together with a lack of agricultural workforce, led to the abandonment of fields located in semi-arid areas, whose harvests were far too unpredictable. Therefore, this period saw the rise of more specialised cultivations, requiring even more labour and irrigated fields. The texts from Ugarit and Alalah, close to the Mediterranean coast, and from Emar and Ekalte, in the Euphrates Valley, portray a landscape made of square or rectangular fields (not as elongated as the ones found in Mesopotamia) for the rainfed cultivation of cereals, of small irrigated gardens surrounded by an enclosure wall (especially in Emar, on the Euphrates, and in Ugarit, in a coastal area with water springs), and of vineyards (especially in Alalah and Ugarit) and olive-groves in hillier areas.
However, the characteristics of the region’s agricultural landscape were not as influential as the legal administration of these lands. The basic separation between lands belonging to the palace and lands owned by private families continued to exist. The former lands were partly used by the palace, through the employment of servants without families (and thus without offspring). These farmers had to give up 50 per cent of their harvests to the palace, while the remaining half was used to cultivate the lands the following year, as well as to provide food to people and animals. Alternatively, the palace allotted its lands to palace functionaries on a temporary basis. Eventually, these lands remained within the same families, forming a class of absent landowners working for the palace.
Regarding lands belonging to villages, the palace required them to pay a tithe, thus far less than what the palace required from its own employees. In fact, the palace could not extend its control over the villages’ lands. Villages were a crucial source of labour, needed to work on palace lands full-time whenever necessary, or for seasonal and intensive work (as it would have been inconvenient for the palace to maintain permanent servants for this purpose). Therefore, palace lands were productive because they used part of the economic and social resources of the villages. Other palace activities, such as the farming of sheep for the production of wool or various types of workshops, were not producing food surplus, but simply transforming raw materials. Consequently, the value of payments in food rations, fundamental for workshops that did not produce food, could have been equal to the value of the goods produced. However, the overall advantage of this system was the production and availability of a wider range of products.
With an agro-pastoral productivity that did not provide wide margins for surplus, the palace economies, especially in coastal areas such as Ugarit, Byblos and Tyre, and more northern ones, such as Carchemish and Aleppo, largely relied on craftsmanship and trade. Just like in the Eblaite period, the main sectors were two, namely, textiles and bronze. The textile sector was centred on transhumant wool production, which gained significant value and prestige through specific techniques, such as dying fabrics in various shades of purple (produced from Mediterranean molluscs). Bronze production was also highly developed, thanks to the availability of copper from nearby Cyprus. Moreover, bronze was continuously exported to Mesopotamia, Egypt and even Anatolia. The tributes Syrian states had to pay to the Hittites, and Levantine states to the Egyptians, show that the main products required were purple dyed woollen fabrics and bronze objects and weapons. In the case of gift-exchanges between royal courts, there were also high-quality luxury products, such as glass, jewellery, gold and silver cups, specific items of clothing, or chariots.
In the Late Bronze Age, the palace and family sectors experienced significant social changes. These were mainly due to the above-mentioned economic and political problems of the period, which affected the Near East as a whole, but had a particular impact on Syria and the Levant. From as early as the sixteenth century bc, the palace was characterised by the solidarity existing between the king and his elite. This resulted in the marginalisation and exploitation of the rest of the population. This solidarity was further strengthened by those processes of accumulation of lands in the hands of few wealthy individuals and debt slavery. The king had in fact ceased to take care of these processes. The solidarity of the elite also did not manage to preserve the ancient system according to which specialised labourers guaranteed their services to the palace in exchange for their maintenance. Between the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries bc, then, three phenomena developed alongside each other, whose combination eventually threatened the entire system.
The first phenomenon, the most ancient and obvious one, was the transmission from father to son of the service to the palace and the land allotted with it. In the long run, those who were born in lands belonging to their families for generations naturally believed that it was a particular type of family property requiring royal approval, such as a document signed by the king. Consequently, the former service to the palace was simply turned into a heavy tribute, which completely upset the relation between service and retribution.
The second phenomenon, which was more recent and problematic, was the spread of exemptions from service. These were originally granted as a repayment for special services to the king. However, with time the exemptions began to be inherited as well, becoming closely linked to a particular land, rather than a specific beneficiary. The third phenomenon was typical of cities like Ugarit, where economic and commercial activities were more important than military campaigns. It was the practice of paying the palace instead of providing a service, especially when the latter was military (such as being a maryannu, or other), and therefore too dangerous.
The accumulation of unlawful inheritances, exemptions and payments for services, at first every year, then only once, brought the palace to lose its specialised labourers. The phenomenon mainly involved the upper classes, while craftsmen seem to have been less involved in this particular development. Different exemption strategies began to appear, clearly exemplified by the two opposite groups of the merchants and the maryannu. As commercial agents working for the palace, merchants would have generally departed with a grant from the palace to bring back goods from abroad. However, they started to combine this institutional activity, which provided them with considerable wealth, with more commercial and financial activities, such as interest loans and counter-guarantees. The aim of these merchants was to increase their personal wealth at the expense of the palace. They thus obtained service and tax exemptions, which made them more like independent dealers than palace functionaries. When palace administrations collapsed at the beginning ofthe twelfth century bc, merchants were therefore able to continue their activities, restructuring the system formerly centred on the palace. The strategy used by the maryannu was simply based on a combination of exemptions and inheritances. They ‘paid’ for their freedom and generated an income from their lands, through a system that by now did not require them to work. By the time palaces collapsed, partly because of these military exemptions, the class of the maryannu was completely swept away, disappearing from the sources.
While the inheritance of lands and services had moved from the family sector to the palace, the latter’s attention for personal merits rather than family history began to spread among its free citizens. The head of the household therefore became an independent landowner, rather than the owner of a land that belonged to his entire family. This is due to the spread of land sales, which were by now free of all those obsolete symbolic and ceremonial practices in use in the past. As we have already seen for Nuzi, but without all the juridical fiction, in many cases these alienations happened out of necessity, greatly benefiting those who could lend money (either merchants or other members of the palace). Even in case of inheritances within a family, the old criteria of transferring one’s estate to one’s sons (and a privileged share to one’s eldest son) were gradually substituted by choices based on merit and personal preferences. The first idea was that there was no elder or younger son, and the eldest son could not rely on his innate privilege anymore. The second criteria was that, in order to inherit, it was necessary to ‘honour’ (kabadu, as one would say in Ugarit) or ‘fear’ (palahu, as one would say in Emar) one’s parents, namely, take care of them and obey them, acting respectfully towards them.
Being one’s son, thus one’s biological heir, was therefore not enough anymore, since procedures of disinheritance and alienation were now relatively common and easy to implement. Especially in case of the death of a father, the respectful behaviour of sons towards their widowed mother, who in Emar became ‘both mother and father’, was crucial to ensure them their inheritance. No one could rely on a right by birth on his inheritance anymore, but had to earn this right through work and obedience to one’s parents.
Moreover, when birth rates were low and families were extremely small, adoptions and emancipations of female slaves became increasingly common. This practice contributed to the transformation of the old family solidarity, based on a network of mutual support allowing families to overcome financial or demographic difficulties within a wider community, into a mere issue of financial management. This forced the former system of communal solidarity to slowly disappear. Therefore, this social solidarity was substituted by personal achievements and the commodification of land and labour. The process thus allowed the strongest to survive and left the weakest to perish.
Debtors unable to repay their loans and forced to become slaves for life thus became incredibly numerous. In this regard, the political authorities did not develop any measures to protect them or free them. Instead of commissioning remission edicts, palaces were too busy promulgating agreements for the search, capture and return of fugitives to their owners. Unable to flee from one state to the other, fugitives tried their luck in areas outside palace control. In the steppes, mountain and forest fugitives, called the habiru, found refuge in tribal groups involved in transhumant farming and banditry at the expense of palace caravans. The consequences of this process were serious. Villages, which the majority of fugitives came from, found an alternative to the authority of the palace. At the same time, shepherds began to play a less marginal and more conflictual role towards the palace. The merciless exploitation of rural classes by the palace and the increasingly low demographic levels, together with the increasing exemptions of palace functionaries and the changes in family relations, laid the groundwork for significant social changes. The latter, however, were waiting for the definite collapse of the palaces’ authority to become fully effective.
World History
