The great organisations were large redistributive centres: surplus, wages, services and commodities were accumulated and redistributed to a degree that easily superseded interactions on a village and family level. The enlarged scale of these interactions made the older means of interaction through habit and personal acquaintances inadequate. In other words, a more objective and impersonal system was needed in order to ensure and guarantee that exchange would remain constant in every direction. This brought to the development of counting and measuring systems, and systems meant to give a concrete value to commodities, labour, time and land.
Figure 4.4 Plan of Uruk (above); the district of Eanna in Uruk, level 4 (below).
Systems of measurement (weight, mass, length and area) already existed. They were predominantly based on body parts: the thumb (inch), cubit or foot for linear measurements, or the talent (the weight ofa person), or the weight of a donkey and so on. These conventional and concrete systems were difficult to implement in a complex counting system. This was due to their unreliability and their different standardisation from place to place. The decisive step towards a more reliable system took place when these units were standardized and linked to a numeral system. In Mesopotamia, the system was sexagesimal, based on multiples of six and ten. Therefore, multiples and divisors of a given unit were 60 and 360, 1/60 and 1/360 and so on.
Linking units of measurements to the sexagesimal system made the whole system much more accessible to the administrators of large-scale organisations. For instance, the talent was divided into 60 minas, and each mina was divided into 60 shekels. These changes removed the original concreteness of the system in favour of a more reliable standardisation. This facilitated the calculations necessary for administrative purposes, from additions to multiplications and divisions (by people or units of time). This was especially the case for the distribution of rations, which was a repetitive operation due to its frequency and the large number of people involved. The assets managed by the urban administration (both in terms of income and expenditure) therefore began to be accounted for, both in terms of quantities and time. These aspects could not have been accounted for in individual households, where systems for the record of assets were not needed on such a scale.
Standardised units of measurements required prototypes approved and guarded by the central administration. For instance, the ‘palm’ had to be equally long for everyone, and always the exact half of a cubit. Therefore, it could not have been measured with one’s hand, but with an officially approved palm length. The rise of redistributive organisations of a scale larger than that of family units, then, led to a link between measures and the numeral system. It also led to the development of models, especially smaller stone weights (mostly shekels, rarely minas), which have been recovered in situ. On the contrary, measures of lengths were made of more perishable materials. Therefore, they have not survived. Units to measure capacity were at times marked on vases, but are otherwise detectable through the standardised dimensions of containers.
Another step towards this administrative standardisation was the comparison of values. Exchange and redistribution required a system able to measure the value of goods, labour, time and land. Every aspect becoming part of the system had to receive a value in relation to the others. A relation of this kind already existed in a very rudimentary form, namely, through the exchange of a given quantity of a certain commodity for a different quantity of another commodity, according to its accessibility, importance, or the labour needed to produce it. These subjective and variable values allowed the first forms of reciprocal exchanges. However, they could not be transferred onto a larger, long-standing and impersonal redistributive organisation without being simplified and standardised. The central administration therefore established the respective value of the goods and services provided, and based its exchanges and remunerations on this system of equivalences.
Two further operations were essential for the urbanisation process. The first one was the selection of certain commodities as standard units of value, rather than memorising the value of each good in comparison to the others. This standardisation constituted a considerable simplification, and a fundamental one when exchanging on a larger scale. The process led to the memorisation and application of equivalences of all available commodities compared to one unit of value (or two or three). The latter acted as the unit of measure for the other commodities. Therefore, the exchange of any given two commodities had to be calculated against the value of the commodity acting as unit of value, without the latter having to be physically present in the exchange. There were two main units of value in Mesopotamia: barley and silver (and sometimes copper). Barley was readily available, of low value, and thus often present in exchanges. On the contrary, silver was a precious and rare material, but also non-perishable (since it could not be consumed), allowing its accumulation. These were two very different materials, to be used as units on different occasions with different goods, and thus complementing each other.
The second operation was linking this system of values to the numeral system. Equivalences that were too complicated to work out would have made conversions too problematic. The solution was to allocate simple numeral equivalences to the units of value of the local economic system and to calculate them in
Sexagesimals. Commodities were measured through different systems of measurement (metals and wool in weight, cereals and oil in volume). Therefore, it would have been impossible to calculate correspondences unless the various systems of measurements and the individual values were easy to work out (in terms of being all sexagesimal). The standard Mesopotamian system matched a shekel of silver to a gur (300 sila, or litres) of barley, or six minas of wool, or twelve litres of oil. Since the multiples and divisors of units of weight and capacity were all roughly linked to the sexagesimal system (6, 10, 12), conversions were relatively easy to work out.
Time was another important factor in this process of quantification. Also in this case, the units of measurement were easily found in nature: the solar year, the lunar month, and the day. This natural way of counting time was then standardised through a sexagesimal system, creating years of 360 days, with 12 months of 30 days each. The same can be said for the subdivision of a day into hours and minutes (on which, however, there is no evidence for the earliest phases). Once it was homogeneous and sexagesimal, time could be easily calculated, especially for the provision of rations. If the daily ration was of two litres of barley, that would become sixty litres a month; similarly, a litre of oil a month corresponded to a shekel of silver a year and so on.
The system of rations gave time a different value according to the work carried out. For basic rations, which repaid the average work in the fields or elsewhere, the main parameters were gender and age. These parameters were used to measure food in terms of the average body weight. The monthly ration of 60 litres for men therefore became 40 for women and 30 for children. The rations also included oil (given on a monthly basis) and wool (provided on a yearly basis), covering the whole range of essentials for survival.
The standardisation and evaluation of labour in relation to the time needed and the payment required led to a standardisation of products. In other words, a potter was paid on a fixed monthly wage, since it was too difficult to check if and how much he actually worked. Consequently, the management established how many pots he had to produce in a given amount of time. The potter knew that by the end of the month he had to deliver a certain number of pots of specified capacity and features. He therefore had to produce them in series (thanks to the existence of the right technology for it), delivering standardised pots. This type of production was able to fulfil a commissioner’s wishes in the safest and fastest way possible. Mass production, fixed parameters and fixed wages standardised production on certain types of vases. This process was closely linked to the standardisation of the goods contained in them and their value.
The most studied example of this process is the production of bevelled-rim bowls. The latter were bowls meant for food rations. These bowls were produced through moulds, which gave the external surface of the bowl the rough surface of the mould itself. On the inside of the bowl, fingerprints show how the clay was pressed inside the mould. The border was cut by the potter’s thumb (hence the name bevelled-rim bowls). These bowls, made in haste with rough clay and badly fired, have been found in large quantities and concentrations. This proves that they were used for the provision of large numbers of employees in large organisation and therefore not within a family unit. The bowls usually had standardised sizes (large, medium and small), both due to the use of moulds and their intended purpose.
It has been suggested that the capacity of these bowls corresponded exactly to the daily ration, and that the three sizes corresponded to the three categories of people (men, women and children). It has also been suggested that the bowl was thrown away and a new one was provided each time and filled up. However, these suggestions are unacceptable. The bowls were not all the same, not even in terms of size. They were used like normal bowls, thus not filled to the rim and not used to take away a ration (let alone to measure it), but simply to hold the ration to be consumed. They were certainly not thrown away after use, an inconceivable waste for ancient times. They were kept by the palace or temple administration (in fact, the highest concentrations are mainly found around temples) for the meals of their workers, who received their daily ration on location. Therefore, the bowls were for occasional workers (corvee), not for regular employees. The latter received a monthly ration. Nonetheless, a high level of standardisation in the production of these bowls remains evident. This derives not only from the production process itself, but also from the purpose (rations) and use of these bowls within a system that was standardised and operated with large quantities.
The administrative needs of the great organisations created a sexagesimal agricultural landscape (made of fields, distances between furrows, simple numeral relations between seeds, harvests, areas, labour units and so on), a sexagesimal division of time and a fixed system of computation and of remuneration. Therefore, they transformed a reality characterised by infinite variables into a computable, impersonal and rational universe, which could be planned and managed successfully.
World History
