Below we will examine the terminology of private versus public, but first we must look at the manner in which we can deduce evidence for public and private in the surviving records. Frequently, the private or public nature of a text is determined based upon the provenance of the tablet. If a tablet is found in a palace, temple, or large administrative complex, we assume that it was a public document. A text found in a residential area is assumed to belong to a private archive. There are numerous difficulties with this method of classification. For example, according to our traditional division of texts into public and private, modern tax returns would certainly be seen as public documents, even though they record transactions that are primarily private in nature. Human history is full of instances when private documents, such as wills, sale documents, and letters, were stored in ostensibly public locations, such as temples, town halls, and government records offices.
Moreover, the people of the Ancient Near East often made no clear distinction between an official’s private and public roles. We must stress that any confusion in this regard is our own and probably did not exist among the ancient administrators (Van Driel 1994: 192; Zettler 1991: 261; Michalowski 1991: 46). Observers of the Ancient Near East have been prone to cite this as evidence of the overwhelming public control of the economy. Instead, we must see this as evidence for an absence of the kind of tension between public and private roles that is characteristic of our own world.
Our desire to differentiate public and private in antiquity raises two further problems about our source material. The first difficulty arises because much of the primary documentary evidence has either not survived or has not been unearthed, and this makes quantitative analysis of the Mesopotamian economy extraordinarily difficult. Moreover, the urban bias of the cuneiform record must be reckoned with in any study of Mesopotamia. The majority of the inhabitants of the Ancient Near East, the unnamed individuals who did much of the work for the large institutions about which we are so well informed, are hidden from our view.
The second difficulty stems from the fact that the historian of the Ancient Near East is dealing with societies that were literate in ways that are alien to our society. The conventions surrounding the use of writing and the preservation of texts in antiquity were different from those that operate in modern society. Therefore, we are occasionally just as surprised by the inclusion of some material in the written record as we are puzzled by the absence of so much other documentation. It is precisely the missing tablets, which most likely never existed, that often prevent us from making a qualitative analysis of the Mesopotamian economy. Therefore, we are dealing not only with an ancient and unfamiliar society, but also one that will always remain somewhat inaccessible.
Much of the economic activity that took place in the Ancient Near East may have been undocumented, and further, we have no way of knowing how much of the documented material has survived. Most often we only have one part of the textual equation, as the records may have been recovered or survived from only one area of an ancient city. For example, the Ur III period (2112-2004 bce) is one of the best documented eras in antiquity, and yet the records that survive are almost exclusively those of the central and provincial administrations. For the succeeding Old Babylonian period, the situation is largely reversed. We only have extensive archival records from both the institutional and non-institutional economies in the second half of the first millennium bce during the Neo-Babylonian period.
World History
