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In classical times oligarchic restructurings inverted the archaic order. General economic self-sufficiency based on the principle of widespread property ownership was replaced by monopolization of the land, above all by foreclosing creditors and especially in the aftermath of war. Individuals fell into servile status. Widows and orphans no longer were protected. As for soldiers captured in war, no temples survived as economic entities to advance the funds to redeem them. Many were sold to slave dealers for what the market in human freedom would bring.
Mercenary soldiers replaced free peasant-infantrymen.
Democratic leaders who tried to reverse the erosion of traditional social values were murdered. The details are part of a long gap of silence by the writers of their time. History was all but expurgated of the tradition that things had once been different. Oligarchic propagandists even misrepresented Solon’s seisachtheia which freed the Athenian peasantry from debt-slavery as being merely a currency devaluation making debt repayments marginally easier.
Whereas Bronze Age cosmologies were associated with economic equitability, Iron Age religion became increasingly divorced from social idealism. Instead of periodically restoring order for society at large, the new religions dealt more with salvation on a personal scale. The trend appeared in Babylonia already in the late second millennium BC, especially after the collapse of traditions of proclaiming economic freedom. By late Roman times imperial cults arose, dominated by the entrenched status quo.
The resulting economic polarization led to the greatest Clean Slate yet known. By the fifth century AD depopulation had become so serious throughout the Roman Empire as to threaten collapse in the face of northern invasions. As the money economy broke down, usury was banned, until the 13th century AD paved the way for productive credit. The slave population, housed in sexually segregated barracks, was given its freedom under feudalism and permitted to marry. This banning of chattel slavery and usury paved the way for the modern era.
The spirit of Christianity did not instigate these measures, but provided a religious ideology to support them and hence to shape subsequent western civilization.
The spirit of secular progress has bolstered the permanence of property transfers, and also of debts (save for the bankruptcy loophole), including national debts. But a new economic polarization threatens to call forth a new, worldwide Clean Slate.
We therefore must beware of confusing intentions with consequences. Certainly the way in which our civilization began did not determine how it ended up. If anything, it is the way each civilization disintegrated that played the major role in shaping its successor.
This book concludes by showing how the archaic worldview disintegrated by late classical antiquity. What began as an integrated natural cosmos, patterning social organization and economic renewal on the rhythms of nature, ultimately polarized and dissolved into chaos.
By the time western Eurasia reached the Iron Age, the oligarchies of Athens, Sparta, and Rome had little use for the social values of equity embodied in the Clean Slates—descended from paleolithic traditions—which restored Bronze Age economic freedom as part of the New Year renewal of nature. As society polarized, the image of nature fell into disorder. This was true even of the calendar, which long had provided the general paradigm for social organization. The Julian calendar became a hodgepodge of lunar and solar, Egyptian, and Roman practices.
Roman numerals, weights, and measures mixed decimal and duodecimal systems.
Literacy was lost outside of the Christian temple estates.
The musical scale fell into disrepair until the time of Bach.
What had begun as banquets at which guests were proud to demonstrate a sober balance in their imbibing descended into the Roman Saturnalia with their vomitoria.
Oligarchy overtook the importance of nonhereditary tribes in ancient Rome.
Merchants sought to profiteer at the expense of society at large, appropriating lands and reducing debtors to slavery.
Religion became more otherworldly, and aimed at merely personal rather than social salvation.
Cities sprawled, losing their cosmological proportions and dropping their early rituals.
Ideas of justice were ossified into mazes of legal precedents, losing the spirit of social renewal which periodically had restored economic equity in archaic times by canceling debts and redistributing the land.
Warfare disenfranchised Rome’s peasant-infantry by indebting it, with no postwar proclamation of freedom from debt or allotment of new land to returning veterans.
And for better or worse, modern society has not restored the idea of an integral across-the-board cosmos.
It was the particular way in which archaic society fell apart that spurred what we know of as western civilization.
It was precisely the extreme polarization brought about by usury and the alienability of property that led to the long economic crisis, throughout the Roman Empire, and that led it to ban outright personal slavery and its single major cause, usury.
With these bans a great transition was made from cyclical time to our modern “historical” time. Rather than canceling the debts periodically, there was a perpetual banning of usury—a ban which remained on the books from the fifth through 12th centuries AD.
This break is what makes western civilization different from the development of tribally organized communities outside of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean.
And from the very beginning, the roots were different (as alluded to in the Prologue).
One consequence was that instead of interest being owed mainly to the public institutions or their collectors, debts were owed increasingly to private individuals. Instead of debt-slaves being freed periodically and their lands returned, debt-slavery became permanent. Lands, once sold or forfeited to the well-to-do, were lost irreversibly rather than only temporarily.
The inception of specifically western civilization represents a process of decontextualization, taking social practices out of their original broad context and letting each dimension of society travel on a journey of what may appear to be its own accord.
Our intellectual world is fragmented into disciplines. This compartmentalization is the crux of the problem of most academic research concerning the archaic world and its social philosophy: We are using a broken mirror to reflect the distant archaic kosmos.
A great break set classical antiquity in the Mediterranean apart from its earlier Bronze Age matrix. Instead of building up larger and more thoroughly integrated social and economic[1] units than hitherto existed, the very inception of specifically western civilization represents a process of decontextualization and smaller-scale individualism.
In discussing the matrix from which western civilization broke, I have found it necessary to go considerably beyond discussing Bronze Age social philosophy as a subject in itself. In any event there are no Bronze Age discussions explaining why societies were structured in the way they were. The very idea of providing such explanations arose only in classical antiquity, and represented the origin of philosophy. From the Bronze Age there were only indirect indications of social values, e.g., in the public-sector ration system, the iconography of rulership, and the sacred images of sun-gods of justice and of justice-goddesses of retribution.
The model for organizing archaic societies was not a body of political philosophy, much less an economic ideology. It was the calendar, from which counting, measures, and weights—and hence quantitative analysis—were built up. These basic core or “grid” structures in turn developed what truly may be called corporate accounting, beginning in the Sumerian temples in the third millennium BC. As noted earlier, the elaborate temples and their workshops and rental lands became civilization’s first entrepreneurial corporations, staffed with the first hierarchies of officers, who were accountable at annual meetings for the economic surpluses they generated.
Overall, there was a trend of decontextualization from central public authority, initially the temples, to society at large. Dispersion also occurred from the Mesopotamian core to the Mediterranean periphery over a period of over three thousand years (roughly from the Uruk expansion c. 3500 BC to the inception of the Roman Empire at the transition to the Christian era).
At first only the ruler had his horoscope cast; later, everyone could have this done. And at first omens were a public occasion, taken only for the ruler as a stand-in for the whole land. Later, classical superstition spread down to the lowest levels of society, and indeed found its greatest fuel there.
At first only the city-temple precincts were made the subject of an initiation ceremony. By the first millennium BC this had spread to entire cities.
At first feasts were public; later they became privatized, as did music as it shifted from a ritualistic context to that of pure entertainment. Of course, it was precisely its “entertaining” quality that established its important central social role in the first place. But what changed was the context, and with it the shift of musicians from public servants (e.g., blind men) to musicians for hire. (Also drama, as shown by the Dionysian artists.)
Guilds seem to have followed suit, from “temple unions” of public employees (organized from the top down) to the Roman colleges of professional tradesmen.
Religion itself became privatized, inward-looking rather than a matter of social policy.
What was transformed above all was the idea of time. It changed from one of periodic renewal to an absolute “historical” grid. Christianity played a role in this.
There was a long movement to this. It began when land tenure and the alienation of cultivated properties ceased to be subject to reversal, and when debts no longer were subject to periodic cancellation, e.g., by the ruler (or automatically “by the calendar” in the Hebrew laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy).
And politically, the key act was the transition from centralized monarchies to aristocracies. The latter pursued economic polarization, and dethroned the major source of power, the ruler—who might have opposed them, and had done so in Mesopotamia for many centuries from the middle of the third millennium BC through the time of Hammurapi. (In this reading, Hammurapi was important not for centralizing authority, but for relinquishing it to local big-men.)
At the same time there has been a narrowing of scope resulting from our taking all dimensions of knowledge and daily life out of its cosmological setting—decontextualizing it, privatizing and secularizing it.
Nowhere is this decontextualization clearer than in the evolution of economic relations in the modern world. Histories of economic thought traditionally have dismissed classical antiquity’s contributions along these lines by denying that classical Greece and Rome had economic theory.[2]
Karl Marx, whose A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy[3] (German ed.: 1859) and Theories of Surplus Value[4] (German ed.: 1862–1863) have been called the first histories of economic thought, noted in Capital[5] (German eds.: 1867, 1885, and 1894) that the reason why classical Greece never developed a labor-time theory of value—nor could have done so—was because of slave labor. He believed that free and slave labor could not be co-measured. Yet Mesopotamians did so.
Modern economists discuss how markets establish prices and refine theories of market equilibrium responding to shifting supply and demand conditions. Bronze Age Mesopotamia had a dual economy—and the economic structuring came not from the market (which was only residual) but from the large institutions. It was administered.
In the mid-20th century, Karl Polanyi[6] tried to oppose the economic “modernists” by terming Bronze Age economies “redistributive.” His ideas on the particular mode of redistribution have in turn been outmoded, but he was on the right track.
The idea of “balance” was not that of modern market equilibrium, but rather one of active distributive justice.
Nobody thought that letting successful merchants and other businessmen pull ahead of their compatriots could be socially beneficial. (Yet, to be sure, this did not deter Seneca from being one of the major usurers of his day.) There was never anything like Adam Smith’s idea of the “invisible hand.”
Bronze Age Sumer and Babylonia were not “Oriental despotisms.”Citation NeededCan you help us figure out where this quotation is from?OpenSee All Queries They had market relations and self-seeking. But the most adverse consequences of imbalance—above all, debt, and with it debt-slavery and in time the permanent loss of lands and disenfranchisement of over a quarter of classical antiquity’s population—were periodically undone by the royal “freedom proclamations” of economic justice.
These did not exactly put everyone back on the same par. But they did ensure everyone freedom from servitude and guarantee land and personal liberty free of debt.
As I mentioned in previous chapters (see Periodicities of Property and Debt, for example), the terminology regarding Clean Slate proclamations (“amargi,” “misharum,” “andurārum,” and “deror”) can be confusing to the modern-day reader. The context of meanings was different.
One consideration is the concept of liberty—freedom from slavery—versus our economic liberty, i.e., the freedom to use market forces to extort as much as we can.Vague TextCan you help us make this more specific?OpenSee All Queries
Classical Greece and Rome were more in the character of aristocracies than democracies.Transition NoteCan you help us add a transition and expand the thought here?OpenSee All Queries
Modern economic historians seeking to find in classical times only those elements that may be construed as anticipating modern thought have been obliged to limit their efforts to mere tactics, such as those of how to raise public moneys in Book II of the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomicus.
The signposts along this road are the Old Oligarch on the Athenian constitution. And for utopianism, Plato’s Republic[7] and Laws.[8]
Economists meanwhile trace the semantic root of their discipline back to the Greek “oikos,” which they translate simplistically as (family) “household.” This seems at first glance to ground their discipline in the economics of individual budgeting. As I discussed in The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets regarding wealth-seeking (Aristotle’s “chrematistics”):
Furthermore, with regard to usury (also from The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets):
What is ignored by modern-day economists looking at ancient Greek oikos as family budgeting is the implicit mathematics. When Aristotle (Politics, I.9) contrasted the demand for food (which is satiated) with that of money (which, he said, is infinite), he was referring to increasing rather than diminishing utility: The pursuit of money led to addiction, not satiety.
Mesopotamia’s interest rates (20 percent for commercial credit, 33 1/3 percent for agricultural debt) were not set by market equilibrium or profit opportunities, but rather by analogy to the birth of fractional numbers.
Their computations showed how rapidly capital could double and redouble at these rates. The implication was consistent with their policy of canceling debts outright. If TABLET (Lewy[10] 19__)Specify CitationCan you help us identify the full citation that is missing here, including the year?OpenSee All Queries shows that at 20 percent simple interest, a sum of capital multiplies sixfold in 30 years, then why not cancel it at this time?
This was politically easy to do as long as most debts were owed to the large public institutions and their collectors. But as property and mercantile activities flourished more and more in private hands, above all in the Mediterranean periphery, it became harder—much harder—for rulers to do this. Ultimately rulers were unthroned by the aristocracies that emerged in the first millennium BC.
Our own epoch is the ultimate (not the inevitable, but the actual) culmination of this long process of privatization—currently about four thousand years of momentum behind it.
This prompts the question: Have we reached a limit? Just as the ancient order reached its crisis with the First Dark Age in 1200 BC (military), and Second Dark Age of approximately AD 500 (financial), are we about to experience yet a Third Dark Age, again financial, which will lead to a more statist mode of development?
Individualistic and antistatist representations of economic life as being naturally and inherently free-enterprise—and that this was inherent in Indo-European-speaking western civilization itself—can be defended only by picking up the study of civilization in the third or fourth act, as it were—with the “new beginning” of classical antiquity rather than with the actual inspiration for economic order in the Bronze Age Near East. It was in Mesopotamia where most of our “western” institutions originated.
What those who tout free-enterprise economics like to leave out of their accounts is that the prototypical or “original” households were those of the temple corporations (and later the palaces). These large institutions constituted the public sector of their day. Although they did not theorize explicitly for our benefit, there was an implicit theory of economic behavior, and certainly of social values (utopian and often propagandistic as these may have been from one period to the next).
Enough economic accounts have survived to show that the public institutions did indeed utilize a labor-time principle of accounting values, if not market value. (Adult free and slave males, women, and children each had their own ration-levels comprising their cost.) Much of this accounting was for internal account-keeping—book-values, in modern terminology—and did not pertain directly to sales prices. Yet there seems to have been an implicit supply and demand relationship. This is why the prices of tin, silver, and gold varied from minerals-rich to minerals-poor regions at various distances from the geographic source of supply.
As in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, the textile industry is prototypical here.
Antiquity’s two distinguishing economic features were slavery and usury. It had corporate investment—but this was for the public institutions, not for the private sector.
It was largely as a byproduct of public enterprise—and also of slavery as this grew in demographic and economic importance—that industry was held in contempt by the landed aristocracies who emerged as the ancient oligarchies.
In their moneylending and monopolization of land lay the schizophrenia of ancient economies. In overthrowing the monarchies the economies lost their rudder, at least the only one that could have countered oligarchic excesses. The oligarchy itself appointed Solon archon of Athens, but his debt cancellation hardly could have been achieved in later times.
When the Spartan rulers Agis and Cleomenes tried to do this in the third century BC they were exiled and died for their reformist efforts.
In The Creation of Order I have tried to focus on a hitherto neglected distinguishing feature of antiquity: its cosmological structuring and, as a byproduct, its periodic Clean Slates restoring economic freedom (if not equality) for the peasant-citizenry. If there was dirigisme, it was dirigisme within a context.
Of course, this varied greatly from one region to the next. Egypt’s pharaonic economy was not that of Mesopotamia, and neither was that of the Indus civilization (larger in size than either Mesopotamia or Egypt). In view of these differences it is necessary to throw out all ideas of any inherent “stages of growth” for societies. There is really no such thing as “the” ancient economy or mode of production. There were many ancient modes, and each came to an end in its own way. There were many dead ends.
Western civilization itself seemed to be a dead end, at least to the Eastern (Byzantine) half of the Roman Empire and to the Christian millenarianists as to the Hebrew prophets.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyIf possible, expand here specifically about Judgment Day (see the Key Concepts section of this chapter, particularly this query).OpenSee All Queries
What pulled it out was (1) the radical notion of productive credit, and (2) the superior productivity of free labor.
These are the two premises on which the modern era has been founded. But they are in danger of being violated today. The debt overhead has reached an untenable magnitude.
Our market ideology tends to blind us from this economic reality—one which ancient writers and historians were not loath to acknowledge. What upsets modern economists to the point of diverting their attention from the modern-world problems is the same problem that discolors their interpretation of antiquity. And to the extent that archaeologists and translators absorb the modern prejudices of our time, they too are distorted.
In its financial aspects, the Mesopotamian economic inspiration derived/stemmed from the bifurcation of Bronze Age Mesopotamian society between public and private sectors. This bifurcation was in turn a byproduct of social values.
It also exhibited the paired duality common to much archaic thought. There was no idea of praising the public as opposed to the private sector. Rather, there was a complementarity, a notion of the appropriate spheres of each part of the social order.
Duality was viewed not as good and bad initially, but rather in the sense of right and left, east and west, male and female, public and private.
Debts were mediating balances between these two sectors, both parts of archaic society.
Elsewhere, there were unbifurcated single-sector societies. When these took over Mesopotamian practices, they did so in a new context—one which lacked the checks and balances found between the Mesopotamian temples, their priesthood, and the private/communal sector.
In the above sense Bronze Age thought was inside-out as compared to modern economic individualism. The ethical aim was to achieve the bulk of the population (which lived on the land) above the breakeven point. This is why debts periodically were canceled, lands redistributed, and (domestic) slaves freed.
Industry was hated, ironically, because the Bronze Age was a “service” economy—in the sense that much original handicraft labor was literally servile. It was performed by lowly dependents in Mesopotamia (the orphans and widows, the blind and infirm) or foreign slaves.
This glossary of key concepts will help readers who are new to the subject of archaic human history.
Keyword: “Progress,” in the sense of irreversible time (“secular progress”) in contrast to circular or spiraling periodicities.
Also “cosmopolitan,” locking progress into an international grid.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyGrids are discussed in the chapter body, but the word “cosmopolitan” is not used. Can you help us add it and work it in?OpenSee All Queries
Key images: Slavery and polarization, which became irreversible (“progressive”) in late antiquity.
This culminated in the greatest Clean Slate yet known as personal slavery and usury were banned in the fifth century AD in the face of a collapsing Roman-imperial population.
Lunar symbol: The lunacy of beginning the year 10 days late instead of on the winter solstice, which falls awkwardly on December 21 instead of on January 1Fact CheckCan you help us figure this out: Is the year actually begun 11 days late, not 10 days late?OpenSee All Queries, simply so that in Julius Caesar’s day it could coincide with a new moon.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodySome of this is discussed in generality (“the Julian calendar”) but we’d like to see these specifics from the Key Concepts section about Julius Caesar (and his Julian calendar) and the winter solstice in the Epilogue chapter body; can you help us insert it in the chapter body?OpenSee All Queries
Solar symbol: The Roman emperors and subsequent European kings emerged out of aristocratic infighting. They presupposed an irreversible inviolability of bloodlines, not social fluidity.Add ContextThe connection between emperors and kings and the sun needs to be explained briefly (since this falls under the “Solar symbol” section of Key Concepts).OpenSee All Queries
Principle of regularity: Caesar’s year of 365 1/4 days, subsequently refined. Worldwide adoption of the foot and mile, then the meter and gram. Division of the world into 24 time zones.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it? Please include what to add and where in the chapter to add it, and any sources.OpenSee All Queries
International prices all plugged into a single worldwide grid.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it? Please include what to add and where in the chapter to add it, and any sources.OpenSee All Queries
Economic application: As debt and property transfers have become irreversible, so has the principle of economic polarization within the world economy and in each national economy.
Periodic renewal ceremony: Only the millennium is left. In 1000 AD millenarianist Christian social movements awaited the resurrection as the Day of Judgment at the end of historical time.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyJudgment Day is discussed in the Key Concepts section of this chapter but is not explicitly mentioned in the chapter body.OpenSee All Queries
Integration of the intellectual and social kosmos: The Enlightenment and its individualism replaced astrology as “queen of the sciences” and theocratic analysis. The result was classical moral philosphy’s offshoot, modern economics.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThese Key Concepts are not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add them? Please include what to add and where in the chapter to add it, and any sources.OpenSee All Queries
Public character: The limited-liability corporation protects individuals from state control under the law of nations.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThe Law of Nations and international law are not mentioned in the chapter body. Can you help us add it there?OpenSee All Queries
International bodies sponsor worldwide uniformity of prices (as well as the metric standard) under free trade, and also the sanctity of world debt—and hence finance-capital—operating via offshore banking enclaves to evade national controls.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it? Please include what to add and where in the chapter to add it, and any sources.OpenSee All Queries
Religious sanctification: Separation of church and state is associated with a conflict between personal self-seeking and social obligation.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it? Please include what to add and where in the chapter to add it, and any sources.OpenSee All Queries
Ultimate dissolution: International economic polarization threatens to become so extreme as to force a new Clean Slate.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it? Please include what to add and where in the chapter to add it, and any sources.OpenSee All Queries
Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973).
Veda Cobb-Stevens, “Opposites, Reversals, and Ambiguities: The Unsettled World of Theognis,” in Thomas J. Figueira and Gregory Nagy (eds.), Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (Baltimore: 1985).
Hermann Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, Moses Hadas and James Willis (trs.) (New York: 1975).Interrelated QueryThis text is cited in a part of the Epilogue chapter omitted and moved into the General Queries page.OpenSee All Queries
Arthur M. Hocart, Kingship (London: 1927).
Arthur M. Hocart, Social Origins (London: 1954).
P.V. Kane, “The Vedic Basis of Hindu Law,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Bombay), 1922–23, pp. 57–82.
Hildegard Lewy, “Marginal Notes on a Recent Volume of Babylonian Mathematical Texts,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 67 (1947), pp. 305–320.Specify CitationWhich of the two Lewy texts was meant?OpenSee All Queries
Hildegard Lewy, “Origin and Development of the Sexagesimal System of Numeration,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 69 (1949), pp. 1–11.Specify CitationWhich of the two Lewy texts was meant?OpenSee All Queries
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (trs.) (London: 1887).
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, S.W. Ryazanskaya (tr.) (1st English ed., Chicago: 1904).
Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Emile Burns (tr.), S. Ryazanskaya (ed.) (English ed., Moscow: 1963).
Gregory Nagy, “Theognis and Megara: A Poet’s Vision of his City,” in Thomas J. Figueira and Gregory Nagy (eds.), Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (Baltimore: 1985).
Plato, Laws. From Plato in Twelve Volumes, R.G. Bury (tr.), Vols. 10 and 11 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1967 and 1968), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project.
Plato, Republic, via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project.
Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (eds.), Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (Glencoe, Illinois: 1957).
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: 1942).
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