Introduction

Beginning in the nineteenth century, excavations in Iraq, Syria, and Iran have
brought to light the remains of the civilizations that ourished in the ancient
Near East in the third, second, and rst millennia BCE. Among these nds, the
written records, over 250,000 clay tablets inscribed with the cuneiform script,
stand out. In the ancient world, this corpus is superseded quantitatively only
by the source material in Greek; more text survives from antiquity in the
ancient Near Eastern languages Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian than in
Latin (Streck 2.011). Some 80 percent of the ancient Near Eastern text corpus
are_of socio-economic content a mine of information on economic history
that reaches back to a period very close to the rst appearance of stratied
urban societies.

The overabundance of qualitative and quantitative textual information

notwithstanding, there are few extended treatments of the economic history
of the ancient Near East that are informed by theoretical concerns and models
as well as by an adequate understanding of the primary sources, and that also
address economic development over time and changes in economic performance.
Research is hampered by the sheer mass of philological detail that has to
be harnessed for the purpose of generalization, by the unequal distribution of
the data (van de Mieroop r997), and by the lack of archaeological research on
the issue of Overall demographic development, economic performance, and
standards of living.2

The environment. and the "traditional paradigm of the ancient Mesopotamian

economy

Ancient Mesopotamian societies were complex peasant societies: strongly

stratied, state-building societies characterized by a comparatively high
degree of urbanization (Bang 2006: 55). The environmental conditions determined
to a large extent the economic activities (e.g. Postgate 1994; Potts 1997;
Wilkinson 2003; and Wirth 1962). Four principal ecological zones can be
distinguished in southern Mesopotamia: the central alluvial plain, crisscrossed
by rivers and irrigation canals; the swampy river deltas and other waterlogged
areas; the steppe bordering on the alluvium (the realm of the shepherds); and
the cities. The principal economic activities associated with these zones were
irrigation agriculture, hunting, and shing, sheep-breeding and artisanal and
other city-based non-agricultural activities. In northern Mesopotamia, the
more hilly countryside permitted a mixture of irrigation and rainfall
agriculture. The principal cereal crop, barley, was complemented in the south by
dates: southern Mesopotamian agriculture was based on two leading crops,
rather than one. Sesame was the main source of vegetable fat, barley beer and
later a "beer" made of fermented dates were the principal beverages.
Importantly, in southern Mesopotamia, where urbanism rst arose, many
essential natural resources, especially metal, stones, and good wood, were
lacking and always had to be obtained from neighboring Iran, from the Levant
and from Anatolia and, via the Persian Gulf, from India and Arabia.

The various forms of socio-economic organization that were adopted by

the societies that ourished in this environment are often seen as variants of
one basic model.3 Following the terminology of Liverani (2011: 41-44), this
model is founded on a dichotomy between a domestic" and a "palatial
mode of production. The former is village based and involves agriculture at
or near a mere subsistence level; producers and landowners are identical,

autoconsumption dominates, and exchange is limited,'local, and predominantly

reciprocal; full-time economic specialization is mostly 'absent. This sector of
the economy is subordinate to the "palatial" (or institutional) sector
that is dominated by large temple and palace households. Here producers
are in a servile status vis-a-vis the owners of the means of production
(especially land); there is labor specialization and redistribution of goods
within ,the institutional household. This sector of the economy is city based,
i.e. it is closely linked with the process of urbanization.
The institutional sector depends for its survival on the (seasonal) labor and
the surplus produced in the "domestic" sector of the economy. Especially from
the second millennium
onwards, this surplus is centrally collected by means of a "tributary system"
(see Liverani 2.011: 5253; Renger 2002, 2003, 2.004; and e.g. Van de Mieroop
r999: 11314; [for his approach, see Graslin-Thom 2009: r16-118]).

The existence of other modes of production is conceded by the proponents

of this model. There is general agreement that in all periods of Mesopotamian
history, from the end of the fourth millennium sea onwards (Powell 1994),
private land ownership (if not necessarily ownership of arable land) was
recognized and protected by law. However, there is considerable diachronic
variation and equally considerable disagreement among scholars regarding
the weight that has to be allotted to this and other economic subsistence
strategies compared with the two sectors of the economy, the institutional and
the (village-based) domestic (and communal), on whose interplay the
dominant-model of the Mesopotamian economy is founded. Complex systems of
bureaucratically administered redistribution within the framework of large
institutional households were certainly of major importance in the third
millennium. According to some scholars, essentially the entire population of
southern Mesopotamia was integrated into such households, while in later
periods, subsistence production on small plots dominated the life of the vast
majority of the population.4 Others hesitate to subscribe to such sweeping
generalizations (e.g. Liverani 2011: 43; Van de Mieroop 1999: 115 ) or emphasize
the coexistence of the "private" sector of the economy next to the
"institutional sector also in the third millennium bce (e.g. Garfinkle 2012 :
27), but agree that throughout the three millennia of documented ancient Near

Eastern history the dominance of subsistence production and the "palatial"

sector of the economy left at best limited, scope for economic phenomena that
can ,be classied as "capitalist" in that they depend _ as dened in the
introduction to this volume on the government-backed interplay of private
property rights, contractual relationships, and markets governed by supply
and demand.

This "two-sector" paradigm of the Mesopotamian economy has been

developed predominantly on the basis of evidence from the third millennium
see. and it fits these data best. The model's signicance for later periods is
questionable and has been questioned. While the continued existence and
relevance of the "domestic" and the "institutional" (or "palatial," following
Liverani) modes of production is beyond doubt, changes in their cumulative
economic weight argue for a nuanced application of the two-sector model to
later periods of Mesopotamian history. Its most sustained challenges come
from the documentation for longdistance (and domestic) trade that proves
the existence of market-based and prot-oriented commerce supported by
complex social and legal institutions, and from evidence dating to the rst
millennium BCE that shows a period of economic growth driven, inter alia, by
increasing monetization and the market orientation of economic exchange.
These phenomena will be treated in the remainder of this chapter.
Markets, longdistance trade and commerce in the ancient Near East: aspects of
capitalism

Mesopotamian societies could procure important resources such as metals

from neighboring regions by violence, through military raids, the imposition
of tribute, or through institutionalized gift exchange with foreign rulers
(eg. Veenhof 2.010: 40-41). Most often, however, such goods were obtained
through trade. The best evidence comes from the rst half of the second
millennium. Especially northern Mesopotamian, i.e. Assyrian, data from
around 1850 BCE document prot-oriented commerce in textiles and in base
and precious metals that can be classied as "capitalist" according to the
denitions set out in the introduction. The Old Assyrian caravan trade is

MICHAEL JURSA

documented by a corpus of 25,000 cuneiform tablets ('e.g. Dercksen 2.064;

Veenhof 2008, 2010). Its basic structure will be summarized here. The hub of
Assyrian trade was the city of Assur on the Tigris. Assyrian and foreign,
merchants imported to Assur textiles and copper (from the south), and tin I
and lapis lazuli from Iran; nomads from the citys wider hinterland brought
wool which was woven into textiles in Assur in home-based workshops often
run by women (typically, the wives of merchants). Assyrian traders paid for
these goods with silver. This silver (and gold) was earned through the export
of these goods to Anatolia.

The king of Assur 5 rights with respect to this crucial aspect of his citys
economy were limited. The main administrative powers rested with the city
assembly, a collective body which consisted of representatives of the city's
elite (merchant) families and ran also the "city hall," the towns economic
center. While the city. represented by the city hall, held the monopoly on
some trade goods (meteoric iron and lapis lazuli), its main function in the
economy was that of guaranteeing contracts, of dening the legal framework
for all trading, which included guaranteeing the stability of the system of
measures and weights and the purity of the precious metals traded, and of
establishing the diplomatic relations with other regional powers on which the
Assyrian caravan trade depended. The city also acted to limit competition to
its merchants rom traders originating in other cities (Veenhof 2010: 5152).
Bilateral treaties guaranteed Assyrian merchants the right of residence in
foreign cities, including the right to establish trading colonies,
extraterritorial rights, guarantees of safe conduct, and protection against
brigandage (Eidem 1991: 189). The city hall also collected taxes on trade goods.
The city delegated some of its power to the administration of several colonies"
established by Assyrian merchants in the commercial quarters of Anatolian
cities; in their dealings with Anatolians, the Assyrian traders could count on
the backing of the local representatives of their city.

The institutions of actual trading are abundantly documented. Trading rms were
normally family based, but caravan ventures frequently were funded by joint
stock funds'. (namqqum, "money bag," in Assyrian [Veenhof 2010: 55]). Up to
around a dozen investors family and business partners of the trader, but also
simply rich citizens of Assur pooled resources reckoned in a gold standard to
nance a traders business trip. Such investments were usually made for a
decade, and were expected to yield to the investor double the amount invested,
plus additional prots. Credit was frequently given and taken; debts bore
interest, and sometimes also compound interest. Debt notes could be transferred;
they were negotiable instruments similar to medieval bills of exchange.
Merchants were aware of the uctuation of prices and market mechanisms and
tried to benet from them whenever they could. They were motivated by desire
for prestige, as reected in their large houses that have been excavated, and
for prot, as expressed by a warning addressed to an overzealous merchant: "you
love money, but you hate your life.

These Assyrian merchants are but the best-known case of Mesopotamian

long-distance traders who worked in a setting that for all the involvement of
the state often export goods were surpluses originating from royal or temple
estates, and in the rst millennium long-distance traders were often royal
merchants bore all the imprints of market-based and prot-oriented trading.6
Even when they acted for the state, merchants bore personally the risk of their
activities and adopted various strategies to minimize it (GraslimThom 2.009:
381428; Jursa 2002). Thus, market-based exchange dominated the realm of
trade, especially long-distance trade, throughout ancient N ear Eastern history.
This sector of the economy was a realm of entrepreneurial activity that can be
usefully analyzed with for instance the concepts of neoclassical theory.
Nevertheless, it may be argued, in line with the rtwosector" model, that the
Old Assyrian case, and the sphere of (long-distance) trade in general, are not
characteristic of the dominant economic structures of most of ancient Near East
history and of the lives lived by the vast majority of its population. As one
of the most outspoken defenders of the role of private entrepreneurship in
third millennium BCE Mesopotamia observes, it seems clear that "individuals
in the ancient world often derived their impetus from a prot motive and
economizing choices were made in antiquity," but while "a large segment of
the urban population . . . was free to engage in entrepreneurial activity," "the
largest portion of the population . . . was absolutely dependent on the
institutions that controlled their labor" (Garnkle zoraz 153). Only for the
rst millennium race, and in particular for southern Mesopotamia in the late
seventh, the sixth, and the early fth centuries BCE (the "long sixth century"),
can one make a case for a general shift of the economy toward market-based
transactions. This shift led to economic growth on the intensive margin which
coincided with economic growth on the extensive margin a possible case of a
"Malthusian singularity. "7 The remainder of the chapter focusses on this
evidence.

The environmental and technological matrix of economic life in Babylonia in

the first millennium not: including the long sixth century on which these pages
will concentrate,did not differ signicantly from that of earlier periods:
Babylonia was still a predominantly agrarian society depending on irrigation
agriculture with a double focus on barley and the more labor-intensive, but also
more productive, cultivation of dates. Sheep-breeding was the third principal
agrarian activity.

Within this framework, a certain set of interdependent ecological, demographic.

and political factors cumulatively caused structural economic change.
By the eighth century ace, the climatic anomaly that had signicantly
contributed to the crisis of the Near Eastern world around the turn of the
millennium had passed: the climate grew wetter, the river system in the
alluvial ood plain of Mesopotamia stabilized, and conditions for agriculture
production in southern Mesopotamia improved markedly. Population levels
rose, and there began a phase of increasing urbanization (Adams 1981).
Politically, the rise of the neo-Babylonian empire at the end of the seventh
century brought to an end an extended period of unrest and war. As the center
of an empire that stretched from the Levant to the foothills of the Iranian
plateau, Babylonia could reap the benets both of peace and of imperial
domination.
Jointly, these factors triggered an expansion of the economy, and far-reaching
change.8 This development can be followed in great detail through
a mass of qualitative and less abundant, but still substantial, quantiable
data. We focus here on the "long sixth century, which began with the rise of
Babylonian at the end of the seventh century and came to an end in 484 BCE,
when Babylonian rebellions against Xerxes and Persian reprisals caused major
disruptions in the socioeconomic fabric of the country. Over 20,000 cuneiform
tablets document this period Gursa 2005); many more remain unpublished. The
result of the economic transformation in the 130 years (the long sixth century)
following the fall of Assyria (612 BCB) and the rise of Babylon can be sketched
as follows. Agricultural production increased overall and was strongly market
oriented. A large (if unquantiable) part of the urban population worked in
non-agrarian occupations; there was a high degree of labor specialization.
The majority of the urban and rural workforce consisted, for

the rst time. in Mesopotamian history, not of compelled laborers, but of free
hirelings who were paid market wages in silver money. The economy was
monetized to a greater degree than ever before silver served not only for
high-value transactions, but also as low-range money. Few among the urban
population can have remained entirely untouched by the monetary economy.
Consumption patterns suggest a signicantly higher level of prosperity than in
earlier periods of Babylonian history.

The interconnection of these phenomena, which will be described in more

detail below, can be established through a commercialization model" of
Smithian inspiration (e.g. Hatchet and Bailey 2001: 121173 and Millett 2.001;
jursa 2010a: 783800 for the application of the model to the present period).
Demographic change is one important stimulus for agricultural and commercial
development and technological progress, the agency of the state is another.
Proting from state-controlled investment in the agrarian infrastructure and
generally lavish state spending,population growth and a concomitant process of
urbanization set in motion (and was in turn sustained by) a positive feedback
cycle in the economy. This led to an increase in demand and to an increase in
aggregate as well as per capita production. Urbanization allowed an increasing
division of labor and economic specialization, and thus led to higher
productivity. As administrative, religious, and economic centers,
cities were foci of high consumption and depended on an increasing pool of
non-agricultural labor. They stimulated the production of a growing agricultural
surplus through offering market opportunities. The resulting modicum of economic
growth not only , offset (for a while) the Malthusian threat accompanying
demographic growth but also allowed a noticeably (and quantiably) higher
general standard of living than in earlier (and later) periods.
Some of the evidence that supports this model will now be discussed in brief.3

The demographic expansion in Babylonia from the seventh century

onwards is best visible in the results of archaeological surveying. According
to Adams (1981: 178), long-term demographic growth that began in this period
led to a vefold (or more) increase of the population in the region during a
span of ve to seven hundred years. Other estimates are more conservative

(Brinkman 1984), but it is certain that in the period under consideration many
more people lived in Babylonia than in the preceding centuries. They also lived
in larger settlements: urban settlements increased overproportionally, a
result of fairly abrupt, probably state-directed, policies of settlement
formation (Adams 1981: I78).
The agrarian basis of the economy underwent a deep structural transformation
(Irirsa 2010a: 316468). Canal-building projects and state-sponsored
land-reclamation schemes extended the cultivated area. Agricultural production
also intensied qualitatively. In arable fanning, seeding rates were
higher, and the space between the furrows was reduced, in comparison to
the second and third millennia Bce.Owing to the resulting greater investment
of labor and resources, Babylonian cereal farming in the sixth century bce
produced on average about 25 percent higher returns than in earlier periods.
Furthermore, very many landowners in this period favored date-gardening
over arable farming, and turned elds into palm gardens.
Peace and state-sponsored improvements of the irrigation system favored this
societywide trend towards long-term agricultural investment. The process is
amply documented in the textual record. To cite just one example, the
agricultural transformation of the region around the, city of Nippur in central
Babylonia can be traced through written records over a period of four centuries
(lursa 2010a: 405418). .An exclusively grain-farming area in the eighth
century,Nippur saw .some development in the sixth century and had changed to
the more intensive two-crop regime typical for the period by the fth century.
Importantly, date-gardening not only achieved higher surface yields than
arable farming, but was also more productive in terms of the labor invested
(by a margin of It! to 100 percent Gutsa 2010a: 5152.): The preponderance of
horticulture in the agricultural system of the period is a key factor for the
entire economic structure: it caused a society-wide increase of the available
agricultural surplus and led to an increase in the productivity per capita of
agricultural labor, and thus of the largest sector of the economy. -

Agricultural production diversied under the inuence of (especially

urban) markets. In the cities hinterland, cashcrop production proliferated.
Two examples illustrate the documentation that is available. One tablet
archive furnishes evidence for cash-crop production of onions, which was
directly stimulated by the markets in Babylon and by entrepreneurs
specializing in the marketing of this niche product: the farmers grew large
quanties of onions under contractual obligation to the middlemen who
marketed their produce Gursa 2010a: 21618; Wunsch 1993, 20m). A temple
archive demonstrates that the. large institutional household in question,
which, according to the traditional view of the "palatial economy, should
have been essentially autarkic, in fact could not have survived economically
without the market the temple sold up to half of its agricultural income on
the market against silver money which was spent mostly to pay for hired
labor and for the purchase of animals, especially sheep (Iursa 2010a: 572~576).
Phenomena such as these cannot be accommodated by the traditional View of
the Mesopotamian economy described above.

In earlier periods of Mesopotamian history, uncoined silver had served as a

money of account and a standard of value as well as a high-value money that
physically changed hands only in exchange for expensive goods (see Graslin-
Ihom 2009: 238254 and jursa zoroa: 469474 ). This role of silver changed in
the course of the first centuries of the rst millennium BCE. The eighth century
still saw a comparatively "traditional" pattern of money usage silver was
mostly used for high-value transactions among professional traders and weal
thy clients. By the sixth century, this had changed, and silver money was not
the impractical high-value money it was previously. Many types of transaction
were virtually always conducted with money, while there was none for which
money was irrelevant. In an urban context, virtually all goods and services
were available against the payment of silver, from the. hiring of specialized
and unspecialized labor to the buying of foodstuffs. The rural population earned
money mostly as hired laborers in the city and on large building sites in the
country and by selling cash crops on urban markets.
The importance of silver is reected also by the terminology, which for the
rst time distinguishes silver qualies and degrees of purity, for which
eventually, from about 545 BCE onwards, the state started to assume
responsibility. Coins must have been in circulation at least in the Achaemenid
period, if not earlier, but the Babylonian terminology was conservative and
continued to ignore their existence. All forms of silver, coined or otherwise,
were weighed, down to the Hellenistic period, so their worth depended on their
intrinsic value. The expansion of the monetary economy caused the development of
new contract forms, including innovative types of business partnership ventures.
There were bilateral (or multilateral) partnerships in addition to commenda-type
partnerships between one (or more) investor(s) and one (or more) agent(s).

Babylonian law reached a considerable degree of abstraction here. The business

company had a legal identity of its own; its assets were seen as distinct from
the assets of the investors Oursa 2010b). The legal and institutional
requirements for a widespread use of productive credit were in place. although
deposit banking in Babylonia only evolved in the late fth and early fourth
centuries. Such arrangements served a variety of purposes; tavern-keeping and
beer-brewing, craft production, small-scale agricultural enterprises, regional
and longdistance trade. However; the business partnership was primarily a means
of nancing small undertakings. The investors numbered usually two or three, and
the silver sums invested remained comparatively modest. In most cases they
represented the value of one or more donkeys, or one or more slaves, rarely as
much as the value of a house. The nancial capabilities of individual business
companies did not surpass those of rich private households and did not even come
close to those of institutional households.

Silver circulated on the market. For Babylonia in our period, the working of
the commodity markets can be observed from the late seventh century
onwards on the basis of qualitative and quite rich quantitative data; for the
later centuries of the rst millennium, there is an extremely rich collection of
data in the "Astronomical Diaries" texts which collect series of astronomical
observations as well as price data and other "terrestrial phenomena (e.g.
Pirngruber 2012.). Prices were demonstrably subject to seasonal fluctuations
and to the laws of supply and demand. The statistical proof is conclusive:
prices fluctuated unpredictably and could not be foreseen by consumers, and
they were strongly interrelated through substitution and complementarity
(cg. Pimgruber 2012; Temin 2002.; van Leeuwen and Pimgruber 2011).
Transport costs, and hence transaction costs in general, were low in comparison
to other ancient civilizations, owing to the ubiquitous presence of
waterways.

Nevertheless, the case for market eiciency in Babylonia should probably

not be overstated. Just as in the case of Egypt in late antiquity, for which a
similar argument has been made (Rathbone 1997), these were "comparatively"
well-performing, "comparatively" integrated markets: market failures were a
common occurrence.11 It may be conceivable to apply to these Babylonian
markets Bang's concept of the "Bazaar economy" that he developed for the
Grew-Roman world on the basis of comparative evidence (Bang 1006; 2008):
"a stable and complex business environment characterised by uncertainty,
unpredictability and local segmentation of markets (Bang 2006: 79). The
juxtaposition of a stable institutional background for commerce and instability
resulting from contingent external factors is certainly useful and applicable to
the Babylonian evidence, but it is less clear that we can see here a fundamental
qualitative, distinction, rather [than gradual differences, that distinguished
ancient markets from, for instance, homologous institutions of early modern
Europe.
Social structures shaped the development of factor markets (jursa in
press a). The socioeconomic environment was particularly favorable to
the development of a labor market. The period experienced demographic
growth, so manpower was available. Nevertheless, the "palatial" sector of
the economy, the temple households and the royal establishment, did not
have at its disposal a reservoir of dependent laborers that was sufcient for
the state's huge investments in the agrarian infrastructure and ambitious
public building projects. A substantial segment of the population had no
institutional ties and could seek work freely; and even institutional depend-
ants enjoyed a certain degree of freedom in taking up independent employment, as
did qualied slaves in private ownership (Dandamaev r984). Much
labor was contractual, based on agreements between two parties that in
principle entered into the contract by their own free will. Wages were
negotiated between the parties and depended on supply and demand; at
harvest time, for instance, building workers could prot from the general
labor shortage and demand extortionate wages. The development of wages
over time followed that of commodity prices (Iursa 2010a: 673681).

Hired mass labor is well attested in temple archives (Beaulieu 2005; Jursa
zoroa: 661681). For public building projects hired labor was as important as,
or even more important than, compelled labor. Craft production in the city
was dependent on monetized exchange, and on the availability of labor for
hire; this led also to artisans] specialization and to the appearance of new
trades. The best evidence here concerns smithing (Payne injursa 2010a: 688
694), the baker's trade (I-Iackl injursa 2010: 708) and the freelance laundry
business, a branch of the economy where also women entered the market
place (Waerzeggers 2006). Much, if not most, of privately owned land was
farmed out to free tenants or on analogous terms to slaves. Otherwise slaves
appear within the area of private farming in a supervising, managerial
capadty; they were found among the ordinary workforce only occasionally
(Dandamaev 1984: 252-278; jursa 2010a: 234235).
Finally, the system of compelled labor and military service for the state relied
on the availability of substitute workers and soldiers whom the holders of land
encumbered with tax and service obligations could hire for service in their
stead; these substitutes were paid high cash wages (lursa 2011; van Driel 2002).

Three principal types of landholding can be distinguished: institutional

(royal and temple) estates; land held by individuals; and estates granted
to collectives by the state in return for military service and taxes (IurSa
zoroa: r7raos, 316468; van Driel 1002). The large, but frequently understaffed
and underexploited institutional estates were cultivated by compelled and
hired labor and by free (or, more rarely, slave) tenants; they were frequently
managed for the king, or for the temples, by private contractors who introduced
an entrepreneurial element into the administration of state land.
Royal land grants were cultivated by the recipients of the grants, or by free
tenants. Much is known about land in private hands. the most innovative sector
of Babylonian landholding in this period. Private small-scale date-gardening on
private estates was the most intensive and most productive form of agriculture
in the sixth century and a forerunner of agrarian change (Jursa 2010a: 760).
Access to land for rent was in part regulated by interpersonal relationships of
sometimes long standing that were similar to a patronclient relationship, but
there is enough evidence for short-term leases and a rapid turnover of lessees
to suggest that both tenants, usually free men, and landowners were fairly
exible. There was a wide possible range of economic relationships between
tenants and lessors reflecting the interplay of economic and social forces on
the rental market. In general, contractual law and custom created a stable and
predictable institutional framework and outside the institutional sphere and its
partial reliance on the labor of dependants there is little in the sources about
the use of constraint and the exercise of power on the part of landowners.
Property rights were usually well dened and well protected; institutional
rights (or rights of the state) on land intersected with private property rights
only in a few clear cases. Areas that had been reclaimed by state intervention
were subject to certain types of taxation and labor service, and temples could
lay a vestigial claim to certain estates and demand a tithe. In neither use,
however, were there restrictions on the alienation of the land by the private
owners. In fact, only royal land grants to soldiers could not be sold (but they
could be pledged, rented, and inherited); otherwise there was no absolute
legal restriction on the buying and selling of land whatsoever. In practice
royal and temple land was alienated very rarely and only in extraordinary
conditions; but the change of ownership of privately owned agricultural land is
extraordinarily well documented. It is justied to speak of a land market:
property rights were guaranteed by law, and the nature and the quality of
the land were decisive factors for the price. Nevertheless, the social

embeddedness of this market determined the framework within which it functioned;

there was a mentality of avoiding the sale of land whenever Possible, so that a
majority of sales occurred under duress; and even then,land was preferably sold
to social peers. These social constraints rendered the access to productive land
through purchase difcult for outsiders. Where it occurred. it usually must be
seen to imply a signicant imbalance between the social power and the economic
resources of the "outside" buyer and the seller.

Concentrating on data bearing on production, as the foregoing pages have

done, the excellent performance of the Babylonian economy in the long sixth
century (by the standards of the region in antiquity) is evident; it was growing
on the extensive as well as on the intensive margin. The increase in labor
productivity per capita follows most clearly from the general shift of
agriculture from cereal farming to horticulture. This characteristic of the
economy can be put into even sharper relief by focussing on consumption and the
standard of living Gursa zoroa: 8048r6). For methodological issues, see, e.g.
Morris (2004, 2005) and Scheidel (mm). In the absence of reliable and detailed
archaeological studies on proxy data for living standards (stature, nutrition,
mortality and life expectancy, disease patterns, and housing), textual data have
to be used. Wheat wages, i.e. the quantity of wheat the average daily wage of
an unskilled free worker could buy, are a crude but effective indicator of
real income. In most ancient and medieval societies, daily wages of 3.5-6.5
liters of wheat predominate (Scheidel 2010), but Babylonians of the long sixth
century earned wheat wages of 9.614.4 liters, signicantly more than their
Mesopotamian predecessors of the late third and early second millennia ace
(4.88 liters). This is a strong indication for unusually high prosperity levels
during much of the long sixth century. A comparison of Old Babylonian
(c. mooI600 BCE) and NeoBabylonian dowry and inheritance documents,
with their detailed list of household goods and material possessions in general,
points into the same direction: urban households of the sixth century BCE
owned a much wider range of household goods than their social homologues
of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and dowries and patrimonies were
much richer (Jursa 2010: 806811). These data support the production-oriented
analysis summarized above; they give us a coherent image of a comparatively
prosperous period which benetted from internal economic growth owing to
increasing agricultural productivity, the stimuli of a growing urban population,
and a culture of comparatively ee economic exchange with low transaction costs.
Throughout much of the long sixth century, the economy also benetted from
incoming wealth owing to Babylonia's imperial domination over much of the Near
East.
The states contribution was arguably crucial for creating and sustaining
this dynamic economy. The Neo-Babylonian empire, and later the Persian
empire, mostly managed to maintain peace in the land, the decisive precondition
for the economic development of the long sixth century. Second, largescale
state-sponsored building projects aiming at land reclamation and amelioration
transformed parts of the rural landscape. Royal land allotment schemes of the
seventh and early sixth centuries gave the initial impetus for the reclamation
of the barren or underused land around the cities after decades of war and
unrest. The Crown shaped the institutional. administrative, and technical
foundations of Nee-Babylonian agriculture. It promoted commercial development by
furthering entrepreneurial activities at the interface between the institutional
and the private economy. It also interfered with the monetary system, by
introducing various means for safeguarding the quality of silver (and by
attempting to set xed interest rates). Next to their investments in the
agrarian infrastructure, the most important contribution of the Neo-Babylonian
kings to the economic expansion during their reign consisted in their
extravagant building activities. The huge new temples, palaces, city walls, and
cross-country defense structures were nanced to a large degree with tribute and
booty from Assyria, Syria, and the Levant. These building undertakings brought
large amounts of bullion into circulation and temporarily allowed many urban
unskilled laborers to subsist largely on money wages because they could nd
employment for much of the year.
Imperial domination is thus at the root of the inationary process that caused
the value of silver to fall to about a third of what it had been in the second
millennium BCE, allowing silver to function as an all-purpose money for the
rst time in Mesopotamian history. Furthermore, royal demands for (cash)
taxes and for labor and military service contributed to the increasing
monetization of economic exchange: willingly or unwillingly, taxpayers were
forced into the monetary economy.

in conclusion, the narrative that results from the reading of the evidence
that is proposed here is that of a limited Smithian success story, as
occasionally occurs also in other premodern economies. The interest of this
case lies in its early date and in its particularities, in the combination of
longue-dure factors of demography and climate with certain much more transient
elements of l'histoire conjoncturellr and vnementielle, to use the Braudelian
terms. In particular, it was imperial domination that irthered agrarian
development and the monetization of exchange that led to economic growth and
increased prosperity. Correspondingly, it was also through political change, as
an indirect consequence of the conquest of Babylonia by the Persians (539 ace),
that the particularly prosperous long sixth century came to an end; the
country's prosperity was harnessed by a new ruling class in a way that
eventually undermined its foundations.

In the later fifth century and thereafter, after an unsuccessful rebellion

against Persian rule, the fortunes of the traditional Babylonian urban elites
who had been the principal agents of the economic expansion of the preceding
period declined. Their economic interests were no longer served by state
politics as they had been under the Neo-Babylonian empire and, by institutional
inertia, in the rst decades of Persian rule. The expansion of largescale
land ownership of Persian nobles and Babylonian supporters of Persian rule
introduced into the Babylonian socioeconomic system a class of agents who
depended for their prosperity on their use of political power rather than on
commerce and agricultural business founded on a stable legal system and
generally recognized property rights. The new elites had more power to
compel labor than the Babylonian urban upper classes in the sixth century,
and there may have been a tendency to extract from the province as much of
the available resources as possible. Wage levels fell, and, if the sketchy data
that are available have been read correctly, prosperity levels seem to have
stagnated, if not declined. In the longue dure, the process of agrarian change
and expansion that was initiated in the long sixth century continued in later
centuries and laid the basis for the exceptional prosperity of Iraq in the early
Islamic period. The development was not linear, however. The exceptional
economic expansion of the sixth century had been created by a fortuitous
combination of long-term economic and climatic background conditions and
much more short~lived political factors. With the disappearance of the latter
this short-lived Malthusian singularity came to an end.