Institutions

Superficially, it would be logical to assume that the importance of the institutional economies cannot be overestimated. Even the millions of liters of grain recorded in the administrative texts pale in comparison with the outlays involved in the pyramids, temples, and palaces. The 2.3 million blocks of stone in the great pyramid at Giza had to be put in place in some 23 years, around 100,000 a year, or 275 a day, or one block every two minutes. This required some 25,000 to 30,000 workers to be on hand at any one time for a score of years (Lehner 1997: 224). Even if they worked in annual and seasonal shifts, the work had to be kept up. And this pyramid was not a mere aberration. Sneferu, the father of Khufu, who was the builder of the great pyramid around 2500 BCE, piled up a cubit meter volume in his two pyramids which almost doubled that of his son, and one of Khufu’s successors almost equaled the great pyramid itself (Kemp 1983: 88). If the pyramids before and after this halfcentury of toil are disappointing by comparison, the temples and private tombs should provide some compensation and made for more work.

Even so, the walls around the pyramid enclosure of Djoser at Saqqara are of a higher quality than those around the contemporary city of Arad in Palestine, and a half-kilometer or 0.31 miles longer. The walls around the New Kingdom temple at Karnak enclose an area larger than most of the contemporaneous cities in the world. Both the walls and the buildings they enclosed had to be constructed, and the workers kept alive.

During the Third Dynasty of Ur (2114-2004 bce), the grain paid out to the 40,000 state dependents totaled some 30 million liters or 7,736,160 bushels annually (Waetzoldt 1987: 118). Data from Ramesside Egypt imply expenditures of a similar magnitude (Warburton 2000: 69-70, 74 n. 20). One Mari letter from near today’s Syrian-Iraqi border records a royal offer to dispatch five million liters of grain on donkey back with a merchant (Durand 2000: 3: 18).

The 2,000 persons employed in the Ur III grain-grinding industry pale into insignificance when placed beside the 15,000 employees in the contemporaneous textile industry in the province of Lagash (Waetzoldt 1987: 119). The production of the Ur III textile industry may have exceeded the requirements of the local market by a factor of 10, implying a dependence upon export markets (Englund 1998: 151 n. 342).

The manufacture and sale of textiles was a very important industry across the entire Near East, from the Aegean to Iraq. In some cases this trade was under the control of central authorities exploiting labor maintained through rations to transform wool into textiles (Dossin 1964). In other cases, women would weave at home and retail their products to state firms (Condon 1984). The economic power of textile distributors affected private economics well beyond southern Mesopotamia, quite aside from the state dependents.

The economic importance of the pyramids seems less when we see that one provincial textile industry was involved in a task of a similar magnitude. The existence of Mesopotamian temple towers, the ziggurats, and the pyramids underscores the

Capacity of the state to command labor; however, the temples and the related investments are merely the symbolic projection of raw economic power. It was this power that provided the state with a decisive edge in competition.

This image of a wide diversity of professions (masons to silver smiths), concentrations of employees in industrial enterprises, and mind-boggling quantities of grain gives the superficial impression of enormous wealth and concentrated economic power. These concepts lie at the base of the concept of the ‘‘palace-economy’’ system. The institutions played a key role in several different ways. In many cases individuals were assigned land from which they drew income while executing state tasks, such as supervising textile mills or performing temple rituals. The institutions were not only run by the bureaucrats, but utterly dependent upon them. The key to understanding the economy was the capacity of the institutions to determine employment and investment strategies by controlling agricultural production. It was the agricultural production that produced the surplus allowing the institutions to invest in textiles, and it was the institutional agricultural surplus that kept grain prices low, so as to ensure rural poverty among small-holders. It was the scribes who assured that the whole functioned; they formed an essential part of the elite, with vested interest in increasing their own wealth and the strength of the institutions.

The dimensions of the institutional economies must, however, be placed in context. The elite and the immediate dependents of the institutions made up an insignificant proportion of the total population. What gave the institutions economic power was not an overwhelming economic role, but their leverage. The remainder of the population was tied to the land and agricultural production. A small group were professional merchants. The peasants had to pay taxes or rent to the institutions, and the merchants had little hope that the peasants would be interested in exotic items. The institutions and their dependents provided the market for the offerings of the merchants, and their grain surpluses had a decisive effect on the value of grain in the hands of the peasants.

Agriculture was thus the source of wealth in the ancient world. Labor was far more valuable than technology, and the command of labor was decisive.