The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models (Social Science History) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804757550 ISBN 13: 9780804757553

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Historians and archaeologists normally assume that the economies of ancient Greece and Rome between about 1000 BC and AD 500 were distinct from those of Egypt and the Near East. However, very different kinds of evidence survive from each of these areas, and specialists have, as a result, developed very different methods of analysis for each region. This book marks the first time that historians and archaeologists of Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome have come together with sociologists, political scientists, and economists, to ask whether the differences between accounts of these regions reflect real economic differences in the past, or are merely a function of variations in the surviving evidence and the intellectual traditions that have grown up around it. The contributors describe the types of evidence available and demonstrate the need for clearer thought about the relationships between evidence and models in ancient economic history, laying the foundations for a new comparative account of economic structures and growth in the ancient Mediterranean world.

About this title

About the Author

J. G. Manning is Associate Professor of Classics at Stanford University. Ian Morris is the Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Stanford University.

From the Back Cover

"We have waited too long for this fine book."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"[This book] is an important and timely contribution to a growing field in the study of Mediterranean antiquity."--Canadian Journal of History

From the Inside Flap

Historians and archaeologists normally assume that the economies of ancient Greece and Rome between about 1000 BC and AD 500 were distinct from those of Egypt and the Near East. However, very different kinds of evidence survive from each of these areas, and specialists have, as a result, developed very different methods of analysis for each region. This book marks the first time that historians and archaeologists of Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome have come together with sociologists, political scientists, and economists, to ask whether the differences between accounts of these regions reflect real economic differences in the past, or are merely a function of variations in the surviving evidence and the intellectual traditions that have grown up around it. The contributors describe the types of evidence available and demonstrate the need for clearer thought about the relationships between evidence and models in ancient economic history, laying the foundations for a new comparative account of economic structures and growth in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE ANCIENT ECONOMY

Evidence and Models

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5755-3

Contents

List of Figures....................................................................................................................ixList of Tables.....................................................................................................................xiList of Contributors...............................................................................................................xiii1. Introduction IAN MORRIS AND J. G. MANNING.....................................................................................1Part I: The Near East2. The Near East: The Bronze Age MARIO LIVERANI..................................................................................473. The Economy of the Near East in the First Millennium BC PETER R. BEDFORD......................................................584. Comment on Liverani and Bedford MARK GRANOVETTER..............................................................................84Part II: The Aegean5. Archaeology, Standards of Living, and Greek Economic History IAN MORRIS.......................................................916. Linear and Nonlinear Flow Models for Ancient Economies JOHN K. DAVIES.........................................................1277. Comment on Davies TAKESHI AMEMIYA.............................................................................................157Part III: Egypt8. The Relationship of Evidence to Models in the Ptolemaic Economy (332-30 BC) J. G. MANNING.....................................1639. Evidence and Models for the Economy of Roman Egypt ROGER S. BAGNALL...........................................................187Part IV: The Roman Mediterranean10. "The Advantages of Wealth and Luxury": The Case for Economic Growth in the Roman Empire R. BRUCE HITCHNER.....................20711. Framing the Debate Over Growth in the Ancient Economy RICHARD SALLER..........................................................22312. Comment on Hitchner and Saller AVNER GREIF....................................................................................239Bibliography.......................................................................................................................243Index..............................................................................................................................281

Chapter One

Introduction

IAN MORRIS AND J. G. MANNING

Ancient historians conventionally draw a line through maps of the Mediterranean basin. On one side of it are the Greek and Roman worlds; on the other, Egypt and the Near East. Aeschylus and Herodotus already made a similar distinction twenty-five hundred years ago, but since the late eighteenth century AD the delineation has provided the basic structure for studying the ancient Mediterranean world. After 250 years of scholarly consensus about the reality and importance of this Greco-Roman/Egyptian-Near Eastern boundary, a major shift of opinions began in the late 1980s. Some specialists announced that there was just one East Mediterranean culture in antiquity, stretching from Mesopotamia to the Adriatic. Others asserted that while this had been true in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, the East Mediterranean koine had fragmented in the fifth century BC. Others still acknowledged the merits of the traditional view that classical Greco-Roman and Egyptian-Near Eastern cultures were fairly distinct but believed the former had strong Afroasiatic roots in the latter. Finally, some insisted that there was no point trying to make distinctions within the Mediterranean at all, since the entire basin had been tied together in a kaleidoscopic pattern of constantly shifting interactions. Throughout the 1990s the old dividing line was arguably the most prominent academic battlefield in ancient Mediterranean studies.

The fiercest clashes have been among students of ancient literature, art, and myth. But challenging the traditional divided-Mediterranean model also has profound implications for economic historians. If-as many philologists and art historians now claim-Greco-Roman culture was an offshoot of Egyptian and Near Eastern culture, why were the economic systems of these two broad regions of the Mediterranean as different as historians have traditionally believed? The debates over Mediterranean culture require economic historians to ask new questions; and the answers to these economic questions will necessarily feed back into the debates among cultural historians. In this volume, economic historians of various regions try to lay the foundation for a systematic comparative economic history of the ancient Mediterranean. They highlight key problems in the evidence, models, and intellectual traditions of the economic history of different regions of the Mediterranean in different periods of time. The book is merely a first step: Our main goal is to clear away some of the conceptual fog and empirical ignorance that currently bedevil comparative economic analysis.

This introductory chapter is a position paper. We define the central problem and explain the state of the debate as we understand it. We also make some recommendations for research in the next decade. It has become fashionable in the last few years to complain that ancient economic history has run its course, and that there is no hope of real progress. We disagree completely. Serious economic analysis of the ancient Mediterranean world has barely begun. A century of important work has created a large (but problematic) database, honed powerful (but somewhat narrow) methods, and identified fundamental (but unresolved) problems. Ancient historians should be proud of these achievements. But the field remains radically undertheorized and methodologically impoverished. Theory, method, and data are inseparable. Archaeologists and historians have made great advances in classifying and analyzing the primary sources but have not thought enough about how to build models or how to relate models to the empirical facts.

We see four particular limitations in the way research is currently organized:

1. In the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, ancient historians debated the purpose of their field-its function in the world and how it should be organized so as to perform that function. The divided-Mediterranean model is a legacy of these debates. Whether this division helps or hinders our understanding depends on the particular historian's notion of the purpose of ancient economic history.

2. No matter the region of study-Egypt, western Asia, Greece, or Rome-almost all ancient historians work within a broad, shared tradition. Ancient history is empiricist, positivist, inductive, and particularistic, driven mainly by philological agendas created in the nineteenth century. For most practitioners, economic history provides background information that will help scholars interpret more important cultural activities. There is little sense that ancient economic history contributes to any larger questions. The fields reward technical expertise in reading texts or recovering artifacts but put little emphasis on model building, methodology, or comparison. The result is economic history without economics.

3. Beneath the level of this shared tradition, there are deep divisions between Classics, Egyptology, and Near Eastern studies. Scholars in each field tend to be located in separate university or museum departments, and the emphasis that all these fields put on very specific linguistic skills discourages shared graduate programs. The separate scholarly communities use terms in different ways, and while work across these boundaries is more common than it was a generation ago, it remains the exception. The separation of disciplines by language reinforces perceived differences in socioeconomic structure, greatly inhibiting systematic comparison of economic systems.

4. Different kinds of evidence survive from different parts of the Mediterranean. For example, Egypt is rich in documentary papyri recording family and individual economic transactions. Greece has little or no evidence of this kind but has a sophisticated literary tradition that addresses the morality of economic behavior. Given the positivism of these fields, "economic history" has come to have very different meanings to scholars specializing in different parts of the Mediterranean. Egyptologists and papyrologists lean toward detailed accounts of specifics; Hellenists, toward sweeping overviews of ideologies. There are few generalizations that can be made across disciplinary boundaries because of the contrasts in the kinds of evidence available. Progress depends on careful consideration of how we build models, how our conceptual frameworks relate to the data, and how we can develop methods that will allow us to test models across regions.

We see six ways to resolve these problems:

1. Conduct more discussion of the metanarratives that structure arguments: By "metanarratives" we mean the grand stories within which some questions assume importance, while others are rendered irrelevant. Charles Tilly (1984: 1) once suggested that historical sociologists "bear the nineteenth century like an incubus." Ancient historians are afflicted by similar spirits, but some of them are even older, haunting us from the eighteenth century. Only by self-conscious discussion of metanarratives can we decide if we still want to ask the same questions as Weber or Marx (let alone Winckelmann or Niebuhr). If we exorcize their ghosts, we need to know what we want to put in their place.

2. A deliberate turn toward social science history: We define what we mean by this in more detail below, but for the moment we sum it up as a commitment to assuming the basic rationality of economic actors and systems, formulating explicit explanatory models, and exposing these models to the risk of falsification. Social science historians have developed powerful tools for the analysis of economic systems and for rigorous comparisons across space and time. It is both arrogant and ignorant for ancient historians to assume that they can do good economic history without these tools.

3. A broader approach to economic history: Historians must focus on both the performance and structure of ancient economies. This will require new models, new methods, and new kinds of evidence.

4. More thoughtful integration of archaeology into ancient economic history: In many contexts archaeology provides the only data that can be quantified on a large scale, and there can be no real economic history without quantification. The archaeological record is subject to formation processes every bit as complex as those behind the written record, so this is not simply a matter of using an objective material record to correct a subjective textual one. But on the other hand, some classes of archaeological data can potentially be recovered from all regions of the ancient Mediterranean, vastly improving our ability to write comparative history.

5. More emphasis on ancient demography and technology: Economic history depends on understanding demographic trends and the production possibilities set by technology.

6. More detailed comparisons of economic institutions through time and space: There has been little work on whether superficially different institutions in different parts of the Mediterranean were functional equivalents, or whether similar-looking institutions in fact functioned differently. It is telling that the only extended comparative study of premodern financial systems-including ancient Mesopotamia, Periclean Athens, and Augustan Rome-is by an economist, not an ancient historian (Goldsmith 1987).

This volume is a step toward these goals. It began in 1997 with discussions at the dinner seminars of Stanford's Social Science History Institute, which led to the institute hosting a conference on evidence and models in ancient economic history in the spring of 1998. The conference featured four pairs of specialists on the regions of the Near East, Greece, Egypt, and the Roman Empire; responses came from social science historians based in Stanford's Economics, Sociology, and Political Science Departments. Participants hoped to cross two sets of barriers: those dividing ancient history from the social sciences, and those dividing specialists within Mediterranean studies.

There was a flurry of conferences on the ancient economy in the late 1990s, but the Stanford gathering was rather unusual. John Davies, who took part in several of these meetings, concluded that "in general, two main messages stemmed from the Stanford conference. The first was a continuous undercurrent of determined deconstruction of the Finley divided-Mediterranean model as static, simplistic, useless, and retrograde. The second comprised a set of signals that the pre-Alexander economies of the Ancient Near East were vastly more complex and diverse than conventional wisdom dreamed of" (Davies 2001: 13).

Rather than rushing the papers into print, we have taken several years to discuss them and reflect upon their potential impact. Important new studies have appeared since 1998, allowing us to refine our goals more clearly. This is not a systematic review of ancient Mediterranean economies or a fully developed model (desirable as both of these would be). It is simply an attempt to open up discussion. There have been plenty of conferences of classical historians featuring a token Near Eastern specialist (for example, Parkins and Smith 1998), or of Near Easterners with a token classicist (Bongenaar 2000), but few attempts to bring the fields together as equal participants. We want to move toward agreement on questions, methods, terminology, and problems. No two contributors have exactly the same ideas about how the field should move, nor do they each address the whole range of issues listed above. Some chapters concentrate on describing the dominant models in a particular field; others, on new kinds of evidence or forms of argument. But all are united by a commitment to building a generalizing and comparative ancient economic history, connected to debates in the social sciences as well as-but not instead of-those in the humanities.

The Nature of the Problem

Europeans and their colonists on other continents have studied parts of the ancient Mediterranean world intensively for centuries, largely because many of them saw the Bible and Greco-Roman literature as the two main foundations of their cultural identity. Theology and Latin dominated medieval education. In the nineteenth century theology retreated and Greek joined Latin; and in the twentieth century Greek and Latin both lost ground to sciences and modern languages. But even in the early twenty-first century Classics and biblical studies remain huge scholarly enterprises, with annual meetings attracting thousands of professionals. At the editors' own university, the introductory undergraduate courses in Egyptian and Greek history draw more students than those in any other field except U.S. history.

The formalization of scientific universities in the nineteenth century preserved the emphasis on ancient Mediterranean studies in two main clusters. The first was analysis of Greco-Roman society, called Classics in the English-speaking world, and Altertumswissenschaft-the science of antiquity-by German speakers. This was normally defined chronologically as beginning with Homer's poetry around 700 BC and continuing at least until the Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity, roughly a thousand years later. The discovery of the Aegean Bronze Age in the 1870s raised new questions; some archaeologists felt that it was part of Classics, while others thought that it was not properly Greek. The chronological boundaries also shifted with geography, as Greek and Roman political power waxed and waned. Down to about 335 BC the classical lands were restricted to the shores of the Aegean Sea, central Italy, and the Greek colonies scattered around the Mediterranean. After 335, Alexander's conquests carried Hellenism to Afghanistan and India, but this larger Hellenistic world (an English term coined after the German Hellenismus, itself a creation of the nineteenth century) was widely seen as not being fully classical. In the second century BC Rome began taking over the western Mediterranean. Some scholars included England and Romania in the classical realm, since those regions fell to Roman legions; while others limited the "real" classical world to the shores of the Mediterranean.

The second scholarly cluster was the study of societies linked to the Bible. Some academics extended this region as far east as Iran, while others stopped it in Mesopotamia. Egypt was generally seen as part of this world, although it was often studied in a separate department. The biblical stories of the Hebrews' wanderings meant that-unlike the situation in Classics-there was complete agreement that the Bronze Age was part of Near Eastern studies. Chronological disputes were pushed back into the Neolithic; sometimes this was ceded to archaeologists in Anthropology or Archaeology Departments, and sometimes not. Most specialists drew a line with Alexander's conquests, abandoning the Hellenistic kingdoms and Roman Near East to the classicists, even if classicists were not always very keen to embrace them.

The West Mediterranean was little analyzed, except insofar as it was affected by Greek colonization and incorporated into the Roman Empire. Most often, specialists on the literature, material culture, thought, and history of the ancient Mediterranean were concentrated in free-standing departments of Classics or Near Eastern studies rather than being distributed across Departments of History, Literature, Philosophy, Art, or Linguistics, as was the case with specialists in most other world civilizations. Classics and the Near East, were, in a sense, the original Area Studies programs.

In common with many humanists and social scientists of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean sought to explain the European invention of modernity; that is, how Europe had diverged from, and become superior to, the rest of the world. Most of the grand theorists of modernity had classical educations, and Karl Marx and Max Weber made particularly extensive use of the ancient Mediterranean in their general frameworks. On the whole, the experts-in Near Eastern studies as well as in Classics-concluded that race, climate, or sociology meant that Egyptians and Asians, in the great river valleys, got a precocious start in civilization but ran up against limits they could not exceed. The Greeks then took over the torch, passing it on to the Romans and ultimately to Western Europe. In one of the most influential books ever written, Johann Joachim Winckelmann proposed that Egyptian art

is to be compared to a tree which, though well cultivated, has been checked and arrested in its growth by a worm, or other casualties; for it remained unchanged, precisely the same, yet without attaining its perfection, until the period when Greek kings held sway over them ... the same thing may have happened to [art] as to the mythology; for the fables of the Egyptians were seemingly born anew beneath the skies of Greece, and took an entirely different form, and other names. (Winckelmann 1880 [1764]: 132-33, 135)

Similar sentiments were repeated thousands of times between the 1760s and 1960s.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804757550
• ISBN 13: 9780804757553
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Manning J.G., Morris Ian