Intriguing contradictions abound on such basic issues as what money was and whether a society was ‘‘moneyless’’ or even ‘‘marketless.’’ Each of the following propositions, while arguably false or highly debatable, can be found stated more or less as fact in reputable reference works:
• Money was invented in Anatolia, modern Turkey, in the seventh century bce.
• Mesopotamia had a bullion system, but no coins and therefore no money.
• Mesopotamia had standardized weights and possibly money, but no markets.
• Ancient Egypt had money but was a moneyless society.
• Ancient Egypt had neither markets nor money.
Recognizing that such statements will remain open to debate is important, though it could be argued that moneyless societies existed neither in Egypt nor the Near East after cities emerged. One can only claim this by adhering to a clear definition of what money is, or better, what it does or what purpose it serves. This would be simple were it not for the complex issues of political economy surrounding it. Gently introducing oneself to this material (as in Snell 1997: 145-58) is recommended, since delving deeper leads one down a twisted path of fascinating but often inconclusive and contentious debate.
Before the third millennium we depend almost solely on archaeology for clues to what various cultures imported and exported to meet human needs and desires. Some facts archaeology demonstrates rather neatly, like that Mesopotamians imported tin, used with copper for making bronze, lapis lazuli and carnelian from the east, wood from the west, copper from the south, and obsidian from the north. Moreover, the clearest evidence for the first interregional economic system in world history, the expansion of the Late Uruk culture of southern Mesopotamia that reached the Upper Euphrates around 3200 bce, is entirely archaeological, most clearly attested by the distribution of small, utilitarian bowls. Cylinder seals from the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods also suggest an organized form of early long-distance trade in southern Mesopotamia and Iran. Egypt’s long relationship with the Levant, the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, is hinted at in a few texts, but the main evidence consists of Egyptian scarabs (amulets carved like beetles), statuary, and other inscribed objects found in excavations in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Similarly, there is a wealth of archaeological finds that point to a Persian Gulf trade stretching as far back as the fifth millennium. But how long-distance exchange was organized, and what standards of value existed, is generally poorly understood before the third millennium, whence come our earliest intelligible archives of cuneiform records.
With records came the explicit identification of goods, individuals, and institutions, either as recipients or distributors of goods, sometimes accompanied by prices or value of the goods exchanged. The more informative third millennium archives come from southern Mesopotamian towns, but we also have tablets from a major Syrian palace at Ebla, to the far northwest. Overall the evidence is still scanty and insufficient when applied to larger questions like who organized trading, who profited by it, was there private enterprise, a free market, or a state-run economy. There are no texts that set out the economic principles of Ancient Near Eastern institutions or towns, describe the experience of traders, chronicle supply and demand forces, or offer analytic descriptions. And if one were to chart the availability of good source materials over time, one would not find a smooth curve rising from relative darkness into later periods of illumination. Rather, after the mid-third millennium we have a generally constant situation of abundant but brief material punctuated by chance archaeological and textual finds of great significance. For example, the Old Assyrian trading colony found at Kultepe, Turkey, provided Assyriologists with unprecedented detail about this family-organized business that connected three disparate regions in profitmaking ventures for metals and textiles before 1800 bce. Analyses of the business correspondence from Kanesh revolutionized the way most scholars conceptualized trade in the Ancient Near East and helped overturn the erroneous view that
Mesopotamia was marketless (Veenhof 1972). Analyses of the inscribed potsherds recovered from a workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina in central Egypt between about 1539 and 1075 bce have similarly reshaped scholarly views on Egyptian money, trade, and markets (Lesko 1994). Most still see Egypt as a redistributive economy, that is, one in which temples and palaces controlled the acquisition and distribution of wealth (Altenmuller 2001). But Egypt is now less easily characterized as a monolithic economy, since we know about black markets and trade that was organized outside the great household institutions.
The interpretation of the Old Assyrian tablets marked a turning point in a century-old intellectual battle known as the formalist-substantivist debate. Understanding this debate is essential to comprehending how the facts are shaped into information and history. Formalists tend to see the capitalistic rationality of modern Western societies represented throughout human history, as if the laws of modern economics (supply and demand, rational choice) were universal. Of course, many of the structures of modern capitalism, like stock exchanges, markets, customs houses, letters of credit, and such, are missing. The substantivists, on the other hand, stress that economies are ‘‘embedded,’’ or constructed within parameters of given socio-cultural ideologies. They deny that societies existing before the industrial revolution of the 1700s of our own era and the rise of modern capitalism could exhibit capitalistic traits.
By the 1950s the substantivists, led by Polanyi (1957), were seemingly winning this debate. A steady stream of sociological works analyzing and criticizing the tenets of capitalism was met by another stream of anthropological studies, especially ethnographies, that had been defining the economics of so-called pre-monetary societies, including many in the Pacific Islands. In these settings trade was organized as either barter, redistribution by a ruling institution, or ceremonialized as gift exchanges between elites. Essential was the embeddedness concept, that is, that the economy was determined by a deeper social ideology. Absent, supposedly, were rationality, prices, profit, and other maximizing motives. Many Assyriologists and Egyptologists found tempting parallels in these works, and the notion that early political economies were primitive took firm hold. Despite plentiful evidence for trade, prices, and money in Old Babylonian texts from 2004 to 1595 bce and Middle Babylonian texts from the Syrian coastal kingdom of Ugarit from 1400 to 1200 bce, entrepreneurship tended to be dismissed as formalist inference or downplayed as secondary, something merchants did to supplement their income from the palace or temple.
Political philosophy has been a key component of the debate also. Marxist scholars propagated the view of Mesopotamian society as having consisted of two competing sectors, urban dependents of palaces and temples versus free rural peasants (Diakon-off 1982; Zaccagnini 1983a; Liverani 1990). In this two-sector model, trade is considered primarily an arm of the urban ruling apparatus that exploited the rural population. Many other scholars have adopted parts of the German sociologist Max Weber’s theory of the patrimonial household, where the kingdom was seen as organized as a pyramid of bureaucrats connected by blood and personal obligations to the king, with all the realm’s wealth and information theoretically flowing from the many parties at the bottom to the royal apex (Michalowski 1991). In this model also, trade is primarily an economic component of rulership.
But private ownership of land and movable goods was apparent in the earliest sources, as were traders buying and selling goods for temples, kings, and individuals. If money and trade for profit did not exist in the earliest states of the late fourth millennium, then they appeared soon after. One thing is clear from looking at transactions in the texts themselves: by commodifying the value of objects and services, people at some point began to commodify each other, however indirectly. Because of this inherently anti-social aspect to trade and money, successful merchants have always taken care to appear equitable in their dealings.
Distribution of wealth among different social groups, or political economy, has preoccupied modern scholars and Ancient Near Easterners alike. Customs, laws, and literature show an intention to balance the profit motives of merchants with competing interests of other social groups.
Today scholars appeal to philosophers or sociologists to support their view of how trade was conducted in early states. Marxists tend to stress the corrosive effects of capitalistic trade and its corruption of benevolent despotism; Weberians see all economic action serving the interests of a charismatic ruler who owned everything in his realm; those following Polanyi see most trade as reciprocal in spirit and study how it became depersonalized; and many find Wallerstein’s (1974/80) world-system concept useful, suggesting that early states built asymmetrical center-periphery relationships to gain advantages in procuring raw materials. However one justifies one’s socio-economic theory, looking back at the origins of money and trade forces one to question not only ancient sources but one’s own material conditions and the current systems that facilitate and justify them. This has an effect on the debate, making it less dispassionate and perhaps more exciting.
World History
