Movement of Goods and People

There were effectively four different systems organizing the output of work in antiquity. (1) ‘‘Free market’’ production lay beyond the control of political actors in the core regions; prices dictated the production and acquisition of silver, copper, and tin. Within the regions controlled by the institutions three systems prevailed. One (2) involved the collection of levies on those who produced various goods from grain to pots. This system of taxation or ‘‘rent’’ was based on the provider voluntarily relinquishing part of the yield of harvests of fish or grain from normal activity, without a corresponding payment made in return. Another (3) involved state control of labor, with the workers controlled by remuneration or coercion as in grain rations for textile workers. In return for subsistence support, the state appropriated the products of the labor. Another (4) system involved the sale of articles acquired through taxation or the use of corvee labor. This system formed part of the local market whereby the institutions and members of the elite could purchase articles from the population of their own community.

The international market determined the flow of silver into Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, and silver determined value. Those employed by the institutions were only a small part of the population, and while participating in the markets, the institutions were responding to the markets. The result was that ultimately the markets determined all economic activity. Price differentials and political coercion were thus the alternative means of encouraging people to abstain from leisure. Direct coercion was impossible beyond the range of one’s political authority. However, as major social units, the institutions were able to influence behavior beyond their realm of immediate political control by taking advantage of price competition, and also by influencing production within their realm of control through political measures.

Those who were under the control of the institutions could be shipped around the world. Egyptian physicians would be sent to the Hittites, or Syrian builders sent from one city to the next. Rationed laborers could remain in the same region, but be assigned very different tasks from day to day (Englund 1991). Even specialists - carpenters and weavers - could be assigned agricultural tasks when the need arose (Zaccagnini 1983b).

Individual specialists moved from region to region in search of work. The case of a Greek bronze sculptor who worked in Yemen during the Roman era is but one example of a widespread phenomenon which can be pursued back to the dawn of history (Weidemann 1983: 18). The craftsman who made the Jebel Arak knife handle in fourth millennium Egypt skillfully combined exotic Elamite art with an Egyptian form, revealing the mobility of specialized labor.1 These individual independent craftsmen moved beyond the borders of their own political systems in search of work or rather gain. They thus reflected the trend opposed to that of the workers who converged at the royal cities of the Persian Empire, or those sent by their ruling institutions to serve at foreign courts.

There were also those who remained in place and served a market niche, such as lapis lazuli workers at Shahr-i Sokhta in Iran, or amulet-makers at Thebes in Egypt. The former were stay-at-homes who served the international market for lapis lazuli. The latter were stay-at-homes who served the local market. The workers at Shahr-i Sokhta relied upon the close proximity of the material and the scale of the market across the Near East. The lapis lazuli came from the mines to the craftsmen, who prepared it for re-export (Casanova in press). The workers at Thebes relied upon the local passion for funerary and prestige goods. They acquired the materials through trade and resold them. In both cases, the customers were from the elites, and thus a member of the Egyptian elite could purchase an article of lapis lazuli which had been imported from Central Asia and then transformed into an Egyptian article (a scarab, a beetle-shaped amulet) by local craftsmen.

Quite aside from market niches, there were distinct differences between Egypt and its neighbors in the Middle East. As a major territorial nation state, legal guarantees and commercial activity in Egypt differed substantially from city-states such as Ugarit, but also even from empires in Babylonia. Whereas the Egyptian state took income in grain, and remunerated its servants in grain (Warburton 2000: 68-89), the palace at Ugarit even paid its agricultural employees in silver (Heltzer 1982: 39).

In the core areas of Egypt and Mesopotamia virtually every member of society was incorporated into the system and supervised. Samsi-Adad of Assyria was obliged to assure that his son, a viceroy, understood how, when, and from whom to expect grain, silver, oil, and wine (Durand 1997: 1: 122-4), while he himself led his armies. Zimri-Lim of Mari held his own officials responsible if the harvest failed and people starved (Birot 1993: 75). Kings supervised the distribution of metals and the plucking of sheep. Much of the ‘‘working life’’ of early antiquity can be reconstructed from the documents. Most of this reflected the view of the official world, but allowed a glimpse at the social organization of labor.