When we speak of public and private, we usually mean something analogous to the public and private sectors of our own society. In our own society, individuals are generally employed in one or the other of these sectors. This does not mean that our public employees do not have private lives and private property, but that their roles as public officials must be kept separate from their private lives. We believe individuals should not play a role in both of these sectors simultaneously. We do not object to a retired general taking up a post with a defense contractor, but we would be rightly suspicious of an active general who was also the vice president of a munitions manufacturer. In contrast, the Ancient Near East was characterized by situations in which individuals filled multiple roles at the same time, and these roles involved what we regard as both public and private functions.
Another difficulty that we encounter is one of scale. In the ancient world the size of the resources in the hands of public institutions appears to dwarf the resources available to individuals. Frequently, this was the result of ideologies that placed the temples or palaces at the center of land tenure systems much different from our own. Nonetheless, there is strong evidence for individual entrepreneurial activity throughout the history of the Ancient Near East.
In the Ancient Near East, the temples and palaces regularly assigned land to individuals or families in exchange for services, most often military service or corvee, or forced, labor. Today, we would consider such services to have a public nature. At the same time, the fact that these properties and obligations could often be sold or inherited poses a problem for our strict categorizations. Additionally, we must be skeptical about making a determination solely on the basis of the ultimate ownership of the land in an environment where land was frequently available, but seed grain, plow teams, and harvesting labor were often scarce (Van Driel 1998: 37-8; Powell 1999: 19).
The desire to apply modern economic understandings to the world of the Ancient Near East is also undermined by many of our own assumptions about ancient society. A hallmark of modern classical economic theory since the end of the eighteenth century ce is the supposition that the private sector is more efficient than the public. In contrast, the study of the Ancient Near East has been characterized by the belief that the public sector is in many ways more efficient. For example, the massive irrigation projects of southern Mesopotamia are assumed to have been impossible without public organization and maintenance.
The ancient economy was an overwhelmingly agrarian economy in a way that is alien to the modern Western world. The inhabitants of the Ancient Near East were employed almost exclusively in agricultural pursuits. certainly there were craftsmen and entrepreneurs whose work was not agrarian in nature, but they were the exceptions. Indeed, much of the administrative apparatus of ancient society was set up to maintain and record the agricultural production of society. The predominance of agriculture means that the study of the ancient economy requires different patterns of analysis from those used for the modern economy.
What is necessary for the interpretation of the economy of the Ancient Near East is a model that recognizes the alien nature of the ancient economy, and especially the structural differences between the ancient and modern economies, while allowing for the appearance of familiar ideas, such as private ownership. It has become obvious that the ancient entrepreneur operated in an economic system that was not governed by the same mechanisms as the modern economy (Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957). At the same time, the entrepreneur of the Ancient Near East was interested in acquiring ever greater wealth, and as a result he sought opportunities to maximize his gain, and to do so on behalf of his own household.
The attempt to describe the society of the Ancient Near East in a way that does not project modern meanings onto ancient practices can begin with the identification of the fundamental economic structures of that society. The most significant of these structures was the household. The household was the chief organizational unit of the ancient economy. Households varied in scale between the individual household of a small family up to the household of one of the chief gods of the pantheon (a temple) or the household of the king (the palace). The ordinary urban household consisted of the immediate family, perhaps some additional dependent relations, and less frequently, a handful of slaves. It was usually a patriarchal household and the head of the family controlled all of the household’s material wealth. The family remained a significant locus for economic activity and organization throughout the history of the Ancient Near East, but not in opposition to the state or public sector. Indeed, the families frequently co-opted the structure of the central authority for their own advantage.
World History
