Dynamics of Production in the Ancient Near East

By Juan Carlos Moreno García

The transition between the 2nd and the 1st millennium BC was an era of deep economic changes in the ancient Near East. An increasing monetization of transactions, a broader use of silver, the management of the resources of temples through “entrepreneurs”, the development of new trade circuits and an expanding private, small-scale economy, transformed the role previously played by institutions such as temples and royal palaces. The 17 essays collected here analyze the economic transformations which affected the old dominant powers of the Late Bronze Age, their adaptation to a new economic environment, the emergence of new economic actors and the impact of these changes on very different social sectors and geographic areas, from small communities in the oases of the Egyptian Western Desert to densely populated urban areas in Mesopotamia. Egypt was not an exception. Traditionally considered as a conservative and highly hierarchical and bureaucratic society, Egypt shared nevertheless many of these characteristics and tried to adapt its economic organization to the challenges of a new era. In the end, the emergence of imperial super-powers (Assyria, Babylonia, Persia and, to a lesser extent, Kushite and Saite Egypt) can be interpreted as the answer of former palatial organizations to the economic and geopolitical conditions of the early Iron Age. A new order where competition for the control of flows of wealth and of strategic trading areas appears crucial.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Oct 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785702846

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Chapter 1

Economies in transition: trade, money, labour and nomads at the turn of the 1st millennium BC

Juan Carlos Moreno García

Two sets of texts may illustrate the fact that deep changes intervened after the crisis of the Late Bronze Age palatial system. In the first case a passage in the report of Wenamun (around the very end of the 2nd millennium BC) records the demands that the king of Byblos made of Egyptian rulers in exchange for the delivery of wood. Alongside precious items such as five gold and silver vessels and several garments of fine linen, more prosaic goods were also sent to the Libanese city, including 500 linen mats, 500 ox-hides, 500 ropes, 20 sacks of lentils and 30 baskets of fish (Lichtheim 1976, 227). The text also evokes the conditions prevalent in the preceding era, when Egyptians paid for timber in hard cash (1000 deben of silver – or 91 kg – on a single occasion). In fact, the harsh negotiations between Wenamun and the Byblite king are hardly reminiscent of the glamorous correspondence of the Amarna era, when gold circulated profusely between royal courts and cemented a dense network of diplomatic, matrimonial and trade contacts at the highest level between international powers (Liverani 1990). However the possibility cannot be excluded that such a contrast between two eras is somewhat artificial and that, in fact, we are simply dealing with two very different spheres of interaction between partners, wherein bargaining was in any case essential, even when kings were involved. On the one hand a world of diplomatic contacts fuelled by the delivery of gifts and the exchange of precious items (including royals and highly sought after specialists, such as craftsmen and doctors), and in which gold played a crucial role. On the other hand a more materialistic world of purely commercial exchanges based on silver.

Both spheres were evoked together, for instance, in the second set of texts to be mentioned, two letters of the Amarna correspondence sent by the king of Alasiya (Cyprus) to the pharaoh. The first letter is typical of the courteous epistolary exchanges between peers. In exchange for a delivery of 100 talents of copper to Egypt, the king of Alasiya expected the delivery of precious goods (perfumes, ebony furniture, horses, a chariot with gold ornaments, luxury garments, etc.) which, in fact, were also readily available in his kingdom as other letters make clear. His requirements thus appear to have been inspired not by need but by diplomacy, as this kind of exchange was reserved for peers, that is to say to acknowledged great kings (or candidates aspiring to such a status) equal in power, rank and wealth. In the second letter the tone is nevertheless quite different, albeit still courteous. The dispatch of 500 talents of copper was to be followed by a payment in silver:

You are my brother. May he send me silver in very great quantities. My brother, give me the very best silver, and then I will send you, my brother, whatever you, my brother, request. (EA 34 and 35: Moran 1992, 105–109; see also Kassianidou 2009)

When considering both sets of texts together it appears somewhat reductive to interpret Wenamun’s claims as proof of an Egyptian decline in the international trading sphere in the late 2nd millennium. In fact, the king of Byblos reminds Wenamun in another passage that former pharaonic missions also arrived into his city to do business, even if accompanied by ships loaded with precious gifts. In this vein, Queen Hatshepsut also recalled in her Punt inscriptions that her forebears brought precious goods from this exotic land in exchange of numerous payments (Sethe 1961, 344). But what appeared perhaps as a shocking novelty in Wenamun’s times is that modest commodities (hides, ropes, lentils, fish) were now exchanged even at the highest level, a practice that was nevertheless also recorded in the Amarna letters (Fletcher 2012).

This is probably the crucial question underlying the economic changes that occurred between the Late Bronze and Early Iron periods in the Near East. Traditional narratives routinely equate the simultaneous end of several Near Eastern states with invasions, poverty, climate change and economic crisis, usually under the apparently self-explanatory term collapse (a recent example: Cline 2014). The Late Bronze Age is no exception, and these narratives have focused their attention on the 12th century BC and argued that usual suspects such as climate change and, especially, sudden foreign invasions (Libyans, Arameans, Sea Peoples, etc.) disrupted trade circuits and urban life and precipitated the end of many vibrant palatial societies, from small Levantine city-states to great powers like the Hittite kingdom. In other cases, the emphasis is placed on internal factors as causes of the collapse, the most noteworthy being internal divisions and the struggle between different factions of the ruling elite and, from a more socio-economic point of view, excessive taxation and the subsequent impoverishment of large sectors of the peasantry. Yet these interpretations are not free from some weaknesses.

First of all, if invaders attacked coastal areas, disorganised exchange networks and provoked collapse, this means that trade had an astonishingly disruptive power in a world that was supposedly based chiefly on agriculture and peasant labour, and which was largely self-sufficient, with limited small-scale exchanges (both in range and volume) and where trade was usually reduced to prestige exchanges between palaces involving a very limited demand (issued from the palatial elite) as well as highly selected commodities. How the reduction, even the end of such limited and specialised circuits, could finally precipitate the end of the whole socioeconomic structure of the Near East thus remains a mystery.

Secondly, the very notion of a sudden collapse is highly reductive. Recent archaeological research shows that the alleged collapse or decline was longer than previously estimated and its local effects quite uneven; while some areas were not affected by it at all (they even thrived), others simply experienced a change in their political organisation (like the emergence of Neo-Hittite kingdoms), while others experienced similar crises but, significantly, quite later (as in the case of the Elamite, Kassite and Assyrian kingdoms; Bachhuber & Roberts 2009; Venturi 2010; Babbi et al. 2015).

Thirdly, the role of invaders as destructive forces is somewhat misleading and it is not impossible that their emergence was more the consequence than the cause of the problems encountered by the palatial systems. Parallels from other periods (such as the Viking Age: Skre 2007; 2013; Graham-Campbell et al. 2011) reveal that changes in the demands of states and in the organisation of circuits of exchanges had intense effects on populations specialised in transport and mediation activities, especially in coastal areas. These populations could then be forced partly to turn to predatory practices (piracy, smuggling), partly to develop new alternative circuits of exchanges, partly to settle in new areas (Sherratt 2003; for Aramaeans: Bunnens 2009). Fourthly, it seems strange that societies with, apparently, quite different political structures, ranging from the allegedly centralised Egyptian monarchy to the almost federal Hittite kingdom, not to speak of the feudal Kassite state, in some cases relatively distant from the core areas touched by invasions, all suffered similar consequences. What is more, these societies suddenly proved strangely unable to integrate the new actors (pastoral populations, maritime communities, etc.) within their structures when they had previously been doing so for centuries.

Two alternative historical models provide a more sophisticated narrative. In the first model, internal socioeconomic factors are privileged. Liverani, for instance, considers that the increasing exploitation of the labour force, especially dependent people working for the palace sector, led to a gradual demographic and fiscal crisis of the state, aggravated by the flight of impoverished peasants into marginal areas and the abandonment of settlements. The consequence was that the growth of territories and populations that escaped the control of palaces progressively weakened these institutions, to the point that internal rebellions and the incursions of external raiders finally precipitated the end of these monarchies (Liverani 1987). While the persuasive arguments of Liverani are based on abundant documentation from Ugarit, they do not seem to extend to other regions and states. As for the second model, the emphasis is put on trade and in changes in the organisation of demand during the Late Bronze Age. According to this perspective, Sherratt (2003) suggests that the intensification of exchange then stimulated the expansion of a new demand based on goods both humbler and different from those requested by the palatial elites. This, in turn, stimulated technological innovation (such as iron metallurgy, more accessible than copper and tin) and new trade circuits that complemented but also circumvented those controlled by the states.

The increasing importance of these new activities and exchange networks, operating on the fringes of the palatial circuits, finally precipitated the crisis of the palatial economies. But what followed was not collapse or crisis but a reorganisation of economic activities on a different basis.

Also in this vein, Liverani postulates that the changes that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age saw the emergence of new state structures (national and ethnic states), as well as of more decentralised forms of exchange that further highlighted the rigidity and difficulties of adaptation of the old palatial systems (Liverani 2002). In any case, the crisis was only relative. Cypriot and later Phoenician traders, the expansion of the incense route in Arabia, the emergence of a lucrative commerce based on silphium around Cyrenaica as well as the continuity of trade routes through the oases of the Western Desert in Egypt, not to speak of the quest for metals from the western Mediterranean, nevertheless proves the importance of exchange following the crisis of Late Bronze imperial powers. Such importance is probably related to a fact evoked by Susan Sherratt, the appetite for metal goods observable in many areas of the Mediterranean at the end of the 2nd millennium. An appetite that contributed, possibly quite significantly, to the transformative intercultural effects of an economic, cultural and technological as well as ideological nature within European and Mediterranean societies during the period from the late 13th century until well into the early centuries of the 1st millennium (Sherratt 2012).

Henceforth trade appears as a crucial element in the economic changes observed during the Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, especially in the case of exchanges occurring outside the palatial sphere. In other words, while official sources frequently refer to commercial operations revolving around palaces, they probably only refer to the tip of the iceberg (Monroe 2009 and 2010; Sauvage 2012). Furthermore it is quite probable that the bulk of exchange was based on modest commodities, rarely documented at all, while their traces in the archaeological record are scarce because of their perishable and transformable nature (metals, textiles, hides, plants, etc.), contrary to the expensive luxury items found in elite tombs or represented in the official iconography (Heymans & van Wijngaarden 2011; Sherratt 2003). In general, it also seems that the centrality ascribed to the palatial economy is somewhat illusory and unbalanced, a mirage due to the fact that monarchies and their personnel not only produced the immense majority of the documents preserved but, in many cases, the goods they produced and sought are easily detected in the archaeological record and enjoy a high prestige as works of art (exotic pottery and ornaments, objects in gold and silver, statues, etc.). Palatial economies thus appear to be somewhat oversized while private operations risk going unnoticed because of the absence of textual sources and the difficulty of detecting the goods involved (Wilkinson 2014). As for the lure of precious metals and the astonishing capacity of small polities to accumulate huge quantities of them (as the plunder brought back from Palestine into Egypt by Sheshonq I in the late 10th century BC shows), these phenomena are hardly understandable if money (mainly silver) did not circulate broadly in internal and external exchanges, had not permeated the whole society (not only its more privileged sectors) and could not be accumulated thanks to customs duty, taxes, etc. (Holladay 2006; 2009). In the absence of powerful monarchies regulating international exchange, temples appear instead as guarantors of the quality of precious metals used in commercial operations (Dercksen 1999; Jurman 2015). Only later would states gradually assume this function for their own fiscal and economic interests.

From a political point of view, the gradual end of the Late Bronze monarchies, first in the Eastern Mediterranean basin, later in Mesopotamia and western Iran, was not followed by anarchy but by what could be called a Levantine political system, made up not of large states and empires but by a cluster of petty polities and city-states. Some of the former big powers survived, but on a much reduced scale, sometimes even divided (Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Elam); occasionally they launched military campaigns seeking to regain control over lucrative nodes of trade (for example the Elamite incursions into Mesopotamia or the campaign of Shesonq in Palestine), but these attempts proved to be ephemeral, failed to expand and consolidate new borders and, quite the reverse, were succeeded by increasing political fragmentation and decline in their homelands. By contrast, petty small polities specialising in trade and in the production of coveted goods (metals, incense) thrived. In all, this was a world where decentralisation prevailed, characterised by a renewal of mobile life-styles (Libyans, Arameans, Chaldeans), political instability, flourishing trade and new forms of demand. In fact, the reduced weight of traditional states was concomitant with the development of both new commercial routes escaping their control and new economic practices seeking to secure and facilitate exchange, such as the generalisation of common sets of juridical expressions and the use of coined metals.

Finally, what happened to former palatial institutions? Late Bronze Age imperial elites, depending on revenue from foreign tribute, military and court positions and, perhaps, income derived from taxes on trade and the circulation of commodities, were most exposed to the changes that took place during the final Late Bronze Age and were strongly affected by the increasing autonomy of economic actors. Under these conditions, local elites rose to a more prominent position and, judging from the best documented cases (Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia) it seems that they followed a two-fold strategy. On the one hand they ruralised themselves as land became their main source of income. On the other hand, they became closely associated with temples, the only institutions which could still provide income (in the form of landed assets and prebends), institutional security in the long term and which, moreover, preserved substantial political power in the local sphere. Neo-babylonian and later Mesopotamian evidence reveals, for instance, that entrepreneurs mediated in trading operations involving the commercialisation of the production of temples and invested in date plantations, real estate, the acquisition of temple prebends, etc. (Stolper 1985; Bongenaar 2000; Abraham 2004; Jursa 2010). The commercialisation and externalisation of operations imply that temples (and perhaps what remained of the public sector: domains of the elite and the royal family, etc.) also contributed to the flows of exchange, as the case of Wenamun shows. Finally, temples appear as guarantees of economic transactions (Babylonian kudurrus were placed in sanctuaries), beneficiaries of donations (as revealed by the Egyptian donation stelae) and surveyors of the quality of precious metals in circulation. However, little is known about the forms of wealth accumulation, investment, etc., outside the elite sector during the very late 2nd and early 1st millennium BC in the ancient Near East, not to speak of the organisation of production in the countryside and the characteristics of peasant and urban demand.

Bearing in mind the importance and extent of the economic changes that occurred during the transition between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, in the following pages I intend to highlight some of the most conspicuous in a long-term perspective.

Trade and geopolitics in the late 2nd–early 1st millennium BC

The expansion of trade activities and new networks of exchange, which were not controlled or dominated by the main institutions and big powers of the Late Bronze Age, had a deep influence on the changes that occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East from the beginning of the Iron Age. They also help explain how the surviving monarchies tried to adapt themselves to a new economic and political scenario, a process that culminated in the emergence of the first world empires of the 1st millennium BC, from Neo-Assyrians to Achaemenids (Sherratt 1998; 2000; 2003; 1998; Sherratt & Sherratt 2001). Egypt was not alien to these transformations and, in fact, it is quite possible that the increasing participation of the Nile Delta in trade activities with the Levant finally precipitated the advent of the so-called Third Intermediate Period, an era marked by the division of the country into many distinctive polities and by the development of the Delta (Sherratt 2003, 49). In a context in which trade and exchange played an increasing role in the distribution of goods, animals and people in the Near East and in the diffusion of artistic styles (Mumford 2007, 259; Feldman 2014), often outside the palatial sphere, Lower Egypt emerges as an important point of arrival and a centre of distribution of the traffic with the Levant (Holladay 2006, 327).

Susan Sherratt has shown how crucial changes affected the organisation of commercial networks during the Late Bronze Age, when modest merchants used the trade networks established by the institutions to their own profit, trading with their own goods. This led to a flourishing small-scale trade, to the development of new trade routes, to the emergence of specialised communities heavily involved in trade (Greek, Phoenician and South-Arabian city-states: Sherratt 2001; Liverani 1997a; 1997b, 111), to the multiplication of exchange regardless of states, thus precipitating the crisis of Late Bronze Age monarchies, as more and more traffic escaped their control, monopoles and tax-systems (as in the route used by smugglers that connected Nubia and Cyrenaica through the oases of the Egyptian Western Desert: Kuhlmann 2002, 163–165; 2013). Under these circumstances, Lower Egypt appears as a region with an ideally privileged position in the new commercial circuits that were emerging in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. On the one hand, Cypriot archaeology reveals the existence of new trade routes linking the Iberian Peninsula, the Aegean, Cyrus, Phoenicia and Palestine (Demand 2004); on the other, the development of the incense route from the end of the 2nd millennium was concomitant with the ephemeral Egyptian effort to control this emerging land route from Arabia (as revealed by the discovery of an inscription of Ramesses III in the oasis of Tayma: Somaglino & Tallet 2011), with the end of the Egyptian presence in Palestine (a network of centres emerged in the Neguev seeking to control caravan trade, sometimes from South Arabia: Faust 2006; Thareani-Sussely 2007), with the last Egyptian expedition sent to Punt (the area of the southern Red Sea) in order to obtain a direct supply of incense and other products from this land and, finally, with the domestication of dromedary (Jasmin 2005). The incense route was fully operative towards the beginning of the 1st millennium (Liverani 1992; Kitchen 2001).

Upper Egypt apparently failed to become an active prtagonist in this new scenario, as the Theban region remained relatively isolated from the Mediterranean, without any apparent control over Nubian territory and resources and it was involved in occasional political turmoil. By contrast, Lower Egypt entered into a new era of urban development, agricultural expansion (judging from the donation stelae) and active trade with the Levant and beyond; the tale of Wenamun, for instance, mentions 20 ships in Byblos that traded with pharaoh Smendes, while another 50 ships in Sidon did business with a certain Werket-el (probably an Asiatic partner or agent of Smendes) and had sailed to his domain (Lichtheim 1973, 226; Liverani 1990, 247–254). A century later, when future pharaoh Sheshonq I established a cultic endowment for his father, his contribution included 15 deben of silver provided by his agents, two "foreigners from Khor" (=Syria and Palestina: Blackman 1941). Esamon, the man from Gaza appears as borrower of a certain amount of silver, together with a herder, in the Theban papyrus Michaelides 2, from around 700 BC (Donker van Heel 2004, 162–166). Further evidence confirms the increasing importance of trade in Egypt, even in Upper Egypt, as well as of activities related with it, such as loans, credit, a broader use of silver as money and contracts (Malinine 1953; Lüdeckens 1960; Martin 1995; Jasnow 2001, 39–43, and 2003, 804–810; Bleiberg 2002, 257, 270; Manning 2003, 843–852; Muhs 2005, 3–5), even the compilation of the first juridical manuals (Donker van Heel 1990; Lippert 2004). So terms such as ḫbr to trade/do business appear in some papyri of the Theban area around the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 10th centuries BC (Müller 2009, 262), while an expression like jrt šwj to trade is mentioned in a context of transactions such as leases, quotas, etc. in a stela of the 10th–9th centuries BC (Meeks 1995).

Another characteristic of Lower Egypt that is reminiscent of the Levant is the fragmentation of its territory into numerous political powers. This probably explains the abundance in this region of land donation stelae from the very end of the 2nd millennium and the first centuries of the 1st millennium, as if local elites sought institutional stability and security through their association with local sanctuaries. While such donations were extremely rare in Upper Egypt and may correspond to a strategy of ruralisation of the local elites there, conditions were radically different in Lower Egypt. Here donations were quite abundant (more than a hundred donation stelae are known from this period) and their frequency coincides with a flourishing local urbanism, the emergence of several capital cities, the consolidation of several independent kingdoms and the growth of local temples, from 950 BC. It is probably quite significant that no trace of donation stelae is known in Lower Egypt prior to this date. To sum up, the increasing integration of Lower Egypt in the trade networks of the Eastern Mediterranean may be partly explained by its flourishing agriculture, the cultivation of new spaces and a growing urban life whose prosperity led to the foundation of richly endowed sanctuaries. As linen, natron, papyrus, horses, ox-hides, fish, etc., were then traded with the Near East, it is quite probable that agriculture, cattle raising and the exploitation of the natural resources of the Delta provided goods for exportation (including cereals, as in the late 2nd millennium), paid with silver (Mumford 2007; Morkot 2007; Briant & Descat 1998, 80–81; Pope 2014, 155–156).

From a geopolitical point of view, however, an expanding trade also fostered rivalries and competition between powers in order to capture and control flows of wealth and networks of exchange (as for the notion of capture of trade circuits: Banaji 2007). In this vein, Kushites and Assyrians (later on, Neo-Babylonians) conquered, respectively, strategic crossroads such as Egypt and Syria in their attempts to control the Levant, the region where some of the most important maritime and caravan routes of the Iron Age converged. In fact, the Kushite conquest of Egypt may probably be explained by the emergence, after the collapse of the Ramesside empire in Asia, of several trade routes that directly linked important producing areas such as South Arabia, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the Mediterranean coast (Philistia, Phoenicia), thus by-passing the Nile Valley. Furthermore, from 800 BC these areas were politically organised as states for the first time and contacts between them, across the southern Red Sea seem to have been intense: on the one hand, South Arabia appears to have been divided into several kingdoms while, on the other hand, the Ethiopian kingdom of D’MT was ruled by kings who held titles typical of South Arabian monarchs, like MKRB and MLK, and peoples from South Arabia are attested in the Ethiopian plateau from 850 BC (Curtis 2004; Fattovich 2004; Philips 2004; Pope 2014). So it seems that an Ethiopian state (or several states) blocked in some way the traditional direct access of Nilotic powers to the Southern Red Sea by land (in this case, the Kushite state), thus forcing them to seek new, alternative ways of controlling this lucrative traffic. Thus, the Kushite conquest or, perhaps better, hegemony over a divided Egypt was only the first step in a strategy that led the Nubian armies towards Palestine and Syria, where they were brought face to face with the powerful Assyrian armies, sometimes with success. Later on the Saite kings would continue the same policy, this time against the Neo-Babylonian Empire. In any case, Kushite kings celebrated the arrival of beams from the cities of the North as well as of Asiatic copper employed in their monuments; they also mention the arrival of ships loaded with Syrian goods, while the expression man of the North became synonymous with slave (Morkot 2001, 248–251; Pope 2014, 113, 119 and 131). Recent discoveries prove that they mastered iron technology in the production of high-quality weapons (Smith 2008).

From an Assyrian perspective, it is possible to get a better perspective of the interests at stake. The use of dromedaries as a new means of transportation made it possible for the palatial powers along the Euphrates valley and in the area between the Euphrates and the Levant to accumulate huge quantities of exotic goods and precious metals within a few decades. According to the Assyrian booty lists, these included myrrh, frankincense and other spices from Arabia, as well as African goods (ivory, elephant tusks, elephant hide, gold, and ebony) and Indian goods (e.g. rose-wood) arriving through the same trade routes. So the early Assyrian strategy sought to control the long-distance trade hub of the Middle Euphrates, where the traditional routes along the river converged with the newly established overland routes. So, in the first third of the 9th century BC, Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) built a new city here and named it after himself, Kār-Ashurnasirpal, while his 9th century successors also conquered or built cities in this area and (re)named them with the element kār port of trade, emporium (Vér 2014, 791–792). Later on, within a few years (743–734 BC), the Assyrian army subjugated the vast territory between the band of the Euphrates and Egypt and established nine kārus in the Levant, from the mouth of the Orontes to Gaza, with the goal of supplying the Empire. Sargon II (721–705 BC) pushed the Assyrian border to the south of Gaza and seized an important commercial centre in the border zone:

The Egyptians and the Arabians – I made them overwhelmed by the glory of Aššur, my lord. At the mention of my name their hearts trembled, they let down their hands. I opened the sealed [harbo]ur of Egypt. The Assyrians and the Egyptians I mingled [to-]gether and I made them trade [with each other]. (Vér 2014, 793)

Sargon II also led campaigns towards the Zagros and the valleys of the Great Khorasan Road – which connected Mesopotamia and Iran, and which later became a very important route of the Silk Road – and created there six new kārus. Finally Sennacherib (704–681 BC) and his son, Esarhaddon (680–669 BC) established kārus in the Zagros, Phoenicia, Philistia and in the Delta of the Nile as well (Vér 2014, 794). So Assyria succeeded in controlling the most important trade routes in the Near East as well as strategic goods, thus making it possible to outrival enemies and competitors, such as when Assyria forbade the export of cedar beams to Egypt (Vér 2014, 798–799), a prohibition somewhat circumvented by Sidonian and Tyrian timbermen and private merchants (Semaan 2015, 98). At the same time, however, the consolidation of the Assyrian Empire also increased the opportunities for commercial expansion (Fletcher 2012).

In the end, palatial policies seeking control of the main trade routes crossing the Near East, the Red Sea and north-eastern Africa promoted more global ambitions and inspired a new kind of geopolitical vision, especially when compared with their Late Bronze Age precedents. The result was the emergence of the first world-empires spreading over two, sometimes three continents: the Assyrian Empire and the Achaemenid Empire. Their economic impact, however, encompassed a much broader area (Aruz et al. 2014).

Wages, hired labour and temples as centres of pre-monetisation

Certain economic features that were well documented in some near eastern societies during the 1st millennium BC can be traced back, in fact, to the last centuries of the 2nd millennium if not earlier. One of the most important, because of its economic and social consequences, is the increasingly decentralised management of land owned by temples and the crown and, consequently, the increasing presence of workers not directly dependent on these institutions. So private entrepreneurs as well as labour forms based on contracts, hired workers and wages become more frequent in the documentary record.

In the case of New Kingdom Egypt, for instance, temples and especially the Domain of god Amun and the memorial temples of the kings, became immense production centres that possessed considerable resources in land, herds, personnel as well as other resources, from mines to fisheries and textile workshops (Grandet 1994; Haring 1997). This marked a new era, as temples now replaced older forms of institutional agricultural and labour management based on networks of royal agricultural centres (such as the Old Kingdom ḥwt) and labour camps (most notably Middle Kingdom ḫnrt) as well as on relatively modest provincial temples. If figures evoked in documents such as the papyrus Harris I, the Wilbour Papyrus and other administrative documents are correct, New Kingdom temples became enormous economic machines, crucial poles in the agricultural and economic organisation of the countryside, able to produce huge amounts of agricultural and textile produce and promoting their own mining, trading, gathering and cattle-rearing operations. But their economic role went much further as they also specialised in the management of crown land. Under these conditions, the cultivation of the fields under their care (whether their own or those belonging to the crown) was made possible by the simultaneous use of several complementary work systems, including the utilisation of their own dependent workforce (compelled to deliver standard quotas of grain), of corvée and, increasingly, agricultural entrepreneurs and free tenants who leased land and delivered part of the harvest, even gold, to the owning institution (Moreno García 2008; 2010; 2014b). Under this decentralised system, temples and the crown saved resources (especially the sustenance of a permanent workforce only needed seasonally), could cultivate dispersed fields without the need to create an administrative infrastructure and obtained huge amounts of grain and silver as income. And here lay two capital questions. On the one hand, the considerable amounts of silver delivered by the temples as taxes to the crown reveal that they commercialised part of their production (about a ton of silver in just one case: Grandet 1994, 238). On the other hand, entrepreneurs had at their disposal a workforce that could be used when and where it was required, thus implying the possibility of hiring workers and the existence of wages. However the weight of hired work and wages in relation to other forms of work, especially serfdom and dependent workers, is difficult to evaluate (Moreno García 2008; 2010; 2014b).

Two sets of sources from the second half of the 3rd millennium BC nevertheless give some possible clues. In the first case, owners of mastabas declare that they had paid the artisans and workers who built their funerary monuments. One example is Akhetmehu at Giza: with regard to this my tomb of eternity, it was made for bread and beer; every workman who worked on it thanks all the gods for me. I gave them clothing, oil, copper and grain in great quantity (Strudwick 2005: 252). These and many other similar statements suggest that some economic activities outside the institutional sphere were based on agreements between workers and individuals on a contractual basis, with wages paid for work and services, as in the inscription of Intef son of Myt, dating from the late 3rd millennium BC: "I have hired (by contract) a ka-priest and I have hired (by contract) a lector-priest. Later on, during the New Kingdom, dozens of agreements between individuals and artisans stipulate the delivery of high-quality funerary equipment (such as coffins) in exchange for payments, and these transactions took place outside the economic circuits dominated by the palatial sphere (Cooney 2007). As for the use of contractual agreements and hired work in the agricultural sphere prior to the 1st millennium BC, a second set of sources might cast some light. Several private inscriptions from the late 3rd millennium BC evoke the acquisition of fields, ships, herds of cattle, goats and assess, even people, while some wealthy individuals even boasted about not having enslaved people (usually women) in periods of distress. In other cases, indebtedness and problems related to inheritance and divisions of property led to the dissolution of private patrimonies, to the extent that preserving and bequeathing the familial assets intact (lit. the house of the father") to the next generation became a major concern and a source of pride in private inscriptions. Hence both sets of documents reveal that wages and hired work were not unknown in Egypt from the late 3rd millennium BC, including wages partially paid in metals. Furthermore, debts, hard times, problems due to inheritances, people deprived of their fields, etc., put at the disposal of both institutions and wealthy individuals a workforce compelled to sell their labour and to integrate themselves into patronage networks in order to survive. The correspondence of Heqanakht, for instance, reveals that the household of this well-off landowner included several subordinates employed in the cultivation of his fields (Allen 2002).

Two final points regarding Egypt should be considered. The first one is the existence of a commercial private agriculture, mainly recorded when taxes were paid, centred on the cultivation of date-palms, flowers, orchards and vineyards and important enough to justify the use of new irrigation tools such as the shaduf. The introduction of this irrigation device around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC made possible the perennial irrigation of small plots and expanded the possibilities for horticulture, especially in peri-urban areas. The papyrus Louvre E 3226 (dated from 1450 BC), for instance, records the exchange of grain and dates (one sack of grain for one sack of dates). While the grain was controlled by institutional granaries, the dates were produced and delivered by individuals (Megally 1977, 254–257; Moreno García 2014b, 49). Other New Kingdom papyri record the delivery of flowers, dates and other horticultural produce made by individuals to ships sent by institutions (Janssen 1961). As for the second point, New Kingdom documents reveal the increasing use of precious metals in everyday transactions, including the acquisition of slaves, fields and cattle. Especially significant is the case of fishermen, who were paid in silver and who also paid their taxes in silver, thus suggesting the commercialisation of their catches. As for the tomb and temple robberies of the late New Kingdom, when huge amounts of silver and gold were stolen, the Ramesside documents reveal that robbers used the booty for the acquisition of fields, slaves, etc. In all cases traders appear as crucial elements in the transformation of agricultural produce into precious metals and their activities seem crucial not only in the service of temples and the crown but also individuals (Moreno García 2014a; 2014b). The extent of such operations is difficult to evaluate but, judging from the evidence in the Papyrus Harris I and other contemporary texts, it seems to have been quite important. In fact, it also appears that Egyptian grain was exported, partly at least in the context of agreements between states. Liverani, for instance, suggests a possible link between the exports of Egyptian grain to the land of Hatti and the depreciation of the value of silver in Egypt around the reign of Merenptah (from a ratio silver/copper of 1:100 to only 1:60 deben), suggesting that huge quantities of this metal had arrived into Egypt as payments for the grain delivered (Liverani 1990, 235–236; Moreno García 2014b, 67–72). To sum up, an increasing role of traders and silver in institutional and everyday transactions, the commercialisation of agricultural produce (both produced by institutions and individuals, especially horticultural goods), the availability of hired work and decentralised management appear to be related phenomena in New Kingdom Egypt. A tendency that would continue during the 1st millennium BC with the first land leases.

Similar conditions also prevailed in contemporary Mesopotamia. Here, the use of silver in private economic activities as well as activities carried out by private entrepreneurs goes back to the 3rd millennium BC (Ouyang 2013; Garfinkle 2012; Steinkeller 2004; Paoletti 2008; Peyronel 2010; Rosa 2011; Bulgarelli; Widell 2008; Wilcke 2014; Cripps 2014), while hired labour is well attested in Ur III times. Then antichretic loaning arrangements procured extra labour, when the interest on a barley loan was repaid in human labour, usually in the form of harvest work. In fact, both the provincial economies and the royal sector were forced to hire workers for wages, usually paid in barley although the occasional use of silver is documented as well (Steinkeller 2015). As for temples, they played a dominant (but not exclusive) role in the economic life of the country from the late 4th millennium, as the cuneiform archives reveal (Steinkeller 2004; Schrakamp 2013; Selz 2014). A position that still prevailed in southern Mesopotamia during the second half of the 2nd millennium in spite of the increasing importance of business and private entrepreneurs (Van de Mieroop 1992). In fact, private entrepreneurs appear in these documents partly working for themselves and partly carrying out missions for temples and palaces.

Later on, while many documents from Kassite Babylonia still remain unpublished, temples appear nevertheless as beneficiaries of royal land grants. This was a period of an apparently increasing ruralisation of society, when the trend towards smaller settlements accelerated. Nevertheless it also witnessed the expansion of the indirect management of land, as kudurru documents prove. These texts concern state land allocated by the king to high officials, such as viziers, high priests etc. and, to a lesser extent, to temples. An example is Itti-Ezida-lummir, a dignitary whose private archive mainly deals with real estate sales concerning houses and house plots but which also includes a kudurru, unfortunately quite damaged. He appears to have been a well-off Babylonian, in possession of some houses in Babylon, as well as of a land donation of a larger estate in this province or in others close to Babylon itself. These royal grants enabled the king to relinquish direct control over his land by parcelling it out to favoured members of the elite. This had the double advantage of rewarding loyal service while absolving the state of the need to manage the exploitation of the land itself (Baker 2011, 304–306; Paulus 2013; 2014). Similarly, during the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods, institutions like temples and the royal palace itself often preferred not to manage their agricultural holdings directly but rather delegated agrarian management to others by various means, including the participation of entrepreneurs (Stolper 1985; Bongenaar 2000; Abraham 2004; Wunsch 2012). Alongside kudurru, several private archives have also been identified in Kassite Babylonia, often containing sale and loan contracts but, for some reason, it seems as though some restriction affected large property sales, to the point that only small estates like private fields around towns, gardens or houses and building plots could be freely sold (Paulus 2013; 2014). There is also evidence of thousands of people forming a mass of slaves in Kassite times, being allowed to live in family groups but ascribed to compulsory work for the state and often trying to run away (Tenney 2011). It appears then that the consolidation of a wealthy landed elite was concomitant not only with royal grants of land, but with land sales of small plots and the existence of serfs and slaves.

A similar pattern emerges in northern Mesopotamia and Syria, where many documents from the first half of the 2nd millennium concern fields sold by private individuals to other private individuals. According to Zaccagnini, the overall pattern of private land ownership from the late 3rd to the mid-1st millennium in these regions (Nuzi, Ebla, Ugarit, Alalakh, Emar, Ekalte, Assyria in the Late Bronze Age) is characterised by the disproportion between a relatively small number of large patrimonies owned by individual large landowners and a vast number of small plots of family land. The agricultural activities carried out for the absentee landlords were performed by a subordinate workforce formed by local peasants who were the former owners of the land, which they had to sell in order to settle economic difficulties and were thus reduced to the condition of debtors or workers for powerful men. As the deeds of transfer reveal, the great majority of privately owned fields were too small to represent the exclusive source of maintenance for an average family. Many peasants were compelled to seek additional income. The basic trend is thus one of a progressive impoverishment of the rural strata and a generalised disintegration of rural family properties that were conveyed to single individuals building up vast land patrimonies (Zaccagnini 1999). This explains why so many texts refer to the loss of property or the right to cultivate communal land to the profit of buyers whose interests sometimes extended over considerable areas encompassing several villages (Renger 1995, 304–307; Beckman 1997; 2008). Under these conditions, hired work flourished, to the point that a special formula for hiring contracts was developed in private documents (Farber 1978, 30–35; Klengel 1987, 163–165; Dosch 1987, 231–232).

The Old Babylonian period palaces also benefited from similar conditions as they could now avoid maintaining a permanent labour force; instead they granted economically viable activities such as herding, farming, selling agricultural products, collecting obligations owed to the palace and recruiting seasonal labourers, to individuals (middle-men, entrepreneurs) who bore the risks, who could make some profit and who could mobilise the workforce necessary to cultivate the land. This is the Palastgeschäfte system (Goddeeris 2002, 338–346, 352–353; Földi 2014, with previous bibliography). Thus the Laws of Eshnunna (18th century BC) and the Code of Hammurabi (around 1700 BC), provide some of the earliest sources of information about the wages of (putatively free) hired labourers (Scheidel 2010, 438–440). Moreover documents relating to the hiring of workers in the Old Babylonian period reveal that silver was always valued above barley in the payment of wages; workers hired for one year received proportionately less than those hired for a month, while those paid on a daily basis received the equivalent of the highest monthly wage (Farber 1978, 30–35). In any case the gradual impoverishment of certain sectors of the peasantry was a tendency that continued in northern Mesopotamia during the second half of the 2nd millennium, when strain from states on the working population and on its capacity to reproduce itself, an increasingly impoverished rural population, the flight of peasants and of urban underclasses joining with nomads to plunder the countryside, contributed to a slow breakdown of the palace-centred economy, especially in Syria-Palestine, during the late second millennium (Liverani 1987). Later on, during the middle of the 1st millennium BC, hired work represented a substantial part of the workforce employed by institutions, and their wages (partly in silver, partly in foodstuff) far exceeded the salaries of the institutional personnel (Jursa et al. 2010, 660–681; Rader 2015; Jursa 2015).

Egypt and Mesopotamia thus reveal that the second half of 2nd millennium was a period in which indirect forms of land management were concomitant with an increasing recourse to traders and agricultural entrepreneurs, in a context of a growing commercialisation and monetisation of agricultural produce. While the role of such intermediaries is well attested in ancient Mesopotamia from the 3rd millennium, in the case of pharaonic Egypt it is during the New Kingdom when inscriptions attest for the first time the importance of traders at the service of temples and institutions, and when many expressions reveal the role played by trade and business in the institutional sphere. Not only do traders (šwtjw) appear for the first time in administrative documents, but their role was considered important enough to appear in the literary genre of the satires of trades as an occupation attractive enough for scribes-to-be. Furthermore, many Semitic terms related to trade and business then entered the Egyptian vocabulary. In fact, the role of traders was crucial in the commercialisation of agricultural produce and its transformation into precious metals that could be subsequently taxed by the state. In any case, the scarcity of Egyptian sources when compared with Mesopotamia hardly conceals the fact that many parallels existed between both regions and that the role of temples as economic agencies in the second half of the 2nd millennium was related to the increasing role of trade, money and decentralised forms of agricultural management in the institutional sphere (Moreno García 2014b, 67–72).

Precious metals and proto-monetary forms of exchange

The famous papyrological dossier on the tomb robberies in the late Ramesside period reveals that huge quantities of precious metals were being robbed from temples and royal tombs in the Theban area, and that robbers operated in collusion with priests, policemen, officials and necropolis workers. In the same documents traders appear as crucial mediators in order to launder the gold and silver stolen as they enabled robbers to buy fields, slaves and cattle with their part of the booty. In other cases they helped melt down metals (Vernus 1993, 64–73). However royal burials and temples were far from being the only target of robbers during these troubled times. Other texts also reveal that modest tombs, such as those owned by the artisans at Der el-Medina, were affected in the same way and that the metallic objects stored in them were avidly sought after (Cooney 2014). Sherratt has stressed that tomb looting in search of metals became a generalised phenomenon in the late 2nd and early 1st millennium BC, when the decentralised circulation of bronze (sometimes in the form of objects, sometimes in scrap or recyclable form) in ever-increasing quantities, combined with the circulation of itinerant metalworkers, meant that bronze and bronze goods had become available directly to almost anyone who wanted them. This subverted the tight control which eastern Mediterranean ruling elites had once attempted to exert over the bulk circulation and centralised redistribution of copper and tin, and contributed to their collapse at the end of the East Mediterranean Bronze Age. Furthermore, this bronze inflation must have affected the value of bronze in the eastern half of the Mediterranean and promoted the increasing production of traditionally highly precious materials like iron. Finally, she also argues that it encouraged the search for silver, the traditional standard of exchange in the East, leading Cypriot and Phoenician activities further and further west, culminating in the Phoenician arrival at Huelva (Spain) by the end of the 10th century (Sherratt 2000; 2012; cf. also Yule in press). Other scholars such as Rehren have emphasised the existence, alongside a mainstream bronze economy closely administered by institutions like temples and the state, of a small-volume uncontrolled scrap metal economy serving the archaeologically often less visible peasant and migrant populations (Rehren & Pusch 2012). The discovery at Bate’s Island around Marsa Matruh, about 300 km west of Alexandria, of furnaces and traces of a modest metallurgical production (needles, pins, etc.), in the context of informal small-scale trading activities dominated by Libyan populations, provides an example of such activities (White 2002, 47–53, 168–174). Decentralised circuits of exchange, together with the increasing use of metals (including silver) in everyday activities, reveal the growing importance of trade and the transformation of commodities into silver and gold, thus leading to what could be called a proto-monetary system led by merchants.

The case of Egypt during the New Kingdom is particularly noteworthy. An exceptional document from this period, the papyrus Harris I, records the massive donations made by pharaoh Ramesses III (1184–1153 BC) to several temples during his reign. Several passages enumerate the huge amounts of goods paid as annual taxes by the servants of the royal mortuary temple and later donated by the king to the temples. Along with linen, cattle, agricultural produce, gold from Nubia and the Eastern Desert, etc., the text also mentions enormous quantities of silver, a metal not produced in Egypt and which, consequently, could only arrive to the Nile Valley through trade and tribute. Only the Theban temples, for example, received three assignments of silver for an amount of, respectively, 10,964.9 deben, 3606.1 deben and 4204.7 deben, that is to say 997.8 kg, 328 kg and 382 kg (Grandet 1994: 238 and 325). How those servants obtained such considerable quantities of silver is unfortunately not stated, but it is quite reasonable to think that the commercialisation of part of the harvests of the temples, as well as taxes levied from temple fisheries and herds, trading activities, etc., made it possible for these institutions to accumulate substantial amounts of silver and pay the taxes in silver on a regular, annual basis.

Other sources reveal that the crown levied taxes in gold and silver, among other goods, from temples and towns in New Kingdom times (Jursa & Moreno García 2015, 149–151). In any case, exchange and the transformation of agricultural produce into metals imply the existence of markets and commercial operations in which traders played a crucial role. Their role as intermediaries in the economic activities led by temples is described in several inscriptions from this period, when they appear at the service of the crown and the temples, to the point that overseers of merchants became part of the temple personnel. In other cases, however, they led their own commercial activities (including missions for wealthy Egyptians) and were taxed by the crown (Castle 1992; Moreno García 2013, 94–96; 2014, 67–72). Traders were thus indispensable not only for transporting, buying and selling goods at different places but also in the transformation of agricultural produce into precious metals and vice-versa, as in the case of traders, apparently at the service of a temple, who exchanged gold for foodstuff (Peet 1934; Megally 1974; 1975). Official missions also involved the use of silver, as in the case of a scribe working for an institution and in charge of the delivery of 46 ingots of silver as well as quotas of other goods (fish, wool, etc.) in the context of trading operations involving the participation of several ship captains (Wente 1990, 120–122). As for fishermen, several sources reveal that they routinely paid their taxes in silver. Ramesside ostracon Gardiner 86, for instance, mentions workers involved in herding and gathering activities in the Delta, who delivered animals, salt, natron and plants to the Domain of Amun while fishermen instead paid a fixed amount of silver.

Later on, when Kushite pharaoh Taharqa endowed a sanctuary in the Memphite region, part of the revenue granted to the temple consisted again of silver delivered by fishermen as taxes. Likewise when Herodotus evoked centuries later the Egyptian tribute paid to the Persian treasury, he specified that it consisted of 700 talents of silver as well as silver delivered by the fishermen of lake Moeris (Moreno García 2013, 94–96). Finally, a single Ramesside official in charge of the production of natron in the area of Fayum delivered to the royal treasury an astonishing amount of 91 kg of gold as his annual tax, thus suggesting that this gold came from customs revenue or from exports, especially when considering that natron was then crucial in the production of glass, a flourishing industry in the Near East during the Late Bronze Age (Moreno García 2013, 96).

Small-scale trade also involved the use of silver and gold (Castle 1992, 256–263). A scribe, for instance, wrote to a colleague to forbid him to behave in such a reprehensible way again as he had done in the past, when he set aside part of the rations under his care in order to convert them into silver (Wente 1990, 114). Three tenants who cultivated some royal land assigned to a temple, are said to have paid gold into the Pharaoh’s treasury (Wente 1990, 130–131). A papyrus recording the collection of diverse goods along the Nile evokes the delivery of silver to a woman at the meryt quay, marketplace (Condon 1984, 63–65), and a market scene from the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep (around 2400 BC) records the exchange of a piece of cloth in exchange for 6 shaty, a unit of value currently used with gold and silver (Moussa & Altenmüller 1977, 85, fig. 10, pl. 24). And, as stated before, traders played a crucial role in the tomb robberies of the late New Kingdom, as they recycled the stolen metals into other goods, thus suggesting that the circulation of precious metals was quite common within Egyptian society and that the sudden appearance of gold and silver in the hands of commoners did not arouse particular suspicion. In some cases stolen gold was melted in the houses of priests (Demarée 2010, 57). How did precious metals circulate at the local, small-scale level?

The discovery of a small treasure at El-Amarna may provide some clues. In a small open space beside a public well in the North Suburb a pottery jar was buried, containing 23 bars of gold and a quantity of silver fragments and roughly made rings, as well as a silver figurine of a Hittite god. The total weight of the gold was 3375 g (about 37 deben), while the total weight of the silver came to 1085 grams (about 12 deben). As Kemp has stated, this discovery illustrates easily convertible wealth poised on the point of re-entering the economy at a private level (Kemp 1992, 244–246). Some texts confirm this impression. Ostracon BM 5631 from