At this point we can safely begin to question the value of the terms public and private for our analysis of the Ancient Near East. In developing a critique of this terminology we must also propose a vocabulary to use in its stead. Our survey below will demonstrate that large institutions made an early and forceful appearance in the society of the Ancient Near East. The institutional economy was created by the formation of organizations that superseded, in both size and wealth, the family or village structure of the first agricultural communities. The early institutions served as collection points for resources and as focal points of urban communities. The temples of early Mesopotamia were the clearest examples of these institutions, and we must recognize the extent to which the temples functioned as economic centers (Van De Mieroop 1997a: 24). The institutions were great households, and as their estates expanded, so did their influence. At the same time, the smaller individual households did not disappear, and the heads of these households sought to leverage their positions through participation in institutional hierarchies. Therefore, we will be better served to speak of the institutional versus non-institutional, rather than the public versus private.
In many respects the dichotomy of public versus private is also too simplistic for the Ancient Near East. From the earliest records we have evidence for the significant influence of the temples, the palace, and the family or independent households. Grouping the palaces and the temples together under the rubric of public does not adequately explain their roles in the economy, or in society in general, and together they do not constitute a public sector, as we would define it today. At certain times and places the temples may have fallen under the direct control of the crown, but this was not true at all times and places in the Ancient Near East. Our goal must be to avoid applying terminology to the whole of the historical and geographic entity under consideration that is only accurate for limited parts of that whole.
The large institutional estates dominated the economy of ancient Mesopotamia, but the efficient operation of the economy by the central administration was dependent on the existence of individual entrepreneurs. Such, for example, is the conclusion drawn by Richardson about the royal household of the late Old Babylonian kings and its interactions in the traditional urban environments of Babylonia (2003). The survival of such individual enterprise in the face of the rise of the centralized state in the Ancient Near East is proof of the importance of the individual households. Most of the public officials in antiquity were in a position to take advantage of their status to enrich their own households, and this was probably expected of them. What is striking about this portrait of the economy is that it illustrates the inadequacies of our descriptive categories. The state administrators of the Ancient Near East acted in a manner that was neither private nor public, and which could not be separated from the relationships they maintained with the various households, individual, familial, or institutional, of which they were members.
The states of the Ancient Near East were characterized by patrimonial administration, in which access to institutional accounts was dependent on state connections, but membership in households that had access to such accounts was not determined by the state. Here we should note the continuing importance of familial relationships in the organization of numerous professional groups throughout the early history of the Ancient Near East, and the continued prominence of family firms in the later periods. By patrimonial, we are referring to an organizing, or managing, principle first described by Max Weber, the German sociologist. His ideas have subsequently been applied to Mesopotamia by Michalowski (1991), Zettler (1991), and Schloen (2001). In a patrimonial system, the household of the ruler is regarded as the chief household of the state, but its actions are governed by tradition and a set of existing obligations to subordinate households. Patrimonial administration stands in opposition to bureaucratic administration and is characterized by the importance of personal relationships. One reservation we have in applying the terminology of patrimonial administration to the whole of the Ancient Near East is the way in which the etymology of the term patrimonial presumes that men ruled households. There is strong evidence that women engaged in independent economic activity, and that wives could act as heads of households in the absence of their husbands (Owen 1980).
Patrimonial administration is precisely what we see in the Ancient Near East as evidenced by the operation of households at every level of the economy. Inherently, this is a system of patronage in which what we call public business took place in noninstitutional households, and private business took place within the precincts of the great institutions, but in patterns that are not analogous to our own experiences. The interlocking households of the Ancient Near Eastern economy were also arranged hierarchically such that many households were subordinate to others, or subsumed within them.
We are not suggesting that private property in terms of discrete ownership of the means of production by non-institutional households did not exist. Indeed, there was more widespread access to the means of production than has usually been attributed to the Ancient Near East. We are making two proposals. First, the Mesopotamians organized their economic behavior on the basis of the household. Second, a reliance on private versus public ignores the ability of individuals to pursue an advantage for several households simultaneously, and to do so in a manner that institutionalized the kind of conflicts of interest that our system will not tolerate. This means that the individual households, which we might regard as private, and the institutional households, which we might view as public, did not always exist in competition with each other.
World History
