The economic historian of the ancient world faces two major problems. The first is the extent of that world. “Ancient history” nowadays encompasses a period of at least 1,500 years, from the new starts in the eastern Mediterranean after c.1000 bc to the break-up of the Roman empire in the West by c.500 ad. True, there is debate whether the latter epoch was economically as significant in the Mediterranean zone as were the realignments of production, exchange, and consumption which were generated by the Islamic conquests, but the pace of change over Europe as a whole by the late fifth century makes ad 500 an acceptable rough terminus. The choice of 1000 bc, also debatable, is determined mainly by the new patterns of control, demand, and outreach which, following a long period of military and social disruption, can be detected within the societies of Mesopotamia (i. e. Babylonia and the Assyrian empire) and the eastern Mediterranean (Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, and marginally Greece). Strictly speaking, “new” is a misnomer, for they largely comprised the resumption of forms of behavior and routes of outreach that were already present in the Bronze Age, but what came to be “new,” and to define our period, was their intensification and their long-term political and military consequences.
The second problem is that of linking description with “theory.” Ever since debate about the nature of ancient economies began in the 1860s, scholars have attempted to devise a theory which could both accommodate and explain visible behavior in antiquity, in terms which addressed both its long-term stabilities and its gradual changes. Intrinsic to the problem throughout this period has been an awareness both of the development of economics as a discipline and of stark differences between ancient and modern economies. No expedient, whether that of adopting modern economic theory wholeheartedly, or that of relaxing its assumptions, or that of devising a wholly different analytical language, has yet met with any kind of general acceptance. As an interim solution, therefore, this chapter will broach wider questions only towards the end, largely confining itself to sketching the three main modes of
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
Behavior which can be observed. Of course the same region, the same polity, and even the same person will show more than one mode of behavior simultaneously, but to distinguish them analytically is one way of rendering their inter-relationships comprehensible.
World History
