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This book was produced by Human Bridges. Michael Hudson has devoted his career to the study of debt.
Introduction
Around 5000 BC populations spread out from the Taurus and Zagros mountain foothills to occupy the semiarid regions and mosquito-ridden swamplands of southern Mesopotamia, as well as the Nile and Indus valleys. Irrigation canals, especially in Sumer, helped achieve unprecedented crop yields, but its rich soils lacked metal ores, stone, hardwood, and other vital materials. Sumer had to produce labor-intensive exports to exchange for these commodities in bulk commerce extending over long distances.
The local food surplus thus was converted into an industrial export surplus produced by a dependent labor force employed by large public institutions. This was civilization’s first organized commercial enterprise, and it was from this centralized hub that subsequent commercial practices diffused westward to the Mediterranean.
From about 3200 BC the major commercial entities were the Sumerian temple (e.gal, literally “big house”) and its Egyptian counterpart (pharaoh, also meaning “big house”), joined after about 2600 BC by the Mesopotamian palace. Dependent labor worked under the direction of administrative officials distributing rations in uniform portions of barley, oil, wool, beer, and other necessities.
Standardized measures were created to administer this large-scale ration-economy, both for its day-to-day coordination and forward-planning. Monthly portions had to be divided into 30 daily servings during the 360-day administrative year. The first measures therefore were calendrical. The “law-giving sky” that determined the public calendar served as a metaphor for the inexorable force of society’s rules and laws—and for the rulers who administered them.
The key requirement for archaic measures was that they be simple enough to allocate large flows of products, labor, rations, and seeds whose value could be roundly converted from monthly to daily units, from bulk to individual measures, and from one commodity to another, e.g., silver to barley units. Early “prices” thus were administered in round numbers with respect both to the calendar and to silver and barley units. For internal account-keeping the silver shekel’s value (used mainly in foreign commerce as “money of the world”) was made equal to that of the gur or “bushel” of barley, although market prices for grain rose in times of crop failure.
A sacred obligation of rulers was to maintain equitable rules and prices, ration-measures, and market weights. However, there were two spheres of law. The laws and official prices of Ur-Nammu and Shulgi (2100 BC), Bilalama (1900 BC), Lipit-Ishtar (1900 BC), and Hammurapi (1750 BC) were limited in scope mainly to the public institutions—the palace and temples—rather than being general “codes” applying to society at large. Public laws were written laws; but much social life on the land continued to be governed by oral common law. It was in the public institutions that regular measured rations were first needed and developed.
These measures were translated into weighed silver units (shekels), and spread via transactions between institutional employers and dependent labor, and between public temple workshops and merchants.
- “Do you know multiplication, reciprocals, coefficients, balancing of accounts, administrative accounting, how to make all kinds of pay allotments, divide property, and delimit shares of fields?” —Babylonian scribal exam, second millennium BC (Sjöberg[1] 1974, p. 167)
Discussions of how weights and measures first developed have been trivialized by “pragmatic” mythologies about the subject. Already in antiquity Herodotus (Histories, Book II: Chapter 109) speculated that land measurement began for a mundane reason. The Nile flooded each year, swelled by the melting snows of the southern mountains, depositing the rich silt which made Egypt’s land so fertile. But sometimes the flooding eroded the land. This required the pharaoh’s tax collectors to make appropriate adjustments in the landowner’s crop obligation. Such measurement, like Egypt’s initial division of the land into equal plots, required geometric surveying techniques.
This view depicts measurement, geometry, and surveying as responses to a pragmatic challenge—the need to mark out landed property. Likewise pragmatic, according to popular wisdom, are the units of measurement. These historically have been based on the dimensions of the human body—the foot and the pace, the handbreadth, cubit, fathom (“reach”), and so forth. The human microcosm thus may serve as a portable measuring rule. As the Greek philosopher Protagoras said, “Man is the measure of all things.” It further seems to be in keeping with the centralized regimes of Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia for rulers to give their own bodily measurements to the scale used by society at large. At least this is what happened in feudal Europe.
Anthropologists have found that there almost always is a combination of forces shaping how traditional societies structure their quantitative relations. Beneath the practical function rests an underlying reflection of the kosmos. Certainly civilization’s earliest rules and measures predate the private property cited by Herodotus. If measures seem at first glance to stem simply from the human body, they also fit together in ways that reflect the calendrical macrocosm.
I. The Semantics and Iconography of Ruling and Taking Measures
If the task of rulers is to rule, and to do this by taking measures, then we should not be surprised that royal symbols invested them with ritual measures to regulate length and volume.
Counting was the first act of ruling. The preceding chapter has described how neolithic chiefs marked off the number of days to elapse until the next new moon, when their communities would come together for the festivals that were their major socializing occasions.[2]
An archaic outgrowth of this calendar-keeping was to create ritualistic physical models of the calendrical kosmos. By the third millennium BC, temples and other cosmological structures were being built as far west as Stonehenge, as far east as the Indus Valley with its “sacrosancta,” and as far south as Egypt with its pyramids and the sed halls where its pharaohs were crowned. These structures typically were oriented to the cardinal directions, to a key rising springtime weather-star such as Sirius, or most often of all to the rising sun on the summer solstice or spring equinox.
Such model-building required careful measurement. In view of the ritualistic context for the first measuring—to build public ritual structures—it seems no mere coincidence that early measures of length reflect basic calendrical proportions.
Whenever we find 12s or 30s there is good reason to suspect that a calendrical paradigm is at work. There are 12 inches in the Roman foot and 12 troy ounces in the pound, just as there are 12 months in a year. And just as the Sumerian administrative month was divided into 30 days, so its “cubit” (kush) had 30 shusi. Thus, even where the individual reference units such as the inch, foot, or cubit appear to reflect parts of the human body, their proportionality tends to be cosmologically determined.
The ritual of aligning and measuring out the communal temple or altar became a basic ceremony of archaic rulership. This chapter of The Creation of Order accordingly begins by discussing these rituals and how the gods themselves were depicted as creating the kosmos by similar such rites.
Southern Mesopotamian rulers had an additional type of measure to administer: the volumetric qu or “liter” of barley rations doled out each month to temple dependents, above all the war orphans and widows. Rulers pledged themselves to protect these public dependents in all their coronation proclamations. The second part of this chapter therefore describes the development of volumetric measures, and why these measures were calendrical, being distributed on a monthly or other regular basis.
In addition to barley, Sumer’s temple and palace administrators had to make monthly and annual tabulations of the wool and oil distributed to dependents and used in the weaving workshops. Also accounted for were the copper and tin cast into bronze implements, while silver and gold were weighed out for sacred objects and their value duly recorded.
Scheduling and coordinating resource flows were facilitated by adopting a general monetary unit of account. In the fourth and early third millennium BC copper served this function, and by the mid-third millennium BC silver had become the money of the world, at least throughout most of the Near East (Müller[3] 1982). However, pieces of raw silver could not readily be measured by volume or length. Although silver pieces might be cut from wire or strips, these still had to be weighed. The development of standardized weights therefore became the third major dimension of Bronze Age measurement systems.
As a result of their primary use within the public sector, measures of volume and weight were overseen by the temples. Each city kept official weights and other standards under sacred protection, and rulers pledged themselves to maintain fair and uniform measures. Furthermore, as a more or less natural outgrowth of directing the monetary economy, Mesopotamian rulers administered prices for the major commodities, above all the barley/silver parity. Also administered were prices for public professional services (e.g., for priests to perform marriage and burial ceremonies) and the price of money itself over time, that is, the rate of interest.
By the end of the third millennium BC, under the Third Dynasty of Ur, the Sumerians had integrated their diverse measures of length, volume, and weight into a single system. This greatly facilitated account-keeping within the large public institutions. Silver weights were denominated in the same proportions as volumetric barley measures, and into this system were plugged the most important prices and interest rates.
These measures were all calendrical: Measures of length were designed first and foremost to measure out temples as physical images of the calendrical kosmos, as noted above. Rations were handed out calendrically, and silver bore interest on a regular calendrical basis. Early in the first millennium BC Near Eastern weights and interest rates diffused to classical Greece and Rome. These new regions were less economically centralized. Having little need for monthly ration-measures, they did not adopt Mesopotamia’s sexagesimal numerical system. The Italians divided time, length, and weight into 12ths, while Egypt and the Aegeans used the rather more abstract decimal system. This shift in the numerical base had major worldly consequences in affecting interest rates. Each region set its rate of interest at the basic unit-fraction: a 60th per month in Mesopotamia, a 12th annually in Italy, and a 10th (dekate) in Greece.
What is so remarkable about these levels is the stability of each region’s interest rate over many centuries. I attribute this to the fact that the rate was set by numerological and cosmological considerations rather than reflecting economic reference points such as profit rates, productivity, and the general capacity of debtors to pay.
Bronze Age rulers solved the problem of interest rates diverging from their “economic” levels in a way so unique that it long eluded the grasp of economic historians. Agrarian debts simply were canceled when they became problematic. This was done as part of the New Year (re)creation of order. This chapter therefore ends up at the same point as The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting, with the New Year festival where Bronze Age rulers proclaimed “straight order” or “equity”—Babylonian “misharum,” Akkadian “andurarum,” and Hebrew “deror,” among other terms. These social measures canceled the debt overhang and thus restored social relations as they were “in the beginning” when the world was first created equitably.
The Linguistic Root ‘Reg’ (‘Regularity,’ ‘Regime,’ ‘Royal,’ Etc.)
Modern languages associate rulership with the ideas of regime, regulation, and regularity, above all in the sense of administering distributive justice. To be sure, royal titles such as “czar” and “kaiser” derive from the family name of Julius Caesar. The word “king” means “head,” alluding to a sequential order—the head of a procession, or perhaps of a table.
Nearly all communities associate the act of ruling—in the sense of proclaiming laws and judging—with that of measuring. This double-sense is inherent in Indo-European words for rulership. Measures are rules, and rules are laws. Rulers rule by taking measures. These notions underlie a broad complex of words associated with the root “reg.” The list includes Hindu “rajah,” English “regent,” and French “roi,” as well as the German word for government, “Regierung,” and hence the land ruled: “Das Reich,” the realm. The English cognate is “region,” and the name “Richard” derives from the same root.
The evolution of this “reg” terminology reflects an abstraction from quantitative rules to more general laws. A figurative usage is thus at work. The idea of ruling—in the sense of saying who should get how much, and how often—was an important step toward establishing regularity in archaic palaces and temples, and in time for society at large. Setting ration levels and prices for the major commodities and public services is what empowered Near Eastern rulers literally to rule. Administering such regularity is what the word “rule” literally meant, along with its related words “regal,” “royal,” and “regime.”
To establish symmetrical economic rules was the principal objective of the social planners who created the earliest measures and price systems. This step having been taken, civilization could proceed to standardize interest rates, land-rents, and contractual rates of return on the capital invested with merchants to finance their trade. Ultimately standardized at the end of this long process were contracts and economic practices such as are regulated in Hammurapi’s laws c. 1750 BC.
How the Gods Measured Out the Kosmos
In mythology the sun-god or other relevant calendar-god laid out the courses of the planets and assigned the stars their proper positions. The book of Job (Chapter 38) expresses this idea eloquently when the Lord speaks out of the whirlwind to ask Job:
- “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? …
- Who marked off its dimensions? …
- Who stretched a measuring line across it?
- On what were its footings set,
- or who laid its cornerstone,
- While the morning stars sang together
- and all the angels shouted for joy?”
Already in the third millennium BC the Sumerian sky-gods Anu and Enlil laid out the universe and established the stations of the planets and their periodicities before fashioning the earth to be the homeland of mankind. The creation epic “Enki and Inanna” describes Enki [“Lord (en) of the earth (ki)”] as proceeding in a similar fashion to lay out the kosmos:
- “He fixed the cords, straightened the footers,
- erected a house at the side of the assembly, guided the lustrations…
- The one whose footers once laid down do not sag,
- whose lasting house once built does not collapse,
- whose vault reaches to mid-sky like a rainbow…
- He fixed the borders, marked them off.”
- —Translation by Kramer and Maier[4] 1989: pp. 51, 53, lines 338–346, 369f.
- …
- “Likewise, Enki’s noble sister, the holy Nidaba,
- got the measuring rod and tied about her arms the lapis measuring line,
- proclaims all the great me (divine decrees),
- fixes the borders, marks off the boundaries,
- is now the scribe of the land.
- Feeding the gods has been put in her hand.”
- —Kramer and Maier[5] 1989: lines 380–385.
Enlil’s forbear Enmesharra endowed the gods Anu and Enlil with rod and ring, that is, the ruling stick and coiled measuring rope (van Buren[6] 1949: p. 434 and Illustrations 3.1 and 3.2). Similarly, the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish (lines 143ff.) describes Marduk as measuring out the dimensions of the Deep (Apsu) and building its counterpart structure, Esharra, as a cosmic model.
Royal Measures and the Iconography of Rulership
It was as a metaphor of laying out the heavens and their calendrical proportions that rulers performed one of their most important rituals: laying out the temple precincts of their cities. These temples were earthly models of time itself, and specifically of the calendrical proportions of the year divided into months and days. It thus was appropriate that in third-millennium BC Sumer the emblems of rulership were the rod and ring. Investiture with these insignia enabled the ruler to lay out the city-temple precinct. This act was primordial because it imitated the creation of the heavens and earth. Out of formlessness arose regular calendrical shapes, analogs of time properly aligned to the calendrical directions.[7]
This served as an analogy for rulers overseeing social order by decreeing rations, prices, and interest rates, proclaiming laws and social measures in general.
Depictions of Mesopotamian investiture rituals show the order-deity presenting the coiled-up measuring rope to the ruler. It looks like a ring as on Ur-Nammu’s stela c. 2100 BC, whose usual interpretation is that the moon-god Nanna is handing Ur-Nammu the rod and ring to enable him to build a temple (Illustration 3.3). The cord’s complement was the measuring rule or “rod.” Ur-Nammu’s contemporary ruler Gudea of Lagash holds a related rule in his lap in his seated statues F and B (now in the Louvre; see Illustration 3.1). That on statue F is ruled to scale, indicating a cubit (kush) of 30 shusi. Statue B’s tablet depicts a walled enclosure with gates, bastions, and towers, the image of the temple he saw in his dream.
The sexagesimal character of Sumerian measures represents the division of time, specifically of the year into months and days. The nindan (“rod”) had 12 kush (“cubits”), each of which in turn had 30 shusi, replicating the 12 x 30 = 360 proportion familiar from the administrative calendar. Likewise sexagesimal were the ush and danna measures:
Table 3.1
Inasmuch as Mesopotamia’s most important architectural constructs were the temples, built as scale models of time, it is not surprising that the conversion factors for the above series (reading down the left column) are 6, 30, 12, 60, and 30. These proportions applied calendrical fractions via sexagesimal arithmetic to spatial measurement (Friberg[8] 1984: p. 113).
The major occasion for using such measures was when rulers acted as delegates of the gods in performing cord-stretching ceremonies to properly lay out the foundations of their city temples in such a way as to reflect the stability of the celestial kosmos. (The term for “survey” in both Sumerian and Egyptian was to “stretch the cord,” evidently a measuring rope of this sort.) Inasmuch as these temples were the ceremonial meeting places par excellence, they gave their character to the entire city. (The Archaic Cosmology of Cities: Building the Kosmos on Earth shows how Mesopotamian temple-founding rituals inspired classical antiquity’s more general city-founding rites.)
The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus describes Egyptian paintings showing “the king or a goddess or a priest spanning a rope and thus determining the direction of the temple-walls. From inscriptions we see that the direction was determined by the stars. In an inscription describing the foundation of the temple at Abydos by Sethos I (1300 BC) the goddess is made to speak to the king thus: ‘You were with me in your function as Rope-Stretcher.’ Still earlier, Thutmose III (1500 BC) is said to have spanned the rope towards the sun-god Amon at the horizon” (Peet[9] 1923: p. 32 cited in van der Waerden[10] 1980: p. 34).
From Mesopotamia the ring and rod can be seen diffusing up the Euphrates. In the investiture ceremony depicted at the Mari palace c. 1800 BC, for instance, Ishtar offers Zimri-Lim these symbols. “About 1,500 years later the same symbolic message is conveyed on a Sasanian rock relief right at Naqsh-i Rustam, when Ardashir I is depicted extending his hand toward the ring which Ahuramazda (in his Sasanian realization) thrusts forward,” noted Margaret Root[11] (1979: p. 173). Describing classical Persian iconography, she added that the ring and rod “seem gradually to have taken on the metaphorical aspect as symbols of the measuring out of justice.”
In India the early Sanskrit vedas or sacred books refer to the word vedi, “earth,” originally in the sense of sacrificial ground—the altar and its temple, whose proportions were reflected those of the world kosmos. The mathematical prehistorian Anthony Seidenberg[12] (1962a: p. 520) concluded that earth-measurement started with the creation of ritual sites as cosmological models. “The whole must be planned accurately in advance. The outlines of the temple were in fact laid out with strings before the walls were begun. The ground plan of a temple, marked out on the bitumen floor by the thin red lines left by a colored string, has actually been found on the summit of the artificial mountain,” the ziggurat at Uruk.
As noted above, these structures typically were oriented to the rising sun, carefully aligned so as not to deviate from straight directionality. This served as a geometric analogy for the rectitude of the ruler’s earthly laws. The fact that the proportions of the temples (and in time, the palaces) reflected the same proportions as the calendar made them models of the calendrical kosmos, and this is what enabled the ruler to emulate the Lord of Heaven in establishing worldly rhythms, apportioning equity and meting out distributive justice. (It is significant that in addition to “stretching the cord” at the New Year ceremony when temple foundations were laid, rulers buried their major proclamations of justice and equity in the walls of these temples.)
Inscriptions by the Lagash ruler Gudea describe the ritual’s details c. 2100 BC:
- “To the house whose halo
- thrusts against heaven,
- whose offices embrace
- heaven and earth…
- did Gudea pace from south
- to north on the fired mound,
- pace from north to south
- on the fired mound,
- laid the measuring cord down
- on what was a true acre [iku],
- put in pegs at its sides,
- verified them himself.
- It was cause of rejoicing
- for him. …
- He placed the brick, paced off
- the house,
- laid the plan of the house,
- (as) a very Nidaba knowing the inmost
- (secrets) of numbers…
- He inspected an omen kid, and his omen
- was propitious,
- on fresh waters he cast grain,
- and its appearance was right. …
- Gudea, the man in charge of building the house,
- placed the basket (with mortar) for the house
- as a holy crown on (his) head,
- laid the foundation, set down the walls thereon,
- gave it a blessing:
- ‘The measuring line flips the bricks!’
- A second blessing he felt moved to give it:
- ‘It is a vine aligning its fruits.’”
- —Cylinder A, verses xv–iixx, tr. Jacobsen[13] 1987: pp. 409–413.
“Flipping the bricks” meant snapping the measuring cord taut against them to make sure they were aligned in a straight manner. This act symbolized the administration of straight rules on all planes. The “fruits” of this correct measurement were justice and equitable rule on earth. Gudea and his fellow rulers thus acted the role of social architects and builders of the kosmos as well as of the temple. The temple-founding ceremony was a ritual demonstration of their moral righteousness as judges and law-givers.
Archaic rulers were supposed to maintain the straight rule of law as embodied in the principles sponsored by the sun-god of justice. They were to direct and correct matters by maintaining social equity. To rule rightly was to properly align social relations, to make things straight, even in the sense of correctly aligning the city and its temples to the four directions to signify the immutable rules—righteousness and rectitude, equity, and justice.
To the extent that the Bronze Age measures of length used to measure ziggurats and other sacred monuments referred to the human body, it was the product of a tendency to attempt a merger of a human measure into the calendrical macrocosm. Bodily proportions were schematized in the canons of sculpture and pictorial art. There certainly is no indication of rulers giving their own bodily measurements to the system. Had this been the case, archaeologists would find that measures of length varied from one ruler to the next. But they do not. Rather, plastic portrayals of rulers regressed them onto a cosmologically based model.
The uniformity of measures is found most strikingly in what was the largest Bronze Age civilization of all, that of the Indus Valley. Archaeologists found a remarkable standardization of brick sizes over a million and a half square miles for nearly a millennium. So continuous a tradition must have had a cosmological grounding to maintain its uniformity.
Only as the Indus and other Bronze Age civilizations broke down do we find a plethora of local measures emerging. “The later millennia witnessed a chaos of systems of weights and measures,” wrote Mainkar[14] (1984: p. 141) of the Indus Valley; “they varied from place to place, market to market and even from commodity to commodity.” This localist devolution represented a breaking away from centralized control and the across-the-board cosmology that went with it. The breakdown gave broader leeway to local big-men to make their own measures.
To sum up, spatial measures were based on 12ths, 30ths, and 60ths (or 18ths and 36ths) long before they were decimalized. And just as early number systems reflected the kinds of things being counted (originally time), so measures reflected the kinds of things being constructed—models of time. The fact that there are 12 inches rather than 10 “toes” to the Roman-modern foot indicates that instead of being either body-based or mathematically abstract from the beginning, measures of length initially were used to measure out architectural models of the calendrical kosmos.
Where we indeed find a primary reference to the human body is in measures of volume based on dietary allocations of barley to the public dependents supported in the temple workshops and palaces. Yet these volumetric measures also have a calendrical character, being distributed on a regular monthly basis to be consumed daily or twice daily, that is, in 30ths or 60ths of the monthly allotment. And it is significant that at the New Year ritual where the ruler measured out the temple precincts and aligned its walls, he also pledged himself to care for the orphan and the widow. This meant above all stipulating what their food rations should be.
In tracing the evolution of these measures it is appropriate to begin by describing the economic functions of Sumerian temples. Just as these were the first Mesopotamian structures to be measured out, so their dependents were the first to receive regular rations. Distributing such rations called for standardized measures—the daily serving unit and its monthly total. In time, silver came to be weighed out as a monetary equivalence to the value of barley and other essentials. This enabled public administrators to strike overall totals in terms of a common denominator of value. Silver by weight and barley by volume were co-measured economically, creating the basis for a money and price system.
It was for quite practical reasons that measures and weights—and ultimately prices and interest rates—retained a calendrical plane of reference as what had begun as a celestial cosmology became a worldly flowering. As the centuries passed, the laws and rulings that rulers buried in the temple foundations were extended to set prices and interest rates. This reflected the primordial role of rulers in maintaining an even social balance, and minimizing sources of crookedness and disorder, literally and figuratively.
II. Development of Measures, Weights, and Prices in Mesopotamia’s Temples and Palaces
The need to develop standardized measures and weights was more pressing in southern Mesopotamia than anywhere else in the Bronze Age world. The primary motivation was commercial: As the most resource-dependent region of its day, Sumer needed to produce exports to trade for foreign metal, stone, and hardwood. This export production was organized in the first instance by the temples. As public-support institutions, they were endowed with labor—that of dependent war orphans and widows, the blind and infirm, and other public wards whose disabilities or bad fortune (e.g., losing their husbands or fathers in war) prevented them from making a go of things on the land. (The details are reviewed in Gelb 1965,[15] 1972,[16] and 1982.[17]) As public dependents they received standardized rations in the form of food, sesame oil, and wool.
Sumerian temples were created as civilization’s first entrepreneurial corporations on record. Here, I will focus on discussing their role in elaborating weights and measures into an overall managerial system. For it was first in Mesopotamia’s temples—and after 2600 BC the palaces—that the earliest accounting systems and their associated measures and weights were developed, as well as the first writing, the formalities of contracts, land-rent, and interest-bearing debt.
Upon reflection it should not be surprising that this flowering first occurred in large public institutions, for it is axiomatic that such institutions tend to develop standardized procedures to feed and otherwise support their staffs. Private family estates and household businesses have always been relatively informal. But when large numbers of public dependents are brought together, whether for welfare-type activities or as parts of an army, there is a strong pressure to begin standardizing things.
The Sumerian temples were the largest economic entities of the fourth and third millennia BC, and were followed by the palaces in the second millennium BC. To build up their handicraft industry they developed management and scheduling techniques to distribute rations to their dependent labor, and raw materials to their workshops. Administrators also used such planning to assign work quotas to dig canals, build monuments, and undertake other public enterprises.
These large public institutions consigned exports to merchants for trade at a profit. This is how Sumer obtained the raw materials which it needed to make use of the Bronze Age technology, as well as prestige products such as lapis lazuli and carnelian from Afghanistan, and other luxury goods used mainly by the public institutions to reinforce their status and authority. In pursuit of this commerce, what southern Mesopotamia had in abundance was labor and fertile land, and also water. The most centralized land was irrigated, while outlying areas were stocked with large herds of goats and sheep whose wool was spun into textiles by an increasingly specialized labor force. This handicraft labor was supported by rations distributed regularly and uniformly. To coordinate internal flows of food and raw materials, temples developed standardized measures. They produced and distributed crops and handicraft manufactures such as textiles in standardized lots, evaluated in prices which in time came to be denominated in silver. Via foreign trade and colonization these prices and related commercial practices diffused to a broad periphery.
All these activities had to be planned and budgeted for. This task fell to officials whose administration was checked by internal controls and royal oversight against inefficiency or outright theft, especially with regard to the storage facilities set up to supply inventories in times of shortfall. Only after the large institutions had put this administrative system in place could a transition be made to market reference points set by fluctuating supply and demand. Before such a market system could be created, basic measures and units of account—indeed, money values and prices—were administered centrally.
This administrative responsibility was part and parcel of ruling. Prior to about 2600 BC, Mesopotamian rulers were temple en administrators (Nissen 1988: pp. 140ff., Diakonoff 1991 and 1983,[18] and Hallo[19] 1957). As palace ensis and lugals took over many of the traditional obligations of these temple ens, they retained many of their traditional functions, above all that of pledging to “care for the orphan and the widow,” that is, to determine how much barley and other rations should be handed out to these temple and palace dependents. (We first find this attested by the Lagash ruler Urukagina at his coronation in the 24th millennium BC, promising to increase the rations to public wards. See La 9.1 in SARI: pp. 72f.)
Volumetric Ration-Measures, and Why They Were Calendrical
Volumetric measures are attested by the middle of the fourth millennium BC, that is, more than five thousand years ago. The rudimentary measure was the beveled-rim bowl used to distribute barley rations. Archaeologists have called these coarse clay utensils the ugliest artifacts of their day (Illustration 3.4). Stamped out in bulk molds rather than turned on potters’ wheels, they “are characterized by the very poor quality of the material used and in the sloppiness of production” (Nissen[20] 1988b: p. 123). “The majority have roughly the same capacity, and the over-tempered clay does not hold any liquids longer than a few minutes.” They therefore must have held dry matter. Nissen[21] inferred (1988a: p. 84) that “cheap and rapid mass production of millions of bowls of uniform size suitable only for use as containers for solid matter” implies centralized organization. (Not all archaeologists agree. See Beale[22] 1978 and Nicholas[23] 1987.) Around 3000 BC new mass-produced containers appeared: conical cups having “roughly the same capacity as the beveled rim bowl.” These are found in similar numbers and are “now made on the wheel, apparently to measure out the daily ration.”
Dependent labor had to be fed regularly. Its ration-measures therefore were calendrical. Throughout Mesopotamian history public dependents are documented receiving 30 units of barley per month. From the late fourth millennium BC through Babylonian times in the second millennium BC we find the ratios 1:30:300, apparently referring to the rations needed to feed 10 men for a month. The relevant Sumerian measures are 1 gur = 300 sila = 30 ban, and in Babylonia, 1 kurru = 300 qu = 30 sutu. The development of these calendrical measures enabled monthly allotments to be handed out to dependents to keep and consume daily in their own living quarters.
The French cuneiformist Maurice Lambert[24] (1963: p. 83) explained the system’s rationale:
- “When the scribe calculates the monthly barley payments—whether to feed animals or pay workers—he began by calculating a daily total. This was actually his only real calculation, for inasmuch as there are 300 sila in a gur, and 30 days in a month, the figure for the monthly expense follows automatically, at least for anyone who knows how to divide by 10. For example, a daily outlay of 250 sila occasions a monthly expense of 25 gur; a daily outlay of 185 sila works out to a monthly expense of 18 1/2 gur, that is, 18 gur 150.”
These standard rations applied to free dependents, who were ranked according to sex, age (adult or children), and social status. “The qû was chosen as the basic unit of capacity because it equaled the amount of grain eaten by an average man in a day; the simdu of 30 qû, in turn, was made the second and larger unit because it represented the quantity of grain eaten by a man in the larger unit of time, the month” (Lewy[25] 1949: pp. 6ff.). Accountants calculated labor costs in terms of subsistence rations specified for various types of labor. Adult males received full rations, women and slaves half-rations, and children half or third rations, depending on their age, being allotted either 20, or 14, or 10 qu. Slaves received half-rations. On balance, the number 60 is implicit for “free” labor from southern Mesopotamia to upstream Nuzi where “1 simdu, or 30 qu, of grain per month was considered the ration for slaves.”[26]
The basic barley measure was the gur, which was divided into 30 ban, with 10 sila making 1 ban (for a total of 300 sila). The daily allocation to male workers was 5 sila. The size of the barley allotment might vary from one regime to the next and from one region to the next, but the characteristic divisibility by 30 or 60 remained a constant.
Throughout history, pointed out Lewy[27] (1949), grain, oil, milk, butter, fruit, spices, and most other staple foods have not been weighed, but measured in volumetric units, much as modern farmers sell vegetables by the bushel: “As in the archaic Babylonian texts weights do actually not occur (in a primitive society, all the necessities of daily life are determined either by measures of capacity or by other criteria).”[28]
These product flows were not yet evaluated in terms of common monetary copper or silver prices, but what was being organized was forward-planning. The new regularized procedures were much more than merely a system of checks on the honesty of administrators (which is all we find, for instance, in Linear B Mycenaean records and those of other peripheral Late Bronze Age economies). What the Sumerians developed was nothing less than a labor-time theory of value.[29]
The Rationalization of Managerial Techniques
The development of Sumerian account-keeping can be traced century by century, with each major regime making important innovations. The earliest records come from Uruk c. 3000 BC, but are so terse as to be little more than aides-mémoire, and remain for the most part undecipherable. The refinement of techniques usually is dated from about 2600 BC with the founding of a major scribal school at Fara (Shuruppak, the town credited in myth as having survived the Deluge). It is here that archaeologists have found the earliest lists of professions, and even cuneiform vocabulary lists of the terms taught to temple and palace scribes.
The first Fara records, listing daily deposits and withdrawals of food and other materials from temple stores, are cumbersome by subsequent standards. No common measure of value yet existed to price goods and services, remunerate labor, rent out lands, or charge interest. Temples and palaces still functioned on an “in-kind” basis. They paid their dependent labor in a standardized monthly allocation of goods, not in a monetary commodity such as copper or silver which then could be spent on buying a “market basket.”
Account-keeping was greatly elaborated in the city of Lagash in the southeastern corner of Sumer. This city rose to power between 2500 BC and 2365 BC under a dynasty founded by Ur-Nanshe. Around 2365 BC his dynasty was unseated by the temple priesthood of Ningirsu. The first new ruler was a temple administrator (sanga) named Enentarzi, and the Ningirsu temple also sponsored his son Lugalanda and the reformer Urukagina. It was under these three rulers that the techniques of public administration took a quantum leap. “In the space of only twenty years,” described Lambert (1960[30]: p. 17, 1961[31]), “the bureaucracy is astonishingly amplified.” Lagash entered “an age of memoranda” replete with notes, resumes, classifications, registers, and dates recording the economic activities of its temples and palaces as a comprehensive integrated regime, a veritable dirigisme.
The major innovator was an administrative director named Enikgal,[32] who served for 15 years as nubanda, a relatively new bureaucratic position. (Since the earliest times, Near Eastern rulers have come and gone, but the same administrator has tended to stay on.) Under his direction, bureaucracy became a managerial science. “From Enentarzi to Urukagina,” wrote Lambert, “the administrative bureaus are born. Archives have been created, and perhaps even statistics. The rule of Urukagina will be the crowning achievement of this enormous work, the triumph of a bureaucracy that will never lack for paperwork (if we can use that expression for writing in clay).”
Classification systems were invented for all aspects of its public life. Subtotals, totals, and grand totals were struck, and increasingly detailed date notations were introduced. Indeed, the standardizing and regularizing of economic accounts played a key role in standardizing calendars. Prior to the 24th century BC, Sumerian month-names varied from one town to the next, and even from one decade to another. But henceforth they were established in a definite sequence.
Thanks to Lagash’s large supply of dependent labor, its weaving workshops stood in the forefront of Mesopotamian industrial development. Built up under Enentarzi, the textile industry expanded significantly under Lugalanda and even more under Urukagina. The Soviet Assyriologist Alexander Tyumanev[33] (1969: p. 112) calculated that for Lagash’s Bau temple during these years, “more than half the women slaves were engaged in preparing and spinning wool (about 55 percent). The rest… were used partly for grinding grain, kitchen work, in the brewery, and lastly, for tending pigs and goats.” Raw material was supplied by sheep owned by the temples, by freemen at large, and most of all by the palace, which enjoyed a monopoly on shearing white sheep. Much of the output was exported to neighboring Umma, Uruk, Adab, and Nippur (Lambert 1961,[34] 1966[35]: p. 34, and 1953[36]: pp. 58ff.).
This industrial flowering was coordinated by temple administrators who elevated account-keeping to a tool for forward-planning. Their managerial efficiency enabled Lagash to vie with Uruk, Ur, and Umma to dominate southern Mesopotamia. The Lagash temples and palace were merged into an integrated administrative system, with the palace gaining effective control.
No doubt Enentarzi and Lugalanda thought of themselves as serving sacred duty while consolidating their rule, but secular concerns certainly were becoming more important. Warfare was becoming more total, consuming more resources and obliging cities to increase their economic surplus. Greater centralization of authority was accompanied by an intensified exploitation of labor. Over time the size of the qu measure changed. Rations were ground down to minimum subsistence levels as temple administration was “rationalized.”
This hardly should be surprising, for a byproduct of production planning historically has been an attempt to increase the economic surplus. In fact, what ensued was a Bronze Age version of Taylorism, that is, scientific management to maximize output and minimize costs. And just as in modern times, these cutbacks caused resentment. Lugalanda was replaced by Urukagina, perhaps in preparation for the coming war with neighboring Umma.
Establishing the Silver/Barley Equivalency to Create a Bimonetary Standard
Money makes exchange relatively easy in today’s world. People are paid at a wide range of rates and spend their money wages, rents, and profits on food, clothes, and luxuries, whose prices vary flexibly in response to shifting supply and demand.
The common denominator of money took many centuries to emerge, as did the price-responsive behavior of markets. The breakthrough to a money economy was initiated by establishing weighed pieces of silver (and thousands of years later, coinage) as a simplifying abstraction. And as this practice spread, measures of weight were established alongside volumetric measures. Indeed, public accountants designed their barley measures and silver weights so as to dovetail neatly with one another in an overall system. What were weighed primarily were the monetary metals—the silver and gold employed in foreign commerce, and to a lesser extent, tin and copper.
Modern economists have spent three centuries discussing the problem of how to establish a standard of value. William Petty (17th century AD), Adam Smith (18th century AD), David Ricardo, and Thomas Robert Malthus, followed by John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx in the 19th century AD, sought to derive a stable measure of value in order to calculate how industrial and agricultural commodities, labor, and capital exchanged for money. An early attempt along these lines was to deflate grain prices so as to look beneath the veil of fluctuating money wages to estimate “real” wages, that is, physical consumption standards. Food prices were used as a proxy to deflate money wages in general, to derive an index for the underlying standard of living and hence the “real” cost of producing goods, evaluated in terms of the labor-time and cost-of-living embodied in them (appropriately adjusted for differences in the quality and cost of various grades of this labor).
Bronze Age economic planners simply paid labor “in kind,” in direct allotments of barley, sesame oil, wool, beer, and a few other basics. However, for the city-temple’s overall economic planner these rations-in-kind posed an administrative problem of how to deal with disparate categories of products—with silver and copper, land-rent, and seed-grain in a single account. How could one strike single “totals” to indicate monthly and annual magnitudes?
At first the large public institutions functioned mainly on a barley standard, at least for their internal bookkeeping: “Treasurers, bureaucrats, foremen in a general fashion all employ public workers and know only barley” in computing rations and other outlays and revenues, noted (Lambert[37] 1963: p. 84). The term “barley” in these accounts is thus used in a similar sense to the modern French term “argent,” whose meaning has been generalized from “silver” to signify money in general.
Whereas third-millennium BC temples had kept their accounts in barley, this monetary role subsequently was taken over by silver. Paul Koschaker[38] (1942) was one of the first to show that references to silver in the temple and palace texts did not actually involve buying and selling for silver at all, but merely valued in-house resource flows in terms of their book-value silver prices. Indeed, to the extent that silver circulated domestically, its sums usually were small, ranging from 1 to 5 shekels, save for dealings among merchants or high officials.
Reviewing early Mesopotamian ledgers and prices, Daniel Snell[39] (1982: p. 182) rejected the term “equivalency” in favor of “the modern category of bulk price.” This is essentially what mining companies call producer’s price or contract price for their long-term customers. The Bronze Age version was an accounting practice that the large public institutions used for their internal bookkeeping. These book-prices tended to remain stable even though warfare, droughts, and floods led supply and demand to vary from year to year.
Such stability could be maintained largely because most output never came to market. The prices were used to assign values for goods produced by the temples and palaces for their own internal use. Snell[40] found that “the Sumerian word for [market] price, ganba = mahiru, occurs nowhere in the silver accounts. The normal expression in them is kubi - ‘its silver value,’ referring to the total price of a stated amount of a commodity.”
If the first price to be fixed was that of money—silver with respect to barley—the prices of other products tended to be expressed as ratios relative to barley, silver, gold, copper, tin, or other monetary commodities. These prices typically were set in round multiples which made it relatively easy to compute and assign values to the flow of resources through temple and palace workshops. In The Birth of Civilization in the Near East[41] (1968: p. 63), Henri Frankfort explained why such simplifying practices were imperative for temple and palace account-keeping: These accounts recorded a continual intake of all kinds of goods, and the outflow of similarly varied stores, in the form of rations, sacrifices, materials for repairs, goods for trade, and so on—which were not reduced to a common standard of value:
- “It would have been impossible to budget from month to month and from year to year unless the book-keeping had been adapted to a somewhat simple scheme with fixed ratios prevailing throughout. The schematic character of the temple accounts can be seen in the… instance [of]… the fodder for the sowing oxen… [being] precisely the same quantity as that used for seed. The span used to break the ground received precisely twice the amount allotted to the span following after with the seed funnel. Similar simple ratios were used for valuations: one gur of barley was reckoned equivalent for one gin of silver; one gur of barley was likewise charged as rent for one gan of land. It is obvious that such equations reduced the innumerable calculations of the temple book-keeping to manageable proportions. … [O]n the whole, the organization of the temple economy aimed at simplicity rather than efficiency.”[42]
While prices were free to vary for the barley sold by private families to the public institutions, temple and palace account-keeping continued to operate on the basis of book-prices. Under “normal” conditions market-prices followed their lead. In any case, once being set, prices tended to remain fixed by custom, often for centuries at a time, at least for basic public sector goods and services.
To sum up, the synthesis of price relations culminating in the silver standard took many centuries to develop. Prior to the fourth millennium BC, merchants and traveling agents dealt in many disparate commodities—fleeces and hides, textiles and copper—without using a common denominator. By the end of the third millennium BC silver had emerged as the money of the world, with public institutions rendering their barley “subsistence” accounts in silver values. The silver shekel served as the basic unit of this monetary system, and by the Late Bronze Age it was spread by merchants from southern Mesopotamia upward (northwest) along the Euphrates to the Phoenician shore of the Mediterranean, and across the Aegean to Mycenaean Greece. But such abstractions are quantum leaps, realized only at the end of a long development process.
The Ur III Synthesis
The great synthesis of administrative techniques and their associated standardization of measures was achieved in the final century of the third millennium BC, 2112–2004 BC, under the Third Dynasty of Ur. Its rulers, beginning with Ur-Nammu and Shulgi, rationalized the economy so tightly that most historians call it a despotic regime. It is not surprising that this centralized economy developed the ancient world’s most thoroughly integrated system of measures and prices.
The administrative techniques that culminated in Ur III did not emerge full-blown, of course. One can trace a steady tendency toward more comprehensive integration and uniform standards from Fara a half-millennium earlier. I do not want to oversimplify the process by implying that there was only one “natural” way to refine account-keeping, measures, and prices. The important point is that the economy was systematized in a holistic way, so that every part dovetailed into a single overview. The resulting synthesis might be called a “general field theory” of public regulation.
The Ur III economy may best be thought of as comprising a subsistence sector on the land, whose families used mainly barley, and a commercial public sector and its associated damgar merchants keeping their accounts in silver, which had become the “money of the world” throughout the Near East. The rural economy accrued barley-debts at 33 1/3 percent interest, the typical sharecropping rate on palace and temple lands. Merchants denominated their debts in silver, and these typically bore interest at 20 percent.
Here for the first time is found a fixed parity between silver and barley (and other prices). This parity enabled Ur III planners to keep accounts simultaneously in silver and barley by establishing a shekel whose weight was equal in value to the gur of barley.[43] Inasmuch as the gur was divisible into 60 units of 5 sila each, so the shekel was divisible into 60 grains (she, meaning grain).
This produced the following barley/silver equivalencies:
Table 3.2
| Barley/Silver Equivalencies
|
| Barley
|
Silver
|
| 5 sila
|
1 grain (she)
|
| 1 gur (= 300 sila)
|
1 shekel (= 60 grains or 60 gur)
|
| 1 mina (= 60 shekels)
|
|
| 1 “silo-full”
|
1 talent
|
These sexagesimal measures must have derived initially from barley, for this was the major commodity consumed on a 30-day monthly basis. The motive for this parallelism evidently was to facilitate domestic account-keeping, for foreign trade had little need to make such calendrical divisions.
The tendency of pricing and market structures for centralized economic regimes always has been toward simplification and across-the-board integration. By the Ur III period we find the measurement systems of barley rations, silver shekels, and even land areas all integrated in round numbers, capped by the co-measurability of barley and silver. Spatial terms also were integrated into this system: The “acre” measure of land—the Sumerian iku, Babylonian qu—was established as the area that could be seeded by 30 qu of grain. (In upstream Nuzi the rate was 1 simdu of grain per imeru of land.) “The area of a field can easily be determined by measuring the amount of grain with which it is seeded, provided a certain ratio between seed-grain and area is generally agreed upon,” noted Lewy[44] (1949: p. 4). Land area thus was related to seed requirements, while crops were measured in terms of the consumption needs for various statuses of public workers and dependents.
The parity between barley and silver was maintained for over a millennium. So central was it for pricing goods and services, fines and contributions, that it was inscribed in the laws of Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi and subsequent rulers through Hammurapi.
The above facts suggest an axiom comparable to that established in The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting: Just as early measuring systems depended on what was being counted (beginning with calendrical time) rather than on the counters (e.g., the 10 fingers), so the fractional proportions that constitute any system of measures or weights depend on the rate of use to which the things being measured, e.g., barley rations distributed on a 30-day monthly basis, volumetric units of measurement preceded money weights and determined their sexagesimal calendrical denominations.
The same principle applies to early Mesopotamian prices: Public regulation developed as a natural outgrowth of setting rations and their associated measures and weights. By the end of the third millennium BC these prices were inscribed in public laws. And for computational ease by public administrators, they were set in round numbers.
A long list of palace prices is attested from the city-state of Ebla in northern Syria c. 2400 BC:
Table 3.3
| Silver-Shekel Prices of Major Ebla Products, c. 2400 BC*
|
| Product 1 Shekel Would Buy:
|
Product
|
Cost in Silver Shekels
|
|
|
1 tin shekel
|
2/3 shekel
|
| 1 1/2 tin shekels
|
|
1 shekel
|
|
|
1 copper shekel
|
1/50th shekel
|
| 50 copper shekels
|
|
1 shekel
|
|
|
1 ox
|
30 shekels
|
| 1/30th of an ox
|
|
1 shekel
|
| 1 animal skin
|
|
1 shekel
|
|
|
1 “long” fig
|
1/3 shekel
|
| 3 “long” fig clusters
|
|
1 shekel
|
| 1 measure of top-grade wool
|
|
1 shekel
|
| 1 measure of low-grade linen
|
|
1 shekel
|
|
|
1 measure of excellent-grade linen
|
3 shekels
|
| 1/3 measure of excellent-grade linen
|
|
1 shekel
|
|
|
1 bronze lance
|
10 shekels
|
| 1/10th of a lance
|
|
1 shekel
|
|
|
1 bronze razor
|
1/2 shekel
|
| 2 razors
|
|
1 shekel
|
|
|
|
|
| *Source: G. Pettinato, The Archives of Ebla (New York: 1981: pp. 198f.).
|
It is evident that certain key commodities were set in a parity with the silver shekel, e.g., a hide, top-grade wool, and low-grade linen. Other prices were set in round multiples: a shekel of tin cost 2/3 of a silver shekel (a round number in the sexagesimal system). A bronze razor cost half a shekel. Copper was priced at 50:1, while an ox was priced at 30 shekels. A long fig cluster cost 1/3 of a shekel (again a round number).
In southern Mesopotamia we find more price variation, probably in large part because so many more types of documentation survive—merchants’ letters and archives as well as palace and temple accounts. Snell[45] (1982: p. 191) pointed out that Ur III prices varied even for products supplied by the public institutions, including prices for such basic commodities as barley, dates, and textiles. He concluded that the palace and temples did not seek to control prices in general, but simply used formal accounting prices for internal record-keeping and planning. In any event the Ur III accounts which he examined showed an average of seven prices per product (“913 prices for 131 products”).
Royal Regulation of Prices, and Their Stability Over Time
As described above, the key price ratio to be fixed during 2500–1600 BC (that is, in the Early and Middle Bronze Age) was that of silver to barley. Accounting prices for animal hides, figs, wool and linen, copper, and other major commodities were plugged into the price of silver in more or less round multiples.[46]
Official prices for major public services and commodities were inscribed by the Ur III ruler Shulgi c. 2100 BC, Bilalama of Eshnunna c. 1900 BC (setting the barley/silver price at 1 kor per silver shekel), and Hammurapi c. 1750 BC. The prologue and beginning of the laws of Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi are broken off from the surviving tablet, but they probably started like those of Bilalama of Eshnunna two centuries later, by establishing a parity between barley and silver. Lines 143–149 reported that Ur-Nammu “fashioned the bronze sila-measure, he standardized the one-mina weight, and standardized the stone-weight of a shekel of silver in relation to one mina” (ANET II: p. 32). The spirit of this tradition may be traced back to Urukagina c. 2372 BC. His “reform text” set the fees that priests could charge for officiating at birth and marriage ceremonies and burials.
Paragraph 89 of Hammurapi’s laws made a gur of barley equivalent in value to a silver shekel. This played an important role in maintaining orderly economic relations, for in addition to simplifying account-keeping, it saved agrarian debtors who lacked silver from forfeiting their pledges. It meant that barley could be used to pay loans originally denominated in silver.
Numerous Sumerian weights have been recovered from archaeological contexts in the temple and palace precincts beginning around the middle of the third millennium BC. These weights typically are in the shape of ducks or other animals (Illustration 3.5), in contrast to the Indus Valley “Harappan” weights in the shape of abstract cubes, truncated spheroids, or kidney-shapes.
One consequence of carving beautiful animal shapes was to make them hard to alter. Any attempt to make them lighter (or heavier) would be visible. To be sure, this anticounterfeiting measure was taken long before coinage developed. What was being prevented was false weights, not false silver or other money.
Presumably the Harappan cubes or truncated spheroids could be shaved to be made lighter for lending or paying out commodities, and then switched with heavier weights for buying products or collecting debts. (The attempt to deter counterfeit weights also would explain why archaic weights were made of relatively hard materials, such as the chert and agate used in the Indus. See Mainkur[47] 1984: p. 149.)
Turning to early public laws, these rulings are not dos and don’ts. They are not anything like the Ten Commandments, nor are they moralizing “wisdom literature.” They are essentially schedules of prices for public services and goods, fees and money fines, and the proper value of offerings. An important extension of setting equitable prices was to ensure fair conditions for buying and selling, lending and collecting debts, contractual formalities, and related aspects of the economic environment.
Archaeologists can trace how the practices innovated by Sumerian rulers spread throughout the Bronze Age Near East as far west as Mycenaean Greece. The first common practice was to fix the most important prices, usually in the round proportions noted above. Once established, these prices tended to remain stable over time. One of the most universal price ratios is the 2:1 rate between bread-wheat and barley for over a millennium, from Ur III to Mycenaean Greece. (Palmer[48] 1963: pp. 114f. noted that in Knossos and Pylos figs and wheat were valued equally, and both were twice the barley value.) Assyriologists have attributed the stability in these proportions to a presumably universal recognition that wheat has twice as high a food value as barley per serving. (Although taste also may have played a role, it may be anachronistic to believe that temple managers cared much about the preferences of their wards.) In any event the stability of public “book prices,” as well as their round proportions, indicates that they did not reflect changes in costs or in supply and demand. Numerical simplicity evidently was often a more important criterion than “economic” pricing.
Also uniform over long expanses of time and space were the proportions of rations distributed to men, women, slaves, and children. Palmer[49] found for Mycenaean Greece the proportions 5:2:1 (with smaller children receiving 1/2), recalling measures familiar from Nuzi, “where the man–boy ratio is 6:1 and the woman’s allocation was only twice that of a child, not even daughters of the royal house rising above the level of a slave’s, which was three times the child’s ration and half the free man’s allocation.” (See also Chadwick[50] 1972: p. 228.)
What guaranteed trading profits even for public-sector merchants was the fact that each city had its own set of prices. The ratios between silver and other metals—gold, tin, and copper—were different for each major city, apparently reflecting proximity to the major mines or trade routes. This local variation in official prices afforded profitable trade opportunities for “arbitraging,” and this also was the case for handicraft production. The result was that even though the natural setting for southern Mesopotamian towns was pretty much the same—or as economists would put it, their “endowments” were similar—specialization occurred, with each city concentrating on some particular industry (textiles, perfumes, metalworking, etc.). Prices for these goods were assigned so as to provide the basis for an intra-Sumerian trade.
Within the context of these official schedules, prices had leeway to vary in the karum areas. It was here that the damgars—men of the quay—transacted their business, dealing for their own account as well as for the temples and palaces that originally sponsored their enterprise. The important point is that prices were free to vary for the relatively small portion of output which passed through the market. (For instance, most of the barley that was sold was produced by members of the communal private sector for sale to the palace.)
But it is the round numbers found for the most basic commodity prices that provide a key to Mesopotamia’s system of weights and measures. The sexagesimal ratios are calendrical in character. The Ebla standard in northern Syria was based on division by 50 (Archi[51] 1987), suggesting a decimalized frame of reference. This numerological feature may help explain the 50:1 price ratio between silver and copper. The Indus-Dilmun standard followed yet a different system. The Mycenaean talent was divided into units of 30 and 120 (Chadwick[52] 1972: p. 228), suggesting a monthly administrative calendar related to the 360-day civil year of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Mycenaean system of dry measures for wheat was sexagesimal: 1 x 10 x 60, while wet measures also may have reflected a 360-day year: 1 x 3 x 6 (= 18), x 4 = 72, a fifth of the year.
Volumetric measures were made compatible with silver, copper, or tin weights, and the setting of monetary weights ultimately would lead toward coinage. From the mid-third millennium BC, Mesopotamian prices were denominated in raw silver. This forced reliance on scales to weigh out the pieces of silver. Powell (1977) noted that the Middle Babylonian word for 1/8 shekel, bitqu (literally “cutting”), suggests silver rings and coils, and may originally have denoted “a piece of standard size cut off from such a silver coil.”
Recourse to scales provided merchants with opportunities to use false weights. It was in large part to save the effort and risk of weighing that preweighed coinage was introduced. (Coins may be thought of as officially “sealed” weights of precious metal.) This was a comparatively late development, not attested before the seventh century BC. (However, Balmuth 1967[53] and 1971[54] may have located second-millennium BC Near Eastern antecedents.)
So we are brought back to the semantics of the root “reg.” Coinage and the authority to oversee just weights led antiquity’s city-states to issue their own coinage, if only to show that they had authority to promote “just measures.” And just as Mesopotamian weights typically were made into animal shapes, so the classical coinages often featured animals engraved with animals as local emblems: the Aegean turtles, and most famous of all, the Athenian owls.
Most of classical antiquity’s early trade was with the Near East. It therefore is not surprising that Greek and Italian cities adopted Near Eastern measures along with arithmetic and alphabetic writing, as well as numerous commercial contract practices first innovated by the temples, palaces, and their merchants (Hudson 1991). To the extent that fractional denominations were established as part of the Near Eastern silver standard, they were adopted as they stood. But the classical economies had little need to develop centralized calendrical ration-measures, and hence were freer to develop a decimalized numerical system. Among the commercial innovations brought to the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians and Syrians was the practice of charging interest. As in the case of prices, interest rates were set in round numbers easy to compute in the local fractional measures and weights. However, the fractional systems of Greece and Italy were different from those of Mesopotamia, and here lies an interesting tale.
An Excursus on Interest Rates
Official interest-rate levels were inscribed in stone and set at 20 percent (12/60) annually in the laws of Bilalama c. 1900 BC (para. 18A21 in ANET: pp. 134f.) and by Hammurapi c. 1750 BC (para. 88f., ANET: pp. 148f.) down from the 33 1/3 percent (20/60) level where they had stood in the Ur III period. These rates remained stable for many centuries. Hence, as noted above, we are not dealing with market pricing based on shifting supply and demand conditions.
An important hint as to what was going on comes from the terminology used for capital and interest. In keeping with the standardization of economic relations that occurred toward the end of the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia, it is in the Ur III economy that one first encounters the metaphoric terms for capital and interest based on the idea of “birth.” The cuneiform word for principal or capital, “sag.nig.ga.ra,” derived, like the subsequent Latin “caput,” from “sag” (head, e.g., of livestock) and “nig.ga.ra” (genitive of “goods, properties”).
The Ur III term for interest was “mash.” The word meant “birth,” specifically of a kid-goat. Only in Ur III did it take on the meaning of “interest” (Steinkeller[55] 1981). And once having been struck, the analogy was followed throughout antiquity.
Many economic historians have interpreted this terminology quite literally—albeit anachronistically—to mean that livestock were borrowed, and used as a medium of exchange. But a closer examination shows that a numerological metaphor was at work.
Birth Metaphors for the Generation of Fractions and Interest
The price of money takes two forms. First is the rate at which the monetary commodity (silver or other metal) exchanges for barley and other goods. Second is the price of money vis-à-vis time, that is, the rate of interest. Inasmuch as archaic rulers were responsible for setting fair measures, and also for economic growth, they also were charged with setting the rate at which silver-money reproduced itself through accruals of interest. Indeed, interest rates were one of the most important prices to be set by Bronze Age rulers. They determined the rate at which obligations accrued to the public institutions that advanced workshop products and silver to damgar merchant-officials to exchange for the imports needed by southern Mesopotamia. Later, interest was charged to cultivators on the land for their barley obligations.
How were such interest rates set in an epoch when social planners did not yet think “economically”? The answer is to be found in the realm of social cosmology. And as with most dimensions of the archaic kosmos, calendrical relations provided the key to this structuring.
Archaic societies viewed time as being like a cycle of human life: Each calendrical period was thought of as being born, maturing, and dying. This imagery explains why each month began with the new moon. It hardly could begin with a full moon and then spend its “youthful” phase shrinking. This would be like a baby being born large and then shrinking to maturity. For the same reason, our year begins on or near the winter solstice, when the days are shortest and the world of nature is least alive. The days lengthen as the year approaches maturity at the summer solstice, and then shorten, much as aging people shrink. On the same principle, our days begin at midnight, the darkest hour, reaching their midpoint at high noon.
Just as counting began with the calendar, so the birth metaphor was extended to numbers and their fractional “children.” Indeed, the gestation and birth process provides the most widespread metaphor in human culture. The word metaphor itself means “pregnant with meaning”: to “bear” (pherein) “beyond” (meta). How appropriate then for the idea of seasonal birth and reproduction to serve as a social and even economic metaphor, culminating in the generation of interest by capital.
The Soviet cuneiformist Igor Diakonoff[56] (1983: p. 83) has described how archaic languages lean heavily on the use of metaphor to convey the idea of abstract concepts as literal extensions of the concrete. He defined an archaic language as one which, “on the lexical level, has no or only poorly developed means of expressing abstract ideas.” The Sumerian cuneiform sign meaning “to eat” is composed of the roots “mouth, bowl,” i.e., the ration-portion distributed to public dependents. Words for economic ideas such as interest likewise were expressed as concrete images, for “In an archaic language there are no adequate means, either lexical or grammatical, to express such abstract ideas as ‘time,’ ‘space,’ ‘subject,’ ‘object,’ ‘cause,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘invention,’ ‘multiplication,’ ‘division’ and many others, some of which appear to us elemental, as, e.g., the distinction between ‘darkness,’ ‘calamity,’ ‘illness,’ and ‘pain,’ etc., or between ‘good,’ ‘enjoyable,’ ‘kind,’ ‘happy,’ ‘useful,’ ‘lucky,’ etc. … In the absence of means to express general ideas, one resorts to generalization by tropes (metaphors and metonymies).”
This kind of image-making also applied to mathematics, beginning with calendar-making. For if time had a gestation period, so did the numerical cycles used to demarcate it by dividing it into fractional measures. Numbers, like time, were conceived in terms of reproductive analogies. The idea of “one” meaning “man” and the word for “two” meaning “woman,” for instance, is found throughout the world. By the same token, numbers beyond 1 and 2 have been imbued with maleness and femaleness by classifying them as odd or even. The Pythagoreans held that “odd numbers are male, even numbers are female” (Aristotle, Metaphysics 986a, quoted in Seidenberg[57] 1962b: p. 2).
Ideas of numerical maleness and femaleness implied an ability to give birth to “baby” fractions. The Sumerian language represented the basic unit fraction (1/60th) as being a miniature or “child” of “normal” units. Cuneiform script represented the single unit “1” and its unit-fraction 1/60 by similar (although differently sized) D-shaped symbols, and the word “gesh” (“man”) signified both 1 and 1/60 (or alternatively, 1 and 60). Likewise in Latin, the as (“pound”) was cognate to Greek heis, “one,” and each of the 12 unciae (“ounces”) was also a “one” (from unus, “unity”).
Robert Stieglitz[58] (1982: p. 257) called this line of reasoning mathopoeic: “the poet might say that the ‘One’ gave birth to a ‘Female’ (= 2) and a ‘Male’ (= 3), who in turn mated and thus begot successive generations of ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ (2p3q5r), formed in the ‘image’ of their prototypes.” Such a thought process is found in Sumer’s sexagesimal system. The initial trinity of numbers—1, 2, and 3—can generate the modular patterns that form the basic higher numbers: 2 + 3 = 5, 2 x 3 = 6, and 5 x 6 = 30, while 30 x 12 = 360. These are the basic Near Eastern calendrical numbers.
The sexual anthropomorphism of numbers was elaborated down through Roman times. Plutarch (Isis and Osiris, Chapter 56) asserted that the ancient Egyptians knew the 3 x 4 x 5 right triangle and the male and female deities associated with it. The upright perpendicular measuring 3 represented Osiris, while the base measuring 4 (an even number, and horizontal, as it is presumed they thought a woman should be) signified Isis. Their offspring was Horus, the hypotenuse 5, a male odd number. Pythagoreans thus built on an old tradition in asserting that “Five is the marriage number.” Plutarch called this triangle the Nuptial Figure. It has a long pedigree, for 3 + 4 + 5 = 12, the number of months in the year, while 3 x 4 x 5 = 60, the basis for the sexagesimal system. And 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 = 360, the number of days in the administrative year. (Adding a 2 to this sequence produces 720, often taken to represent the number of days and nights in the year. Thus 720 = 6! [factorial 6], that is, 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6.)
Inasmuch as 4 could be expressed as 22, the number 60 could be rendered as 22 x 3 x 5. In any case, 60 could be generated by multiplying twos and threes and their combinations (“offspring”). The fact that it is divisible into 11 common denominators has already been cited. These numbers, along with their 11 reciprocals—1/30, 1/20, 1/15, 1/12, 1/10, 1/6, 1/5, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, and 1/1—came to be known as the 22 “children of Anu.” As the leading god in the Sumerian pantheon, Anu was assigned the most important number: one, or unity. In the sexagesimal system this number represented 60 60ths. Anu’s subordinate deities were assigned the basic fractions of 60.[59]
Enlil was signified by 50/60, his high proportion reflecting his status as Anu’s most important son. Enlil’s brother Enki (Babylonian Ea) was given the number 40/60 or two-thirds, Utu (Babylonian Shamash) 20/60 (one-third), Inanna (Assyrian Ishtar) 15/60 or one-quarter, and the storm-god Adad, 6/60, a 10th. (See Figure 3 in Stieglitz[60] 1982: p. 263.)
The moon-god Nanna (Babylonian Sin) was assigned the fraction 30/60, that is, one-half. Not only was the month 30 days long, but a sexual symbolism may well have associated the moon with the female principle, juxtaposed to the “male” sun.
How the Rate of Interest Was Set
Metals as well as fractions were associated with the planetary deities. The basic commercial measure of value, silver, was associated with the moon (hence, the month), while gold was linked to the sun and hence to its annual periodicity. This imbued transactions involving these metals with a cosmological symbolism. Interest on Sumerian silver debts accrued on the new moon, that is, at the time the moon was “reborn.” What was reborn financially was a “baby” increment, the unit-fraction 1/60th. In monetary terms this was a shekel per mina (a shekel being 1/60th of a mina).
The most important annual obligations were the barley debts owed by Mesopotamian cultivators. These debts, due at the transition to the new crop year, were governed by Utu (Babylonian Shamash), the sun-god of justice. Utu/Shamash was symbolized numerologically by the number 20/60 (a third). It happens that the annual interest rate on barley obligations also was one-third, as was the typical sharecropping rate. This correspondence of 33 1/3 percent rates may be merely coincidental, but it certainly makes sense in the “through-composed” or “total” way that so much archaic social cosmology made sense.
The social planners who designed this cosmology of everyday life used the birth metaphor to represent most phenomena correlated with calendrical periodicities, including the payment of interest. For in an animate view of the economic kosmos, if capital (or anything else) increased, it did so by increments—and these were thought of as reproductive growth. The birth metaphor was made especially reasonable when the increase occurred on regular periodic dates coinciding with the rebirth of calendrical time, e.g., the new moon or crop year. In this complex of associations one could say that interest-birthings were payable on the dates that time itself was reborn.
Esoteric as this kind of numerology may seem to modern eyes, its worldly consequences were far-reaching. For if interest was perceived as a payment for time (following the gestation period of capital), then just as time was born periodically, so integers gave birth to unit-fractions—60ths in Mesopotamia, 12ths in Rome, and 10ths in Egypt and Greece. The result was that each system of fractions produced its own interest rate.
As early as the Ur III period, silver money giving birth to “offspring” in the form of interest accruals was likened to goats reproducing themselves with kids. The birthing of time, animal husbandry, and interest thus were all associated with the generation of fractional increments. Through interest payments in the form of small unit-fractions the financial world was thus incorporated into the kosmos and periodicities of nature.
In every archaic society the payment of interest typically consisted of the smallest unit-fraction—a monthly shekel per mina in Sumer’s sexagesimal system, an annual dekate in the Greek decimal system, and an uncia (12th) in Rome. These fractions became the basis for civilization’s earliest interest rates—and they came to be called “newborn”: mash in Sumerian (meaning “kid”), tokos in Greek, and faenus in Latin (both meaning “calf”).
The payment of debts was set at the key calendrical renewal points which demarcated archaic calendars, just as contributions to temple feasts had been. It also was on these dates that interest accrued. Crop debts and their interest were due annually at the New Year harvest, while commercial debts accrued interest on the transition from one month to the next—the new moon. In these annual and monthly periodicities archaic debts and their generation of interest were associated with the renewal of time. This made it seem natural for the monthly payment of a shekel per mina to take on the guise of a newborn unit “born” each new moon.
The philologists Piotr Steinkeller[61] (1981) and Émile Benveniste[62] (1973) have shown that the terms “head (of livestock)” and “kid” or “calf” for capital and interest are relatively late. In the 24th century BC the Early Dynastic term for interest was “she.harra.” The “she” seems to have been a grain-weight of silver, not of barley, and there seems to be no suggestion of a metaphor for fertility. The metaphoric birth terminology for the accrual of interest in Ur III thus dates from half a millennium after interest began to be charged in Sumer.
A “baby” kid (mash) emerges from the older full-sized “parent,” that is, the capital principal or “head” (sag.nig.gar.ra). The cuneiform sign for “baby” and “birth” were the same, “mash,” regardless of whether it applied to animals or humans, numbers or interest. This extension of the idea of “mash” from the meaning of “offspring” to that of the interest yielded by capital principal established a neat formula: Interest was to capital as kids were to adult goats.
The choice of words meaning “kid” or “calf,” “birth” or “offspring” to signify interest should not be interpreted to imply that calves literally were paid as interest or that cattle were the original productive capital lent out by creditors. Such a practice is not found in Ur III or any other society with which anthropologists are familiar. Rather, a common metaphor was at work. Silver could be lent out to yield offspring, despite the fact that metal itself was barren, as Aristotle emphasized in classical antiquity. Silver minas invested at interest gave birth to silver shekels each month with the birth of the new crescent moon, patron deity of silver.
Diffusion of Interest-Bearing Debt to Greece and Rome
In turning to the Mediterranean economies of classical antiquity it is important to recognize that we are dealing not with pristine developments but with the diffusion of practices from the Near East. Also transmitted was the cosmological setting for these practices, including ideas of the sun-gods of justice, avenging-goddesses punishing hubris, and many of the rituals that originated as the Mesopotamian New Year ceremony and were adopted in the Mediterranean lands as city-founding ceremonies, military triumphs, and imperial coronations. But these formalities were transplanted into a new context—one much less centralized, more privatized, and more oriented toward military than commercial hierarchies. Instead of temple and palace merchants we find the aristocratic cavalry “knights” (including their Roman publicani offshoots) in control of society’s wealth. The way in which they managed society did not have the checks and balances found in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.
My purpose in reviewing the economic cosmology of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman counting, weights, measures, and interest rates is not to retread the ground covered above with regard to Mesopotamia, but to show how some key conceptual patterns were maintained despite the shift from the sexagesimal system to Rome’s duodecimal lunar cosmology and Greece’s decimal system.
Local temples served as important intermediaries in transplanting commercial practices from the Near East. Most famous is Delphi, whose priests of Apollo served as a virtual information center concerning Mediterranean geography and colonization. It was through Delphi that cities decided where to plant colonies and trading enclaves, and from its oracle that they shaped their political plans. A similarly financial leadership was taken by Apollo’s island of Delos.
Monetary historians have traced the diffusion of Near Eastern monetary weights from the Levant throughout the Aegean region and Italy. Also transmitted were the foundations of the cosmological geometry subsequently attached to the name of Pythagoras, including the right-angled triangles and numerological symbolism discussed earlier. Also transmitted was a core of astronomical knowledge, along with the myths of sun-gods of justice and the goddesses avenging injustice (Sumerian Nanshe preceded Greek Nemesis).
The practice of charging interest, long misinterpreted as having been an original and universal Indo-European practice, is such a borrowing. It thus is not surprising that whereas the capital:birth metaphor for interest was not coined until about half a millennium after interest was implied in Sumer, it turned up in Greece and Italy full-blown from the first time we find interest implied, in the eighth century BC. This lack of a discernable gestation period suggests that interest and allied economic practices were transplanted by the Phoenicians or Syrians along with the alphabet. Near Easterners also seem to have brought the idea of basing the interest rate on local numerical unit-fractions, using what had become the characteristic metaphor “birth” or “young animal.”
Local and Near Eastern practices were spliced together in ways that often were idiosyncratic. For instance, the Athenians counted the days of the month backward from midmonth or from the month’s final 10 days (that is, from the 20th to the 30th). The reason usually credited for this practice is the need to indicate the time remaining before month-end when personal debts and rents were due, as they are in modern society. Thus in Aristophanes’s Clouds[63] (line 1,131) Strepsiades declaimed:
- “The fifth, the fourth, the third, and then the second,
- And then that day which more than all the rest
- I loathe and shrink from and abominate,
- Then comes at once that hateful Old-and-New day,”
that is, the day when his debts fell due (Meritt[64] 1961: p. 40).
Not needing to create administrative months to coordinate a centralized allocation of rations, the Aegean weight system was more abstractly numeric than calendrical. It was based on decimals, not sexagesimal fractions. Already in their Linear B records the Mycenaean Greeks were found using a decimal system, reflecting Egyptian influence via Crete. The classical Athenians decimalized their monetary system by dividing the silver mina into 100 drachmae (600 obols at 6 obols per drachma).
Still, the periodicity of time, unit-fractions, and contributions to the temples formed a related complex, as they had in the Near East. Greek interest rates were closely correlated with the fractional arithmetic system in much the same way as Mesopotamian rates, but in this case a 10th. I suspect that the cultural bridge for this practice may have been the temples, for some time before interest was attested in Greece they typically received a tithe (dekate) of military booty (Pritchett[65] 1971: pp. 93ff. with bibliography).
Calendrical practices seem to have shaped Italian contributions to temples, and hence Roman interest rates, which reflect the duodecimal weight system. The copper as (“pound”) was divided into 12 unciae (“ounces”), and the Laws of the 12 Tables c. 450 BC set the rate of interest at one 12th per year—a “baby” fractional unit being paid on each “full” unit.[66] This annual basis was more appropriate to the agrarian character of Roman economic life than a monthly measure such as 1/60th.
It can be concluded that while variations in interest rates from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome cannot be explained by any documented profit or productivity rates, they can indeed be explained in terms of their respective fractional systems of arithmetic:
Table 3.4
| Smallest Fractional Unit
|
Normal Rate of Interest
|
Region
|
| 1/60th
In the decimal system, 1 2/3 percent
|
1 shekel per month per mina owed per month = 20 percent per year
|
Bronze Age Mesopotamia
|
| 1/10th
|
10 percent per year (dekate)
|
Classical Greece
|
| 1/12th
|
8 1/3 percent (1/12th) per year (uncia)
|
Classical Rome
|
These interest rates were based on the fractional arithmetic of temple contributions or disbursements. With the exception of the Greek-Egyptian decimalized practice found in the dekate of military booty, these fractions reflected calendrical periodicities. As such they were embedded in the numerical skeleton of local cosmologies.
This explains why they were so stable over the centuries. Even when the power of creditors increased, they did not raise their lending rates. (What they did was foreclose on the land and personal freedom which they obliged debtors to pledge as security for loans.)
Some Consequences of the Shift to Decimal Fractions
At first glance the choice between using a sexagesimal or decimal system of fractions may seem to be merely a matter of convenience. Thureau-Dangin[67] (1939: pp. 95, 102) cited Theon’s Commentary on Ptolemy (ix) attributing the sexagesimal system’s popularity to its simplicity: “60 is among all the numbers the most convenient, because, being the smallest among all those which have the most divisors, it is the easiest to handle,” that is, to divide into halves and quarters, thirds and sixths, 10ths, and 12ths. By contrast, “the number 10 is a very defective basis, because of its insufficient divisibility. A system founded upon a number divisible by 2 or 3 would certainly be more practical.” This is especially true for counting time periods. It is why the modern world continues to measure hours and minutes, arcs and angles, the circle and the celestial heavens in terms of 60s and 360s.
In explaining how Sumer’s commercial interest rate came to be set at 1/60th per month (12/60 per year), the pragmatic consideration of convenience must not be overlooked. In pre-alphabetic societies, where arithmetic ability was just beginning to be taught, computations of interest charges (as well as basic prices) had to be relatively easy to make. This made round numbers preferable. The preeminent round numbers were 360, 60, and 30. In Sumer’s sexagesimal system of weights and measures a monthly accrual of interest at the rate of a shekel per mina—1/60th per month, 12/60ths per year—was the simplest fraction that could be computed. And this fact, I believe, explains why it was adopted.
In addition to being used on a monthly basis for commercial loans, this fraction 1/60th was used annually for applications where only a nominal charge was deemed appropriate. One finds it stipulated, for instance, for the storage of grain in number 121 of Hammurapi’s laws. However, 1/60th is a fraction that we would not expect to find in the decimal system, where it is expressed awkwardly as 1 2/3 percent or .01666…7, an irrational number.
Also simple in its own system but irrational in the decimal system were Rome’s 12 uncia per as, that is, 12 troy “ounces” per “pound.” Like the rate of a shekel per mina, that of a troy ounce per pound was grounded in the calendrical representation of nature (a 12th representing one month per year). In the modern decimal system this rate is no more convenient than is 1/60th: A 12th is expressed awkwardly as 8 1/3 percent (0.08333…3).
In analyzing the consequences of societies shifting away from the sexagesimal system to the duodecimal (Italian) and decimalized (Greek and Egyptian) systems, I would like to emphasize an often overlooked effect: Each numerical system influenced the setting of economic ratios, price relations, and interest-rate levels.
In none of these cases does numerology or administrative accounting convenience result in “economic” rates or prices being set. And when prices are uneconomic, they cause disequilibrium. This is what happened throughout antiquity.
The preceding text has described how useful the 30-day month and its associated fractional measures were for centralized resource allocation. Forward-planning could be calculated in round numbers easy to divide or multiply on a calendrical basis by placing the “decimal point” at 60 or setting the ratio of large to small measures at 30. Such modes of counting were less important for economies not using centralized distribution systems and standardized 30-day months. Greece and Italy thus did not need the particular kind of simplicity that had been innovated in the Near Eastern temples and palaces. Italy had leeway to elaborate a 12-based system, and Greece a 10-based system.
To sum up these points, Mesopotamia’s 30-day administrative month went hand in hand with a sexagesimal system of dividing monthly measures into daily fractions. Italy’s division of the year into 12 months was reflected in the 12-ounce pound, and also elsewhere such as the division of Etruscan federations into 12ths. Greece and Egypt broke entirely from calendrical proportions to adopt the more abstract decimal system of fractions and weights.
Each of these three systems had far-reaching effects on economic policy, as well as reflecting cosmological proportions. The fractional counting systems used by the Near East, Greece, and Italy served as general mental grids to view reality. They shaped the reality of economic policy, and also the proportions of how the human body was depicted artistically. (Music, Temperament, and Social Concord shows how the fractional system influenced the iconography of statuary and other plastic arts.) Worldly policies were translated through the perceptual grid of 60-based, 12-based, or decimalized systems. The way in which one counted thus became an active factor in its own right, influencing as passively reflecting economic and social structures.
One of the most fateful upshots of variations in local fractional systems was the setting of interest rates. Variations in the rates of interest—from Sumer’s 20 percent rate to Greece’s 10 percent and Rome’s 8 1/3 percent—were determined in large part by the local fractional system being used, not by the “market forces” discussed by modern economists. Sumer’s commercial interest rate of 20 percent per year was expressed as 1/60th per month (a shekel per mina). Twelve monthly payments worked out to 12/60, that is, a fifth (20 percent in the decimal system). Greece’s decimal system prompted a dekate (10 percent) of booty being turned over to the temples in the archaic period, and in time this rate became standard for charging interest. Rome’s duodecimal system prompted an interest rate of 1/12th per year—a rate which our decimal system expresses awkwardly as 8 1/3 percent.
The kind of feedback I am talking about between counting systems and perceptions (and shaping) of reality is illustrated in how the birth cycle is expressed in differing calendrical systems. A culture accustomed to using 30-day months would express the period of human gestation as being nine months, that is, 270 days. A society using seven-day weeks (as does our own) would round it off to 40 weeks, making 280 days. Of course, neither of these statements actually affects the period of gestation. The baby will come “when it is due.” But certain manmade reproduction systems are set by policy. Of these, the foremost is interest-bearing debt.
My conclusion is that if interest rates were stable over many centuries, it was because they were set not by market forces (which shift continually from year to year, and certainly from century to century) but by some other, more rigid nonmarket factor. It would be dodging the issue simply to attribute interest-rate stability to the inertia of “tradition.” Something initially must have created the tradition. The most plausible candidate I have been able to find is numerological cosmology.
As noted above, neither cosmology nor administrative accounting convenience results in “economic” rates (or prices) being set.
And when prices are uneconomic they cause disequilibrium. It was to “set things straight” that rulers intervened to proclaim justice—a relief from the accrual of interest-bearing debt, not its enforcement.
Straight Measures as a Metaphor for Righteousness and Rectitude
This chapter began by discussing the semantic connotations of the root “reg” with reference to the idea of regularity. In the Indo-European languages the idea took on various shadings associated with words for “right.” Via Greek “orektós” (stretched-out in a straight line) and “orégō” (to stretch out in a straight line) the root “reg” meant “straight” and hence, by extension, “correct.” The Latin verb “dirigire” contains the similar idea of directing—and a ruler is supposed to do this righteously. Cognate terms in English are “erect,” in the sense of making upright (hence, exemplifying correct behavior), and “rectitude.” A related idea was that of directionality—right as opposed to left.
At the end of this linguistic evolution came more abstract ideas about the rule of law and legal rights, as in German “Recht.” French “droit” contains all the above connotations, as do the cognate words in most other Indo-European languages.
On the basis of these semantic associations Émile Benveniste[68] (1973: pp. 305, 311) found Latin “rex” (“ruler”) to be related to “rectus” (“right,” “straight”) in a way that reflects more of a priestly than a kingly function: The rex “had… to trace out the sites of towns and to determine the rules of law.”[69] Benveniste added that:
- “The important word regio did not originally mean ‘region’ but ‘the point reached in a straight line.’… In the language of augury regio indicates ‘the point reached by a straight line traced out on the ground or in the sky,’ and… [t]he adjective rectus can be interpreted in a similar way: ‘straight as this line which one draws.’ This is a concept at once concrete and moral: the ‘straight line’ represents the norm, while the regula is ‘the instrument used to trace the straight line,’ which fixes the ‘rule’ (règle). Opposed to the ‘straight’ (droit) in the moral order is what is twisted, bent. Hence ‘straight’ (droit) is equivalent to ‘just,’ ‘honest,’ while its antonyms ‘twisted, bent’ (tordu, courbé)… [are] identified with ‘perfidious,’ ‘mendacious,’ etc.”[70]
The idea of ruling in the sense of taking measures thus connotes straight planning. The dual notions of “crooked” and “left” (French “sinistre”) are thus the opposite of “right.” A sinister ruler is one who hands down crooked judgments. “To reckon” means to plan correctly. Its antonym “reckless” has the connotation of being “irrational,” “unreckoned,” or simply “crooked.”
Early in classical antiquity the metaphor of “straight” laws was found in the poetry of Theognis of Megara (late sixth century BC) and Solon of Athens (c. 594 BC). Lines 805–806 of the surviving works of Theognis prescribed that “A man who is theōros (that is, who consults the Oracle) must be more straight… than a carpenter’s pin and rule and square.” Lines 543–546 averred that:
- “I must render this judgment (dikē)…
- along (the straight line of) a carpenter’s rule and square,
- and I must give to both sides their equitable share.”
Line 40 warned of “a man (leader of Megara) who will be a straightener of our base hubris.” Likewise, Solon stated that he “wrote down the laws for base and noble alike, fitting a straight judgment (dikē) for each” (Nagy[71] 1985: pp. 37f., 42f.), using the term “straight judgment” for “just law.” Solon counterposed to “crooked judgments” a “good kosmos” (eúkosma), that is, one which is aligned in a straight manner.
The Greek word “orthos” meant initially “a straight line,” and then developed higher layers of meaning culminating in “equity” and “justice.” It seems also to have been associated with the ideas of “bounding” and “limiting,” and hence of guardianship and hence vigilance.
Likewise the idea of nemo, meaning at first to share or distribute, ended up meaning to treat someone according to law. It appears to be related to nome (“lot,” “portion,” or sometimes “pasturage”), hence nomos (“law,” “custom”), nomisma (a thing established by custom, law, or religious practice), and ultimately Nemesis, the wrath of the gods against individuals who infringe hubristically on the rights of others.[72]
The Sumerian ruler’s role in overseeing distributive justice had been expressed metaphorically at his major public ceremony, the New Year ritual. It was this renovation of cosmological and social order that gave meaning to his rule during the civil year. In Gudea’s dream about this ceremony he prepared the ceremonial first brick, carried the basket of mortar to the foundation, and pronounced the appropriate blessing cited above: “The measuring line flips the bricks,”[73] that is, touched each one evenly in a line so as to make sure the foundation wall was perfectly straight. He then gave a second blessing to the measuring line: “It is a vine aligning its fruits,” these fruits being the spirit of straight justice and rectitude throughout Lagash.
Increasingly associated with archaic justice was the balance and its idea of equity as equipoise. Seidenberg and Casey[74] (1980: p. 196) cited Arthur Evans to the effect that in Mycenaean Greece the balance was “the natural emblem of stewardship.” Yet the balances found in Mycenaean tombs did not seem to be associated with commercial or financial weighing. If weighing began with sacred or other public connotations, it probably was with weighing out the precious metals due to the temples as offerings or tithes. In any case the balance became a symbol for exercising public authority by rendering judgment, literally by pondering.
This imagery is found in the goddess Libra. Most commentators interpret her as weighing evidence to come to a correct verdict. But a more general idea seems to be at work, an idea the Greeks called “isonomia,” “equality under the law.” The idea was essentially one of distributive justice. At society’s highest level, a primordial objective of rulers was to promote social balance, above all by minimizing inequality and other sources of economic disorder.
Royal Checks on Mercantile Crookedness
This underlying objective entailed oversight of commercial and economic relations, and indeed of the wealth-getting process in general. For in most societies the readiest way to enrich oneself was at the expense of others. This disrupted overall social balance by disturbing the sense of equity. Its prevention required increasingly elaborate rules to prevent economic imbalance, above all between creditors and their debtors or between merchants and their customers.
The upshot was that in addition to involving themselves directly with literal weighing and balancing via public sponsorship of standardized weights and measures, rulers pledged themselves to punish merchants or crooked officials who abused them. Oversight of standardized weights and measures thus became part of the administration of law—not so much oral common law as public law, suitably backed by religious sanctions. This made abuses of such measures not only treasonable but sacrilegious.
Yet it is a fact of life that neither civil nor sacred rules are always obeyed. Abundant cuneiform evidence documents attempts by official collectors and merchants to cheat their clients. Many used their public position and personal wealth to enrich themselves, often by coercive and arrogant methods. They would enter the debtor’s or renter’s house to take payment—a goat or other livestock, often for merely a nominal debt (Stephens 196_). They wanted to take collateral worth more than the money owed (typically twice the value, a practice still followed today). And at the most basic level, they often cheated people by using their own measures and weights.
To deter such practices, public laws (culminating in those of Hammurapi) directed creditors, public collectors, and merchants to collect agrarian debts only on the threshing floor. Creditors could not enter the debtor’s house to collect, nor could they seize payment by force or take livestock unless the cultivator voluntarily sold the animal at its full price. Many types of assets were made immune from being taken as collateral—the basic tools of trade necessary to carry on economic activity, including grinding stones, livestock (“the widow’s ox”), and so forth.
Most important of all, temples or palaces kept standard weights against which to compare those of individual merchants and officials. For inasmuch as these measures and weights were first developed within the large public institutions of the Bronze Age Near East, it stands to reason that the first abuses also must have been within this sector. In the first instance the objective was to regulate public administrators—ostensibly public servants seeking to embezzle or profiteer.
In time the oversight role shifted to palace rulers, who administered fair weights and measures as a sacred charge. When kings were overthrown in classical Greece and Italy, this oversight reverted to the temples, above all for coinage weights. (The word “money” derives from the temple of Juno Moneta where Rome struck its first gold and silver coins toward the close of the Punic Wars at the end of the third century BC.) Surveying the shifting authority for such oversight, Kula[75] (1986) pointed out that “It is not by chance that in the Old Testament we find references to ‘measures of the sanctuary’ in periods of ecclesiastical domination, and to ‘the King’s weight’ in periods when the rule of the King prevailed.”[76] It also was significant that as societies became more decentralized and privatized, so did the administration of measures. By medieval European times, measures became royal in the sense of taking the local monarch’s personal measurements (Irwin[77] 1962; Kula[78] described a similar individualistic secularization for Poland).
As I have sketched above, equally important with direct oversight of weights and measures was regulation of their use in practice, and punishment of their abuses. Hammurapi’s laws (numbers 94 and 95) stipulated that merchants who lent grain or money by a small weight but demanded payment by a larger one should have forfeited whatever they had lent. Alewomen found guilty of using crooked weights and measures in selling beer were to be cast into the water (number 108). Paragraph 51 laid down that if a debtor “does not have silver, he will pay the merchant in barley or sesame in accordance with the ratio fixed by the ruler,” that is, “by the royal simdatu.” Paragraph 89 repeated this simdatu, and the following paragraph 90 stipulated that if the creditor took more interest than was allowed, or collected interest after a misharum act had been proclaimed, the entire debt was nullified. (Ellis[79] [1972: p. 81] translated simdatu as “Standard Operating Procedure,” and Finkelstein[80] [1969: p. 58] suggested “standing orders.”)
Outside of Mesopotamia we find much the same pattern of evolution. Crooked merchants used light weights when selling goods or lending out money so as to give their customers less, and used heavy weights when buying or collecting debts so as to gain an undue amount of silver or other commodity. To counter this irregular practice, Leviticus (19:35f.) described the Lord as directing Moses to instruct his followers: “Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight, or quantity. Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin” (a dry and liquid measure, respectively).
By the seventh century BC in biblical society the task of condemning dishonest merchants had passed into the hands of the social prophets. Thus Amos (8:4ff.) depicted the Lord as denouncing the wealthy Israelites “who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land” by scheming:
- “‘When will the New Moon be over,
- that we may sell grain,
- and the Sabbath be ended,
- that we may market wheat?’
- skimping the measure (making the ephah small),
- boosting the price (making the shekel great),
- and cheating with dishonest scales?”
For such abuses, according to Amos, the Lord threatened to punish all Israel with famine. Likewise the prophet Micah (6:9ff.) depicted the Lord charging Israel to:
- “Heed the rod and the One who appointed it.
- Am I still to forget, O wicked house,
- your ill-gotten treasures
- and the short ephah, which is accursed?
- Shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales,
- with a bag of false weights?”
Perhaps the best-known biblical admonishment to employ honest weights and measures occurs in Deuteronomy 25:13–15: “Thou shalt not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. Thou shalt not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. You must have accurate and honest weights and measures… For the Lord your God detests… anyone who deals dishonestly.” (Kula[81] 1986: pp. 9f. gave more examples from the New Testament and the Quran.)
Coopting Lunar-Goddesses to Avenge Crooked Practices
It is somewhat ironic that words meaning “to measure” derive originally from the measurement of the lunar month. The semantic root “me” refers to the moon (“mens”). However, as pointed out at the beginning of this section, whereas the first inspiration of counting was to enumerate the days in the lunation cycle, the same cannot be said of volumetric measures and weights.
“Primitive” counting could be based on marking the days of the lunar month. It typically required 28 symbols, extendable up to 30 as the length of the month varied between 29 and 30 days. But the lunation cycle’s length cannot be known with certainty in advance. Most lunar calendars alternate 29- and 30-day months, thereby averaging out to the 29 1/2-day lunar cycle, but such variability cannot be tolerated in the case of measures, for a simple reason: There cannot be different rules or volumetric standards for months of varying length. Any set of measures requires standardized proportions, initially divisible on a regular calendrical basis. This required that lunar calendars be standardized into fixed administrative months. There are no lunar-based weights and measures, for the simple reason that lunar months vary in length, making them unsuitable as a basis for standardized measures. Food distributions for a 29-day month will not suffice for the succeeding 30-day period. The creation of standardized measures therefore had to await the development of an artificially standardized administrative calendar. In practice the solution found was based on solarized 30-day months and a 360(+5)-day civil year.
The transition to solarized calendars and measures is what seems to have tipped the scales in favor of solar rather than lunar deities. Perhaps the wisdom-god Enki and his analogs Hermes, Thoth, and Mercury retained too many lunar associations to be credited with innovating early measures or weights along with their other contributions. Straight measures became the exclusive provenance of the sun-gods of justice who became the Bronze Age pantheon-heads. For inasmuch as the solarized measures were fixed and stable each month, they served as the analog for rules in general.
What then happened to the lunar deities is an interesting story. They were coopted, reincarnated as goddesses of retribution protecting the new solar values. Behind the sun-gods of justice who sponsored the rules, measures, and laws proclaimed by Ur-Nammu, Shulgi, Hammurapi, and other law-givers stood Nanshe, Nisaba, and other descendants of the archaic order-goddesses. Henceforth their sacred duty was to wreak retribution against perpetrators of injustice. In sum, while the task of rulers was to decree fair and equitable measures, that of justice-goddesses was to punish their abusers, starting with public administrators and merchants using false standards to defraud their customers or the public at large. And by classical antiquity their objective became the higher and more abstract one of countering the egoistic hubris of wealth in general.
We find this pattern of evolution occurring on many planes. For instance, it was in large part to counterpeculation by public servants that written account-keeping was first developed. Such checks may explain why Nisaba—Umma’s version of Inanna/Nanshe—became the patron deity of writing and its instrument the reed, in an epoch when writing served first and foremost as a means of record-keeping to check administrative abuses.
In sum, although most goddesses were linked to the old lunar calendars and hence retained an association with “disorder,” they found a new role as punishers of irregularity and crookedness. They shed the traces of the chaos-dragon Tiamat, becoming guardians of equitable worldly order rather than sponsors of it. Once the chaos-dragon Tiamat had been vanquished, she could be rehabilitated within the new solarized order.
Calendrical Restoration of Social Balance
It is no coincidence that the astrological sign Libra appears at harvest time, following Virgo. Bronze Age crop debts were due at the completion of the harvest season. This point in the year was deemed appropriate for Mesopotamian rulers to intervene and cancel barley debts when economic conditions called for it. This paramount act of Mesopotamian rulership was so important that the Babylonian term for passing a law—“proclaiming justice” or “enacting a simdatu” (literally a “ruling”; the phrase is “simdat sharrim”)—became synonymous with canceling agrarian debts! Ultimately aimed at, from the ruler’s broad point of view, was social balance in the land. (See: Ellis[82] 1972: p. 76 and Kraus[83] 1984: pp. 6ff.).
From the time of Hammurapi (1792–1750 BC) to the penultimate ruler of his dynasty, Ammisaduqa (1646–1626 BC), Babylonian “kings of justice” proclaimed debt cancellations as the central element of restoring order. In these simdat proclamations rulers extended the idea found in nearly every major language grouping, including Indo-European.
Such debt cancellations—misharum acts—were needed with increasing frequency as agricultural conditions in southern Babylonia deteriorated during 2000–1600 BC. This economic stringency is not surprising in view of the fact that interest rates were established by numerological rather than really economic norms and the general ability of debtors to pay. Mesopotamia’s interest rate of 20 percent per year (and 33 1/3 percent for crop debts), Greece’s 10 percent, and Rome’s 1/12th were within the capacity of debtors to pay when harvests were good. But in the face of crop failures or military devastation the debts had to be canceled.
This point cannot be overemphasized. Interest rates became problematic precisely because they did not reflect underlying productivity rates and earning power. Instead of trying to calculate “economic” rates of interest, rulers simply canceled debts and their accumulated back-interest when payment would have created economy-wide strains and inequitable property foreclosures. The ultimate public measure was a cancellation of agrarian debts, and it was through this policy that Bronze Age rulers restored economic justice, equity, and rectitude in their lands.
Epilogue: From the Ruling Rod to the Club
It may be significant that an early English word for “measuring stick” was “wand,” long a symbol of authority in the form of a scepter. As a wand, the “rod” could take many forms besides that of a measuring stick. Indeed, it is quite understandable that during the second millennium BC, as the early “rod and ring” iconography diffused into less centralized contexts outside of Mesopotamia, the superficial form of the “rod” was maintained, but perceptions of its significance changed. In the Old Testament, for instance, we find in Leviticus 27:32 a decentralized and pastoral function of the rod: It became simply a means of counting livestock: “The entire tithe of the herd and flock—every 10th animal that passes under the shepherd’s rod—will be holy to the Lord.” This made the ruler like a shepherd, in taking a census of the population, just as shepherds were accountable for the number of sheep in their care.
Van Buren[84] (1956) found that the rod evolved into the scepter some time late in the second millennium BC. Significantly, it “was at times qualified as a ‘sceptre of length of days,’ or ‘of long days and years.’” She interpreted this as signifying “longevity to its possessor whose vital forces would consequently be yearly renewed; in this sense the sceptre was a fertility symbol,” perhaps “originally a green bough.” In some depictions of the royal hierogamy ceremony, Mesopotamian rulers held an ear of corn as they approached their divine bride. Van Buren wrote, “This suggests that the ear of corn had a double meaning; it was the bridegroom’s characteristic fertility emblem which symbolized the fruitfulness and increase which the marriage would bring about, and it was also regarded as his sceptre indicative of his regal status. A combination of the two ideas implied that it was a symbol of the abundance which would ensue from a just and beneficent rule.” From this symbol, she believed, the scepter evolved into the mace or rod.
But it is just as plausible that the development was just the reverse: that what began as the royal measuring rod was agrarianized as societies became less centralized and the administration of weights and measures passed into the hands of civil authorities. Certainly by classical Greek times we find public measures being kept in the public agora in Athens and other cities, with commercial weights and measures being overseen by agoranomoi, market overseers from the civic “bureau of standards.”
In other contexts we find the “scepter” or rod evolving into the Assyrian mace and ultimately the Roman club, signifying nothing more celestial than brute force. But this is a relatively late development. Root[85] (1979: pp. 194f. citing Moortgat[86] 1969: p. 105) suggested that Babylonians never chose the iconographic theme of the “victorious ruler” because of the priestly administrative character of early Mesopotamian rulership. Root wrote, “Lending support to the idea that the victory scene was not part of the Babylonian representational repertoire is a fragmentary wall painting from Zimrilim’s palace at Mari. Here part of a scene is preserved showing a large figure grasping two foreigners by the hair in the traditional Egyptian manner. … This suggests that the kings of Mari had to look further afield than Hammurabi’s Babylon for models for a victory motif.”
In the seventh-century BC reign of Assurnasirpal II, the god Assur appeared in the throne room from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud (Root[87] 1979: pp. 172f. and Plate 45b): “[T]he king is shown twice, flanking the sacred tree. Over the tree Assur hovers, grasping a ring in his left hand and facing to the right. … This scene may show a type of investiture. The figure of the king on the left holds his mace down at his side, while the royal figure on the right—the one whom Assur faces—has raised his mace as if to signify that he has received power through Assur’s symbolic extension toward him of the ring.” We thus are left with military force and coercive earthly power no longer representing the celestial kosmos.
Key Concepts
This glossary of key concepts will help readers who are new to the subject of archaic human history.
Keywords: To “rule,” “regulate” (“regal,” “royal”). Rulers rule by taking public measures. They administer equitable principles of “regularity” (viz. “regiment” and “regimen”), and standardize the rations distributed to Mesopotamian temple and palace dependents (an idea of social proportionality subsequently generalized to all public laws). Finally, “right,” “correct,” “direct,” and “straight,” counterpoised to “crooked” and “sinister.”
Key images: The stela of Ur-Nammu c. 2100 BC depicts him holding a coiled measuring rope and ruling rod as emblematic symbols of office. His contemporary Gudea of Lagash is portrayed (statues F and B) holding a measuring rule.
Lunar symbol: Justice-goddesses of agriculture, reeds, and hence writing (e.g., Nanshe and Nisaba) avenging injustice and hubris.
Solar symbol: Sun-gods of justice as patrons of royal measures and laws, sponsoring “straight” justice.
Principle of regularity: Sumer’s sexagesimal arithmetic and measures standardized rations as daily fractions of monthly allotments for each category of recipients.
Economic application: Periodic contributions were standardized into interest rates based on unit-fractions: 1/60 per month in Mesopotamia, 1/12 annually in Rome (a troy ounce per pound), and a 10th (dekate) in Greece.
Periodic renewal ceremony: New rulers proclaimed public laws afresh, including official prices and interest rates. Urukagina’s “reform” text of the 24th millennium BC increased the rations distributed to temple and palace dependents. Shulgi’s laws regulated Ur III’s measures and prices, as did the laws of Hammurapi.
Integration with the calendrical kosmos: Fractional measures were designed for distribution and consumption on a regular basis. And interest payments were regularly “born” of capital when time was reborn on the new moon or New Year.
Public character: Measures were first developed in Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces, which acted as archaic bureaus of standards. This function was extended into the general public enforcement of economic relations and contracts, fines and punishments, prices and fees, beginning with those for public-sector services.
Religious sanctification: Inanna, Nanshe, Nisaba, Nemesis—formerly lunar agricultural-goddesses—punishing merchants using false measures or acting unjustly or arrogantly in general.
Ultimate dissolution: Atrophy of public oversight of measures, opening the way for unchecked mercantile abuses.
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- ↑ Åke W. Sjöberg, “The Old Babylonian Eduba,” in Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen (Chicago: 1974), pp. 159–179.
- ↑ Some leaders of Native American tribes in the southwestern United States carried calendar sticks as their emblem of office, and marked off each day and lunar phase (Alexander Marshack, “North American Indian Calendar Sticks: The Evidence for a Widely Distributed Tradition,” in A.F. Aveni [ed.], World Archaeoastronomy [Cambridge: 1988], pp. 308–324). An associated emblem of chieftainship in the American southwest was the notched measuring stick.
- ↑ M. Müller, “Gold, Silber und Blei als Wertmesser in Mesopotamien während der zweiten Hälfte des 2. Jahrtausends v.u.Z.,” in Diakonoff Festschrift (Warminster: 1982), pp. 270–278.
- ↑ Samuel Noah Kramer and John Maier, Myths of Enki, the Crafty God (Oxford: 1989).
- ↑ Samuel Noah Kramer and John Maier, Myths of Enki, the Crafty God (Oxford: 1989).
- ↑ E. Douglas van Buren, “The Rod and the Ring,” Archiv Orientalni, Vol. 17 (1949), pp. 434–450.
- ↑ In some parts of the world the imago mundi’s spatial dimensions are not measured geometrically but are symbolized arithmetically. Native American hogans are made of 16 branches and aligned to the proper direction (Adrian Snodgrass, Architecture, Time and Eternity: Studies in the Stellar and Temporal Symbolism of Traditional Buildings [New Delhi: 1990]). But in Egypt and Mesopotamia the temenos ground was precisely measured out, as were the dimensions of the temples and pyramids.
- ↑ Jöran Friberg, “Numbers and Measures in the Earliest Written Records,” Scientific American, Vol. 250 (February 1984), pp. 110–118.
- ↑ T.E. Peet, The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (London: 1923).
- ↑ B.L. van der Waerden, “On Pre-Babylonian Mathematics I,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 23 (1980), pp. 1–46.
- ↑ Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire. Acta Iranica, 3rd series, Vol. 19 (Leiden: 1979), p. 173.
- ↑ A. Seidenberg, “The Ritual Origin of Geometry,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 1 (1962a), p. 520.
- ↑ Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps that Once…: Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven: 1987).
- ↑ V.B. Mainkar, “Metrology in the Indus Civilization,” in B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta (eds.), Frontiers of the Indus Civilization (New Delhi: 1984), pp. 141–151.
- ↑ I.J. Gelb, “The Ancient Mesopotamian Ration System,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 24 (1965), pp. 230–243.
- ↑ I.J. Gelb, “The Arua Institution,” Revue d’Assyriologie, Vol. 66 (1972), pp. 1–32.
- ↑ I.J. Gelb, “Measures of Dry and Liquid Capacity,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 102 (1982), pp. 585–590.
- ↑ I.M. Diakonoff, “Some Reflections on Numerals in Sumerian Towards a History of Mathematical Speculation,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 103, No. 1 (1983), pp. 83–96.
- ↑ William W. Hallo, Early Mesopotamian Royal Titles: A Philologic and Historical Analysis (New Haven: 1957), AOS Series, Vol. 43.
- ↑ Hans J. Nissen, Mesopotamia Before 5000 Years (Rome: 1988b).
- ↑ Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East: 9000–2000 BC (Chicago: 1988a), p. 84.
- ↑ Thomas Wight Beale, “Bevelled Rim Bowls and Their Implications for Change and Economic Organization in the Later Fourth Millennium BC,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October 1978), pp. 289–313.
- ↑ I.M. Nicholas, “The Function of Bevelled-Rim Bowls: A Case Study at the TUV Mound, Tal-e Malyan, Iran,” Paléorient, Vol. 13 (1987). Pp. 61–73.
- ↑ Maurice Lambert, “L’Usage de l’argent-métal a Lagash au temps de la IIIe Dynastie d’Ur,” Revue d’Assyriologie, Vol. 57 (1963), pp. 79–92.
- ↑ Hildegard Lewy, “Origin and Development of the Sexagesimal System of Numeration,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 69 (1949), pp. 7f.
- ↑ Hildegard Lewy, “Origin and Development of the Sexagesimal System of Numeration,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 69 (1949), p. 6.
- ↑ Hildegard Lewy, “Origin and Development of the Sexagesimal System of Numeration,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 69 (1949), pp. 1–11.
- ↑ Hildegard Lewy, “Origin and Development of the Sexagesimal System of Numeration,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 69 (1949), p. 1.
- ↑ In the opening pages of Capital (1887 English ed., pp. 28f.) Karl Marx reviewed the historical context for evaluating commodities in terms of their labor content. Quoting Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he suggested “an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. … The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, ‘in truth,’ was at the bottom of this equality.” Marx thus believed that under slavery there could be no labor theory of value. Yet even slaves must be fed regularly.
- ↑ Maurice Lambert, “La naissance de la bureaucratie,” Revue Historique, Vol. 224 (1960), pp. 1–26.
- ↑ Maurice Lambert, “La premier triomphe de la bureaucratie,” Revue Historique, Vol. 225 (1961a), pp. 21–46.
- ↑ Enikgal’s name meant “Lord of the large gate,” referring to the gatehouse situated at the entrance to temple and palace compounds, in which tablets were kept throughout most of antiquity to record deliveries and withdrawals. Previously the highest temple rank behind the en was the sanga. This was the position that Enentarzi gave up to become ensi. He appointed as nubanda an administrator named Shubar, whose place was taken by Enikgal at the New Year coronation of Lugalanda, c. 2360 BC.
- ↑ Alexander I. Tyumenev, “The Working Personnel on the Estate of the Temple of dBa.ú in Lagaš During the Period of Lugalanda and Urukagina (25th–24th cent. BC)” [1954], in Igor M. Diakonoff (ed.), Ancient Mesopotamia: Socio-Economic History (Moscow: 1969), pp. 88–126.
- ↑ Maurice Lambert, “Recherches sur la vie ouvriers,” Archiv Orientalni, Vol. 29 (1961b), pp. 427–438.
- ↑ Maurice Lambert, “La Guerre entre Urukagina et Lugalzagesi,” Rivista degli studi Orientali, Vol. 41 (1966).
- ↑ Maurice Lambert, “Textes commerciaux de Lagash,” Revue d’Assyriologie, Vol. 47 (1953), pp. 37–69 and pp. 105–120.
- ↑ Maurice Lambert, “L’Usage de l’argent-métal a Lagash au temps de la IIIe Dynastie d’Ur,” Revue d’Assyriologie, Vol. 57 (1963), p. 84.
- ↑ Paul Koschaker, “Zur staatlichen Wirtschaftsverwaltung in altbabylonischer Zeit,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, Vol. 47 (1942), pp. 135ff.
- ↑ Daniel C. Snell, Ledgers and Prices: Early Mesopotamian Merchant Accounts (New Haven: 1982).
- ↑ Daniel C. Snell, Ledgers and Prices: Early Mesopotamian Merchant Accounts (New Haven: 1982).
- ↑ Henri Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (Chicago: 1969).
- ↑ Henri Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (Chicago: 1969).
- ↑ Daniel C. Snell (Ledgers and Prices: Early Mesopotamian Merchant Accounts [New Haven: 1982], p. 184) pointed out that this rate “is only one of several silver prices attested,” but the others probably represent free-market prices. Market prices evidently reflected shifting supply conditions at least to some extent. In examining Bronze Age price data we must always be clear as to just which sector we are dealing with, market or nonmarket, “private” or public.
- ↑ Hildegard Lewy, “Origin and Development of the Sexagesimal System of Numeration,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 69 (1949), pp. 1–11.
- ↑ Daniel C. Snell, Ledgers and Prices: Early Mesopotamian Merchant Accounts (New Haven: 1982).
- ↑ These were official “in-house” prices, not necessarily market prices. While each city had its own set of official prices, market prices had leeway to vary in the karum areas along the canals outside the city gates. This was where intercity trade took place. We learn of market-price differences mainly from administrative and “merchant” letters. A famous case arose when famine occurred in the reign of Ur III’s final ruler Ibbi-Sin. He delegated ships to his subordinate Ishbi-Erra to buy barley upstream, but when prices rose a hundredfold Ishbi-Erra broke away to set up his own regime at Isin (Oppenheim 19__).
- ↑ V.B. Mainkar, “Metrology in the Indus Civilization,” in B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta (eds.), Frontiers of the Indus Civilization (New Delhi: 1984), pp. 141–151.
- ↑ Leonard R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Prehistory in the Light of the Linear B Tablets (New York: 1963).
- ↑ Leonard R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Prehistory in the Light of the Linear B Tablets (New York: 1963).
- ↑ John Chadwick, “Life in Mycenaean Greece,” in Scientific American (ed.), Hunters, Farmers, and Civilizations: Old World Archaeology (San Francisco: 1978).
- ↑ Alfonso Archi, “Reflections on the System of Weights from Ebla,” in Cyrus H. Gordon, Gary A. Rendsburg, and Nathan H. Winter (eds.), Eblaitica: Essays on the Ebla Archives and Eblaite Language, Vol. I (Winona Lake, Indiana: 1987), pp. 47–90.
- ↑ John Chadwick, “Life in Mycenaean Greece,” in Scientific American (ed.), Hunters, Farmers, and Civilizations: Old World Archaeology (San Francisco: 1978).
- ↑ Miriam Balmuth, “Monetary Forerunners of Coinage in Phoenicia and Palestine in Antiquity,” in A. Kindler (ed.), The Patterns of Monetary Development in Phoenicia and Palestine in Antiquity (Jerusalem: 1967).
- ↑ Miriam Balmuth, “Remarks on the Appearance of the Earliest Coins,” in David Gordon Mitten, John Griffiths Pedley, and Jane Ayer Scott (eds.), Studies Presented to George M.A. Hanfmann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1971), pp. 1–7.
- ↑ Piotr Steinkeller, “The Renting of Fields in Early Mesopotamia and the Development of the Concept of ‘Interest’ in Sumerian,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 24 (1981).
- ↑ I.M. Diakonoff, “Some Reflections on Numerals in Sumerian Towards a History of Mathematical Speculation,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 103, No. 1 (1983), pp. 83–96.
- ↑ A. Seidenberg, “The Ritual Origin of Counting,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 2 (1962b), pp. 1–40.
- ↑ Robert R. Stieglitz, “Numerical Structuralism and Cosmogony in the Ancient Near East,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Vol. 5 (1982), pp. 255–266.
- ↑ Numbers also were assigned to deities outside of Mesopotamia. In the biblical poetic tradition, observed Cyrus Gordon (1978: p. 25), when Zechariah 14:9 states that “on that day Yahweh shall be one, and His name One,” the idea is not merely monotheistic but also numerological. Isaiah 40:26 admonishes the Hebrews to “Lift on high your eyes and see who created these (heavenly bodies): He who brings out their host by number; all of them He calls by name.” Each planet thus was assigned a deity and number.
- ↑ Robert R. Stieglitz, “Numerical Structuralism and Cosmogony in the Ancient Near East,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Vol. 5 (1982), Figure 3, p. 263.
- ↑ Piotr Steinkeller, “The Renting of Fields in Early Mesopotamia and the Development of the Concept of ‘Interest’ in Sumerian,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 24 (1981).
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973).
- ↑ Aristophanes, Clouds (c. 432 BC), line 1,131.
- ↑ Benjamin D. Meritt, The Athenian Year (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1961), p. 40.
- ↑ W. Kendrick Pritchett, The Greek State at War, Part I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1971).
- ↑ This Roman practice left a legacy lasting thousands of years. Charlemagne’s monetary reform of AD 780 contained 12 denarii per libra or talent (in contrast to the 16-ounce avoirdupois pound used for nonmonetary purposes), much as the British shilling was long divided into 12 pence.
- ↑ Francois Thureau-Dangin, “Sketch of a History of the Sexagesimal System,” Osiris, Vol. 7 (1939), pp. 95, 102.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), pp. 305, 311 (in online version: pp. 435, 438, 442f.).
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), in online version: p. 436.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), in online version: pp. 442f.
- ↑ 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).
- ↑ Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue (Social and Philosophical Studies [Chicago: 1906], pp. 122, 132f.) postulated an archaic “sentiment of jealous equality which filled the soul of primitive man. This sentiment demands imperatively that all have the same, things, according to the formula which Theseus, the mythical law-giver of Athens, had given for the foundation of justice. … On the occasions of the divisions of food, booty and lands, this same equalitarian spirit, required imperatively equal parts for all.”
- ↑ Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps that Once…: Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven: 1987), p. 412.
- ↑ A. Seidenberg and J. Casey, “The Ritual Origin of the Balance,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 23 (1980), pp. 179–226.
- ↑ Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton: 1986).
- ↑ Temple measures were cited in Exodus 30:13 and 38:24–27, and Leviticus 27:25; royal measures in 2 Samuel 14:26. Kula (Witold Kula, Measures and Men [Princeton: 1986], p. 292) pointed out that “In ancient China, apparently in periods of weak government, the craft guilds effectively controlled measures.”
- ↑ Keith Gordon Irwin, Man Learns to Measure (London: 1962).
- ↑ Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton: 1986).
- ↑ Maria de Jong Ellis, “Simdatu in the Old Babylonian Sources,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Vol. 24 (1972), pp. 74–82.
- ↑ Jack J. Finkelstein, “The Edict of Ammisaduqa: A New Text,” Revue d’Assyriologie, Vol. 63 (1969), p. 58.
- ↑ Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton: 1986).
- ↑ Maria de Jong Ellis, “Simdatu in the Old Babylonian Sources,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Vol. 24 (1972), pp. 74–82.
- ↑ Fritz R. Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen In Altbabylonischer Zeit (Leiden: 1984).
- ↑ E. Douglas van Buren, “The Sceptre, its Origin and Significance,” Revue d’Assyriologie, Vol. 50 (1956), pp. 101–103.
- ↑ Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire. Acta Iranica, 3rd series, Vol. 19 (Leiden: 1979), pp. 194f.
- ↑ Anton Moortgat, The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia: The Classical Art of the Near East (London: 1969), p. 105.
- ↑ Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire. Acta Iranica, 3rd series, Vol. 19 (Leiden: 1979).
