-->und alle anderen, die neugierig genug sind einen Regennachmittag mit dem kontroversen Thema zu verbringen:
Aus: Trade and Finance in Ancient Mesepotamia,( MOS Studies 1), Proceedingsof the First MOS Symposium (Leiden 1997), Edited by J.G. Dercksen, Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Institut Te Istambul 1999, S. 5-23
Wir müssen alle unsere Nische nutzen:
MONIES, MOTIVES, AND METHODS IN BABYLONIAN ECONOMICS
MARVIN A. POWELL (DEKALB)
The title of my paper I owe, once more, to a bardic comment by my friend Manfred Krebernik, during the course of our communal worship of Ninkasi. My original commission from the organizers of"Trade and Finance" was to present a paper on the use of commodities as money, on the weighing system and its accuracy, and on the purity of metals. As I pointed out in the version of my paper printed in the symposium reader, this could easily be the subject for a book, and, in fact, even a book would not be able to satisfactorily answer a lot of the questions pertaining to these problems. In the present version of my paper I have tried to provide a succinct summary of what I think I know about these topics and to recast the paper in the light of the issues, evidence, and points of view presented at the Leiden symposium.
1. J. Renger and Mesopotamian Economy
On the whole, papers of the symposium and discussion of the evidence and its interpretation supported the general picture sketched out by me in previous papers (Powell 1996, 1990, 1989-90, 1979, 1978b, 1977) about money and the physical means of transferring money - by weight in the case of metal monies - in the Mesopotamian economy. Essentially that position is: 1. Money that is sufficiently like our money to permit legitimate use of the term can already be seen in Babylonia by the mid-third millennium. 2. By this time the economy had developed sufficiently to need something like money, and that need is reflected throughout, not just in so-called"private" transactions, even though a description of Babylonia as a"money" economy is hardly justified. 3. By ca. 2500 silver is already in the process of becoming the primary definition of economic value and retains and develops that function in a continuous and cummulative fashion (except for a hiatus at the end of the Bronze Age) until the cuneiform sources gradually disappear toward the end of the first millennium BC. 4. That the fundamental motive governing economic activity is self interest, which manifests itself in the profit motive, particularly - but not exclusively - hi transactions involving silver.
None of these premises can be proved beyond doubt. The reason for this is quite simple: even though we seem to have lots of texts, in most cases the outstanding feature in any pattern of evidence is the lacunae. We are perforce constrained to bridge these gaps by quantum leaps that, at bottom, can only be intuitive.
Significantly, the Old Assyrian specialists at the symposium (J.G. Dercksen, M.T. Larsen, and K.R. Veenhof) presented compelling evidence for the point of view that has long been held by scholars specializing in the study of Old Assyrian economics, namely, that Old Assyrian trade operated primarily on the basis of supply and demand, that profit was, if not the only motive, the driving force behind economic activity, and that risk was something one accepted as a fact of economic life but which one sought to avoid or minimize if one had the option. Likewise, K. Radner (on later Assyria), M. Stol (on Old Babylonian), and A.C.V.M. Bongenaar (Neo-BabyIonian) all pointed to evidence for wide circulation of silver. Particularly noteworthy, is the fact that H. Neumann's study, which summarized and elaborated upon his own extensive experience with merchant activity and motives in the Ur m period, supports the assumption of a continuity between Ur III and Old Babylonian. Finally, G. van Driel presented a general theory of economic development in Babylonia that largely corresponds to assumptions that underlie my treatment of money in the Mesopotamian economy.
Counterpoised to this general consensus of opinion is the methodological and epistemological problem raised by J. Renger's essay titled"Subsistenzproduktion und redistributive Palastwirtschaft: Wo bleibt die Nische für das Geld?" (Renger 1995) reprinted in the symposium reader as a basis for discussion. The title encapsules three theoretical premises that J. Renger has discussed in this and other works: 1. that"redistributive" economy was a primary feature of ancient Babylonia; 2. that"subsistence" economy was widespread; 3. that"money" is elusive and essentially a fantasy of modern scholars who do not understand how to properly interpret the evidence.
If these premises were all true, especially the last, there would be no point in discussing money, since the cumulative implication of Renger's arguments is that there is no real"niche" for money in ancient Babylonia. Before proceeding to a discussion of this, we should note that a great deal of what Renger says in this and other essays he has written over the last decade or so, insofar as it concerns concrete matters, will find few opponents among Mesopotamian specialists. After all, none of us debate his competence as an Assyriologist. Where many of us, however, are not prepared to follow are the theoretical paths charted out by Renger in applying terms like redistribution, reciprocity, and subsistence to the economy and in the striking tendency to deny that silver functioned as money or that profit motive or supply and demand played any significant role in the economy.
Renger and others who represent this point of view - particularly R. K. Englund, who devoted much space in his book on the Ur HI fisheries to an attempt to demonstrate that all merchants were essentially dependents of the state whose economic activities were motivated, like virtually everybody else in the Ur III state according to Englund, by fear of punishment rather than economic self interest (Englund 1990) - are, of course, not unaware that the vast majority of Mesopotamian specialists do not agree with them. That does not restrain them, however, from making theoretical statements that suggest to non-specialists that the rest of us just fell off the turnip truck or, in any event, are operating with anachronistic models. It is true, of course, that the criticisms Renger makes of non-specialist pronouncements about ancient Mesopotamia are mostly legitimate: non-specialists usually do not know what they are talking about, but neither did K. Polanyi, to whom I am coming shortly. Englund goes further and rejects as unfounded opinions like those of J. D. Muhly (1980) and N. Yoffee (1981), because, says Englund, it is precisely the reading of Ur III texts that makes Polanyi's theory likely, (Englund 1990, 16.) implying, of course, that the rest of us who do not agree with him have not actually read the texts (an attitude that is not unique to this passage) or are merely indulging in"misleading speculation".2
Any scholar who either knows J. D. Muhly or N. Yoffee personally or has read their published works will recognize the strained nature of Englund's argument in asserting that their view of ancient Mesopotamian economy was essentially determined by taking over uncritically ("Kritiklos": Englund 1990, 17 n. 58) the theory sketched out by me at the 1976 Rencontre Assyriologique (Powell 1977). While Muhly's formulation (1980, 174) that the"Ancient Near Eastern economy was also a market economy" surely overstates the case, his further points that Polanyi was ignorant in general about early Mediterranean economy, that there is evidence for markets and market forces in ancient Mesopotamia, and that the evidence presented in M. T. Larsen's contribution to the 1976 Rencontre Assyriologique (which Muhly was reviewing)"brings the Old Assyrian period into a world understood by any modern capitalist", are legitimate and found further confirmation in the evidence presented at the Leiden symposium.
That others who have also read many Ur III texts3 can reach rather different conclusions from those reached by Englund4 underscores two basic features of the problem with which we are dealing: 1. the evidence of the documents is often ambiguous; 2. the conclusions one draws from that evidence are shaped by the methodological ideology with which one approaches the evidence. Even D. C. Snell, whom Englund cites5 as being critical of my idea that markets and profit motives played a role in the economy of the third millennium, has now, in a review of theories about ancient society and economy (Snell 1997, 145-158), come to a position that differs sharply with the positions enunciated by either J. Renger or R. K. Englund. A thoughtful critique rejecting the point of view represented by Renger and Englund is that of M. van de Mieroop6 in his discussion of trade in southern Babylonia in the era following the collapse of the Ur in empire.
This is not to say that the conclusions of Renger or Englund are necessarily all wrong. Quite the contrary, as I have said there is much to agree with in Renger's overall picture of the Babylonian economy and some of Englund's specific interpretations are legitimate (along with a lot that are debatable). What is most dubious is the tendency to ignore counter indications.
I am not objecting to theory. Facts are, at bottom, theory, and"history" itself is a tissue of theory that can rarely hope to closely resemble the reality it purports to describe. The historical"facts" that we talk about cannot, from an epistemological point of view, be separated from how we know them. In this context, I assume sufficiently self-evident as to not require philosophical justification that, in the process of seeking to know the past, use of"models" or"paradigms" created by persons who were themselves essentially ignorant of that evidence we are trying to interpret and through which we seek to"know" the past are not inherently more likely to bring us closer to reality than are theories worked out by those more familiar with the evidence to be interpreted.
2 Englund 1990, 201.
3 Cf., e.g., H. Neumann's symposium paper and Neumann 1979, 1992a, 1992b, 1993; Zettler 1992; Sallaberger 1994.
4 Englund 1990, 199-201.
5 Englund 1990, 17.
6 Van de Mieroop 1992, 188-203.
2. Polanyi and the Evidence for Markets
Over the last couple of generations, in addition to ad hoc theories worked out by Assyriologists and Mesopotamian archaeologists, two theoretical models have been consciously applied to the Mesopotamian evidence. First, the Marxist theory, represented chiefly by scholars within the penumbra of the Russian Empire in its Soviet incarnation, and second the"substantivist" economic theories represented by Karl Polanyi and his disciples. I do not intend to comment on Marxist interpretation of ancient Mesopotamian history except to note that Marx's theory is demonstrably wrong at both ends. According to Marx,"history" should have proceeded in a nice, neat fashion from slaveholding societies, through feudalism and capitalism, to communism. The problem on the early end was that the kind of slave system posited by Marx as characteristic of the beginning phase of this process was an anomaly characteristic above all of the Roman Empire from about 200 BC to about 100 AD. The contortions through which Marxist scholars put themselves to try to save the theory with the"Asiatic mode of production" are indicative of the underlying troubles. And then the collapse of the"great experiment" in the years following 1989 demonstrated, if that was needed, that the end of the theory did not work either. It is hardly necessary to add that Marx's vision of the"middle" bears so little resemblance to what mediaevalists at the end of the 20th century think they know about that vast and diverse world lying between antiquity and modernity that a candid observer would probably be reluctant to believe that they are even talking about the same thing.
Obviously, we are in no danger of seeing a rush of Assyiologists to use the Marxist model. It has failed. But its implications are still with us: virtually every use of the words capital, capitalist, capitalism, and related concepts has been infected with Marxist theory, even when used by the most adamant opponents of Marxism. This remains a serious problem of historical terminology:"capitalism" as the description either of an economic system or of a historical era is an intellectual construct. So is the related concept of"market economy" that played a major role in the thinking of K. Polanyi. As intellectual tools for understanding what really happened in the past they are more obfuscating than clarifying.
Karl Polanyi, like Karl Marx, wanted the world to be better (at least for humans) than it really is and therefore discovered"redistributive" economy. The criticisms made over two decades ago by rational historians of the ancient Near East like J. D. Muhly7 and N. Yoffee8 are still valid, and today there is even more reason to wonder whether the evidence itself on which the theory was erected was sound.9 Although majority opinion is an unreliable criterion of validity, Polanyi' s paradigm is far from commanding the allegiance of the majority of anthropologists.
Be that as it may, the acid test of a historical theory is whether it accounts for all the evidence. The specific shibboleth over which Polanyi' s theory fatally stumbles is the evidence from Old Assyrian trade. That Polanyi' s model does not work for Old Assyrian was adequately demonstrated by K.R. Veenhof almost three decades ago,10 and it was specifically Veenhof 's formulation of the problem to which both Muhly and Yoffee
7 Muhly 1980, 174.
8 Yoffee 1981, 4-6.
9 Cf. Snell 1997, 149-151.
1 ° Specifically Veenhof 1972, 348-351.
referred in rejecting Polanyi's theory as a useful tool for studying Mesopotamian history. For good reason: it is an elementary principle of historical method that one key mistake in an overarching historical theory is a good indication that the rest of the theory is liable to contain serious flaws.
In the mid-1970s, after returning from my first extended stay in the Soviet Union and being not entirely satisfied with the Marxist version of Mesopotamian history worked out by Soviet scholars, I decided to work through the literature pertaining to Polanyi's theory and to test it on the Mesopotamian evidence. I discovered that two key elements could not be made to fit: markets and merchants. I called attention to this problem in two papers (1977, 1978a) of which I reiterate here the main points, because they are still valid.
Polanyi made the following assumptions and assertions about Mesopotamian markets:11 1. Herodotus, who visited Babylon in the middle of the 5th century BC, reported that the Persians had no markets. 2. Babylonian documents reveal no essential economic changes between Old Babylonian and Persian periods. 3. Marketplaces, if they had existed in the time of Hammurabi (Old Babylonian), would have still existed in the time of Herodotus. 4. In Palestine, archaeology revealed no open spaces in towns that could reasonably be interpreted as marketplaces. 5. Cuneiform descriptions of Babylon fail to mention a marketplace. 6. No word for marketplace exists in cuneiform sources. 7. According to A. Leo Oppenheim, archaeological evidence does not favor the existence of marketplaces inside of cities throughout the whole Near East.
Points 1 and 3 are fallible, because they rest upon a misinterpretation of Herodotus, who was talking, not about Babylon, but rather about an ethnic characteristic of the Persians, the well known disdain of the Persian, horse-riding, warrior class for mundane matters like trade. Points 2, 5, and 6 are demonstrably false, and 3 and 6 rest on misinformation and misconceptions.
That the Akkadian word mahlru (from a root with meanings in the semantic range of"come face to face","correspond","receive") has both the meaning of"market-rate" and"market-place" makes it inherently probable that marketplaces existed in Babylonia, and no historian without an axe to grind who reads through the evidence presented by W. Rollig in his essay on the ancient Mesopotamian market (1976) and by the Akkadian dictionaries (CAD M/l, 92-99; AHw 583f.) will fail to recognize that Rollig and the dictionaries are right and Polanyi wrong.
Moreover, point 5, about the topography of Babylon having no mention of a market, is now explicitly refuted in the excellent edition of topographical texts by A. R. George, where the"Market Gate", located in the eastern part of the city (i.e., on the eastern side of the river) is used as a key orientation point for defining city quarters:"from the Market Gate to the Grand Gate is called Eridu, from the Market Gate to the Uras Gate is called Suanna".12 Moreover, George has been able to make a probable case for dating the origin of this landmark to the Old Babylonian period, tentatively located in the southeastern section of the city but inside, of course, the city wall of the first millennium,13 and, in this context it is worth recalling the instruction in an Old Babylonian letter (F. R. Kraus AbB 1 60:14-18) to buy"two good sacks" at the Market Gate (KA GANBA = bab mahlrim). Since we know from another Old Babylonian text (CT 6 29a left edge) that the cost of
11 See Powell 1978a, 133-134.
12 George 1992, 69f. = Tintir V 92f.
13 George 1992, 18-20, 372f.
one such sack was reckoned at two-thirds shekel of silver, this makes the prospective purchase entirely within the range of mass (i.e., 1.5 shekels) at which one would expect actual transfers of silver on a commercial basis (see below on this subject). The evidence assembled by the dictionaries (particularly CAD M/l, 98 under bob mahiri) makes it clear that market gates were a feature not only of northern Mesopotamia but also of Babylonia from the early second millennium through the Macedonian period, and, in a number of cases, they gave their names to the adjacent city quarter.
Moreover, as Rollig rightly pointed out (1976, 293), karu is another term that is directly parallel to mahiru in that it also denotes both an exchange rate and a place where business took place (cf. CAD K, 231-237; AHw 45If.). This is pertinent to the question whether markets existed in the third millennium. The word karu is a Sumerian loan into Akkadian and denotes in both Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian a community of merchants and in Old Babylonian also the derived sense of"exchange rate" and the original Sumerian sense of embankment or harbor. It seems unlikely that these semantic developments could have taken place if at least the rudimentary paradigm of a community or concentration of merchants involved in commerce had not been present in Sumerian cities in the third millennium. The"break" between Ur III and Old Babylonian does not seem to have been as profound as sometimes assumed.
The archaeological evidence, both that from surveys and from pottery typology (e.g., Adams 1981, 171), does not seem to support the picture of a radical hiatus between Ur HI and Old Babylonian sometimes drawn on the basis of texts.14 The break seems to lie in the political area, i.e., initially among elites, and this does not support the assumption that merchants in the Old Babylonian period operated under entirely different conditions and motives than those in the Ur HI period. Indeed, the real hiatus in Babylonia - cultural and economic, as well as political - may have begun toward the end of Samsuiluna's reign, as has been argued in a recent work which uses archaeological, textual, and astronomical evidence to posit dates about a century lower than the widely used Middle Chronology.15
Another Akkadian term that seems to be linked in some way with Sumerian prototypes is babtu, which means both"city quarter" and"outstanding goods", and"deficit/loss" (CAD B, 9-14; AHw 94f.). While it is quite true that the relationship between"city quarter", which is certainly associated with babu,"gate", and"obligation" is not entirely clear, it seems rather likely that the connection lies in some kind of commercial procedure. In any case, it is remarkable that this and similar commercial terms seem to be collectively connected to"gates","embankments", and"streets", i.e., precisely where we would suspect market activity to have taken place and where the relatively sparse evidence indeed indicates that it did.
In view of the Arabic word suq that has been borrowed into a number of European languages in the meaning"market" or"bazaar", the Akkadian word suqu,"street", is a likely candidate for market-related terms. W. Rollig argued in favor of this,16 and K.R. Veenhof also called attention to it in his essay on"hungry silver" and related terms.17 It is to Claus Wilcke, however, that we owe the most penetrating observations about this problem, and I am particularly indebted to him for pointing out to me during a discussion
14 Arguing for continuity: Snell 1997, 57; van de Mieroop 1987, 86f., 118f.; 1992, 241f.
15 Gasche et al. 1998; cf. Adams 1981 ch. 4.
16 Rollig 1975-76, 29If.
17 Veenhof 1987, 65.
of the general problem of motive and markets (January 31, 1999) that I had overlooked his comments on market streets. Since Wilcke's discussion18 is not where most economic historians are likely to look for such information on markets, I summarize his main points here.
There are two liver omen texts from Babylon dated in a single year near the end of the reign of Samsuiluna. Both must have been discovered at the time of the German excavations at Babylon, but somehow only one wound up in Berlin, with the other finding its way into the collections at Yale. B. Landsberger (1967) knew the Yale text and recognized its commercial importance but partly misinterpreted it. F. R. Kraus, in a discussion of omen texts,19 recognized that the Yale text and the, at that time recently published, Berlin text belonged together and evidenced an interest in profit. Wilcke points out that a person named Kuru made at least two sacrifices of lambs within 27 days in order to discover whether the omens were favorable for making profit and that the person who is so anxious to know whether he is going to make a profit must be identical with"Kuru the merchant (tamkarurri)" attested in two other contemporary texts from Babylon. Wilcke further calls attention to the fact that the significance of these texts has not been fully recognized by the dictionaries. Both texts refer to prospective sales in the market: ina suql simati, literally,"in the buying-streets", and Wilcke rightly stresses that the use of the plural points to a complex market spread out over a number of streets (Arabic ^aswaq) and that siiqi simati,"market streets", and mahiru,"market", are therefore probably two terms for the same thing, as long ago suspected by K. R. Veenhof.20 One of these texts asks whether Kuru is going to make a profit (nemelu) on some kind of (gem?) stone, whereas the other asks the same about the sale of goods,"market/trade goods", sahirtu, another term for which the dictionary definitions need revision.
To summarize: there is good reason to believe that both market places and markets in the sense of economic mechanisms existed in Babylonia and that they were shaped by supply and demand like contemporary markets in Anatolia. Thus, we have here one answer to J. Renger's question: where was the"niche" for money? Among merchants and in markets. Similar conclusions have been reached by M. van de Mieroop regarding the Old Babylonian city of Ur.21
Now, I want to be clear that I do not imagine Babylonian markets as an ancient version of Wall Street. And, to what extent we can posit the type of small goods and commestibles markets that gradually came into existence in the fifth century BC in the eastern Mediterranean after the development of low value coinage remains quite uncertain. Nevertheless, something was there, and to deny this any economic significance is as unhistorical as trying to turn a Babylonian market into the Chicago commodities exchange. Moreover, Claus Wilcke's main point about the merchant Kuru deserves emphasis: he would hardly have made the relatively expensive investments in lambs and divination if the potential for lucrative profit had not been real.22
This clear connection between streets and markets, together with the lack of real evidence for a fundamental break between Ur III and Old Babylonian, suggests that the
18 Wilcke 1990, 302-304.
19 JCS 37 (1985), 155.
20 Veenhof 1972, 354.
21 Van de Mieroop 1992, 188-208.
22 Wilcke 1990, 304.
concrete background of the difficult Sumerian expression sila-a gal-la, which means, more or less literally,"that which exists on the street", may lie in some kind of commercial procedure that already existed in the Ur III period. In any case, the fact that the Sumerian term is equated with not only babtu but also with its closely related but not identical synonym qiptu seems to point to a technical meaning something on the order of this: assets which have been (by one or more customary and therefore legally binding procedures) entrusted or invested with someone and which therefore constitute a debt obligation to the investor by the party with whom the assets are invested.
The Sumerian expression seems to be linked to the similar phrase sila-a sei2-a,"which live (plural, animate) on the street". The verbs gal and sei2 belong to a semantic family (suppletive paradigm) meaning broadly"live, exist, be in existence", in which gal is the inanimate component (singular and plural) and sei2 (= SlGv) is the plural of both human and non-human animates, with /lug/ (= LUL) and /til/ (= TI) functioning respectively as the singular animate/non-human and the singular human components.23
In Ur III texts, sila-a gal-la / sei2-a clearly mean something on the order of the"entrusted assets" implied in babtu/qlptu. There were filing categories (tablet baskets) for both sila-a sei2-a (BRM 3 173: oxen and sheep) and sila-a gal-la (UET 3 1781: barley), and merchants also seem to have kept accounts of this type, to judge by an Ur in protocol from Umma (Nik 2 447). This interesting text and its relationship to another text (Snell 1982 no. 1) has been competently analyzed from a philological point of view by R. K. Englund,24 but these two texts do not support Englund's argument that merchants were dependents of the state without private property but rather the opposite.
The earliest of these (Snell 1982 no. 1) is a brief balanced account compiled at the end of Amar-Suen's second year after the death of Ur-silaluh the merchant. The outstanding assets entrusted to the merchant consisted of the following: a first receipt of 49 gur of barley reckoned at the rate of 1.333 shekels per gur, a second receipt of 2.5 gur of barley at the rate of 1.25 shekels per gur, 22 strings of some type of figs and 26 sila of some type of apples reckoned together as worth 147.5 barleycorns of silver, plus 2 shekels of silver from another person for a total indebtedness of 71 shekels and 50 barley corns of silver. Payments to the accounting agency came to 60 shekels in silver paid directly by the merchant and documented by sealed tablets, plus 2.5 shekels of silver credited to his account for bitumen for which there was no sealed document, and 6 shekels"received" by a third party for which the merchant's account was also credited, leaving a debit balance of 2 shekels and 140 barleycorns.
There are several points worth noting before proceeding to the other text. First, what is he going to do with all that barley? He needs something over 15 cubic meters of storage space for it, and apparently he had access to considerable storage space in his market warehouse, as the other text makes clear. But beyond that: is he going to load it on a boat and send it down river or is he planning to sell it locally for a profit? The latter looks probable. Both price ratios are above the Ur El mode value of 1 shekel of silver per gur. As R. K. Englund has extensively argued,25 the state/temple was not a charitable institution and held its creditors responsible for their debts with life and property. Why
23 Literature in P. Steinkeller, ASJ 1 (1985), 195; cf. M. Sigrist Drehem 1992 112f. and Veenhof 1987, 42 + 65 n. 4.
24 Englund 1990, 38-42.
25 Englund 1990, 42-48.
would a merchant be willing to accept barley at such high prices? Obviously because he intended to make a profit out of it. The fact that the first consignment is very large and also very pricey suggests that this consignment took place in winter when everybody was running out of barley. The second consignment which is relatively small and also cheaper suggests that it may have come close to the time of the harvest when there was less possibility of profitably disposing of it.
The other text (Nik 2 447) underscores how little the texts actually tell us about what merchants were doing. It is dated 11 months later and records the results of legal proceedings that took place in the presence of ten witnesses, the first of whom is the governor of Umma and the last the"overseer of merchants" (most of the rest are officials of one kind or another). It establishes that the wife of a man (only he is identified by name) opened the market warehouse, e ganba / bit mahlri, of Ur-silaluh after it had been sealed by a messenger of the governor, and further that she"opened" 45 gur of barley, 4 jugs of oil, and two tablet filing baskets, one of which contained"hand tablets" (dub su) and the other account tablets recording outstanding assets (im dub sila-a gal-la), and further that the husband of the woman and the woman herself (never identified by name) had removed either forcibly or deceitfully (a dar) property of Ur-silaluh from the market warehouse of Ur-silaluh. The court proceeding does not refer to Ur-silaluh as a merchant, presumably because, being dead, he no longer is a merchant, but identification of both"property" and"market warehouse" as being"of Ur-silaluh" makes it likely that this Ur-silaluh is identical with Ur-silaluh the merchant who died in the previous year. These seem to be the only published texts that record his merchant activity. That the property mentioned is private, i.e., not state or temple capital, is indicated by absence of remarks typifying seizure by the state of property to which it had a right as owner or creditor that have recently been discussed by W. Heimpel (1997).
These two texts relating to the merchant Ur-silaluh encapsule in a nutshell the problems we face in trying to interpret merchant activity in the Ur III period. Unanswered, if my theory about the reason for the prices and sizes of the barley consignments is correct, is: why are there still 45 gur of barley in the merchant's market warehouse? Perhaps the reason is that the merchant died a month or so before the end of the year Amar-Su'en 2, and the actions of the woman and her husband took place immediately after his death. But then one has the problem of explaining why the court proceeding is not recorded until 11 months into the next year. Moreover, Lu-Nanna the overseer of merchants seems to be otherwise unattested in surviving documents, unless he happens to be identical with Lu-Nanna the merchant who appears in another court proceeding some ten years later.26 Obviously, if our records were even minimally adequate, we would have some information about such an important person in the Umma merchant community.
There are innumerable questions about merchant activity in the Ur III period for which the evidence provides no answers, but the protocol text shows, as one would expect, that merchants also kept records of their own business. The precise nature of the distinction between dub §u and im dub sila-a gal-la cannot be established, but the latter probably refers to babtu/qlptu type of debts owed to the merchant. It is also worth emphasizing in this context that these records were obviously kept by the merchant in his e ganba / bit mahiri,"market warehouse". This does not support the arguments of those
26 A. Falkenstein, NG II no. 62.
who claim that e ganba is merely a storehouse, deny any connection between e ganba and markets, and ignore the fact that ganba (KI.LAM) is the Sumerogram for mahlrum"market, market-rate, market-place". It is obviously also a place of business. Moreover, in his symposium paper, M. Stol called attention to an unpublished Old Babylonian tablet in Philadelphia which mentions purchase of an e ganba of ca. 108 square meters followed by the purchase of another three times as large (i.e., ca. 324 square meters) bordering on the property of the overseer of the merchants and located near the Gate of Samas, from which he rightly concludes that this sounds like a marketplace. Noteworthy also are the sizes of these properties, which are large for urban real estate in the Old Babylonian period. M. van de Mieroop has made similar arguments, partly on the basis of archaeological evidence, for the existence of a market center in Old Babylonian Ur.27
Whether the expression sila-a gal-la means that we also have to look for a commercial significance in the name of the third Umma month in Ur HI, iti se kar-ra gal-la,"month that barley is on the embankment" cannot be determined for lack of contextual occurrences, but the possibility cannot be excluded.
3. Money
To turn now to the question of what constituted money (I am not going into how one defines it again, as I have said all that can reasonably be said on that point in Powell 1996), silver seems to have been the primary money of Babylonia from the mid-third millennium on except for the end of the Bronze Age, when it is temporarily replaced by gold.28 It must be emphasized, however, that the published sources for this period remain sparse and do not represent a good geographical sample. Gold may have been more accessible in this period, since the large amounts of gold discovered in Mycenaean context in the eastern Mediterranean contrasts sharply with previous eras. Problematic, however, is that the basic price ratio of gold to silver does not seem to be much different than in preceding eras (see below).
In two of my previous papers (1990, 1996), I have made the point that cheap metal monies (tin, bronze or copper, and lead) came very close to forming, along with silver, a pre-coinage money system in northern Mesopotamia. K. Radner in her symposium contribution assembled lots of evidence for the Assyrian Empire which resembles the picture in Babylonia in that silver is pretty clearly the primary money throughout, but metals are more important in Assyrian context and in some cases payment in silver is accompanied by other cheap metal money. In Babylonia, on the other hand, for some centuries from about mid-third millennium (Fara to Akkad period) bronze or copper functioned like a cheap money. This is mostly attested in the land sale and quasi legal documents.29 Copper or bronze seems to have gone out of use as money by the Ur III period, being replaced by barley,30 which remains the primary low value money, though occasionally dates show a similar function in the Neo-BabyIonian period. It is important to note that the price equivalencies in the Laws of Eshnunna are not necessarily to be
27 Van de Mieroop 1992, 188-190.
28 Powell 1990, 93f.
29 Gelb et al. 1991, chapter 8 + plates 87-166; see now Wilcke 1996 with literature.
30 Cf. Steinkeller 1989, 92-97 on weighing silver and pages 133-138 on prices in barley and silver.
interpreted as evidence for the use of bronze as a money in the sense that silver and, to a lesser degree, barley functioned as money but are probably intended as guidelines for judges in assessing fines or payments, and that these equivalencies have nothing to do with the"abundance encomia".31
In Babylonia, rather than calling barley (or dates) a cheap money, it would perhaps be better to say that it functioned like a cheap money, because the evidence as a whole points to silver as the ultimate standard of liquidity. Nor do I imagine people hauling around baskets of barley on their heads to buy a few heads of garlic. J. Renger's point that a substantial number of the inhabitants got some (and in some cases perhaps all) of their necessities from the large estates (temple or palace) with which they were associated and that some got these from their own production is something that I think most of us agree on. What remains quite uncertain is how much of the necessities were provided for in this way.
A small independent farmer raising barley is not necessarily going to be in the position to raise and process sesame. Where did they get their oil from? This is one of the key dark areas in Renger's theory, because, particularly in the case of oil, we have no evidence that all requirements for oil could be met without some type of market exchange. In this context, it is worth recalling that four storage jars of oil, probably each about the size of an amphora (i.e., in the 30 liter range) were part of the deceased merchant Ur-silaluh's property that were"opened" by the woman in the Ur HI court proceeding. The same is true of cloth (wool). We simply do not have in any era documentation that would permit us to assert that all of these needs are covered by institutional mechanisms or by self production.
A good case is beer, which is especially interesting, because it relates to the problem of how things were paid for and how the money system functioned. I have already discussed some aspects of this,32 and Mesopotamian specialists are familiar with the evidence as a whole, but let me just repeat the essence of it. Paragraph 108 of the Laws of Hammurabi (cf. R. Borger TUAT I/I, 55) regulating tavern keepers prescribes that a tavern keeper ("alewife") who is convicted of refusing to accept barley in payment for beer and collecting silver from her customer by using a weight stone that is above standard weight and thereby cheating him is to be"thrown into the water".
There are several points of interest here. First, this is a clear case where someone did not get all one wanted or needed via"redistributive" mechanisms. Second, one can see why the tavern keeper might not want barley. She may have enough already to do her malting, and, if it is summer after the harvest, she will have to store it until the temperature drops low enough to do malting in the fall. So, cash is called for. However, there is a third aspect to this that I discussed in trying to deal with the problem of standards. The Laws of Hammurabi obviously do not presuppose the existence of a standards bureau and an enforcement police. What it legislates against is using a heavier weight stone to measure the customer's silver so that the tavern keeper gets proportionately more silver than she would have gotten if grain had been measured out. In other words, it is presupposed that the going rate (mahlru) for beer in both barley and silver is common knowledge to both tavern keeper and customer. She, however, insists on silver. In this case, the deceit probably consisted of putting, let us say, a half-shekel stone in the balance
31 Powell 1990, 82, 93.
32 Powell 1979, 83-86.
pan instead of, say, a one-third shekel (or more likely at some lower unit of mass). This could have easily happened in Old Babylonian transactions, because the vast majority of small weights are not marked at all, and it is probably what is implied in the expression aban kisi sutenu,"to switch the stone of the bag" (attested in participle form in the great hymn to Shamash: Lambert 1960, 132:108). The parallel law ("P": R. Borger TUAT I/I, 54) regulating similar crimes by merchants may refer to two sets of weights and measuring vessels.
These laws also have a bearing on the problem of how and how much and how frequently silver passed from hand to hand in Babylonian society. That the laws exist shows that some silver at least did circulate in this way in Old Babylonian times despite the inherent possibilities for fraud. And to judge by the substantial number of lines devoted to merchants and commerce - about ten per cent - in the great hymn to Shamash,33 the phenomenon of money and buying and selling cannot have been as uncommon as the redistribution-reciprocity theorists would have us believe.
This is not to say that buying and selling by weight did not entail some problems. The smallest weight stone that I have seen and weighed is a tiny duck in the Oriental Institute (Chicago), which has a mass of only 0.2923 gram,34 but the Babylonians obviously thought they could measure to finer degrees of accuracy, since the basic lexical series that deals with material culture and economic matters records a weight-stone series going from a talent (ca. 30 kg.) to one-third barleycorn, which is only about 0.015 gram.35 The heaviest surviving weight from Babylonia is the two-talent duck weight (60555 grams; cf. Powell 1971, 249) of Ur-Ningirsu, ensi of Lagash, who presumably ruled one or two generations before the beginning of the Ur III period. Its mass incorporates a norm that is virtually identical with the shekel norm on which the Persian daric was based, but it is important to keep in mind that in any group of weights from any era, one will inevitably find significant deviations in mass in all units lower than the shekel, and the margin of error rises, not unexpectedly, as the mass decreases, which is a general rule in weights of all sizes.
Based on calculation of standard deviation in Old Babylonian precision weights, I postulated (Powell 1979, 82f.) that the margin of error in small weights was about three per cent of the total mass. At the mass of a shekel, this would amount to about a day's pay in silver, so it is obvious that exchange of cheap commodities or small amounts of commodities for silver is not something to be expected. However, once the mass rises to the level of a shekel, which for Old Babylonian times represented a month's pay, the inhibitions to buy something for silver are naturally going to be less. After all, a month's pay was not a small amount of money, and someone who could fork out that amount had their eye on whatever it was they wanted and the value of the intended purchase to them. I do not think, therefore that inaccuracies in the weighing system would inhibit those who could afford to buy something for a shekel or more. But I also think that these were a rather small minority of the total population, and, consequently, as I have said repeatedly (since Powell 1979, 86f.), I cannot imagine silver circulating from hand to hand on a daily basis throughout the whole populace - including rural areas - in the Old Babylonian period or in any later period. That, however, is not the same thing as saying that its role in
33 Lambert 1960, 122f. + 132-135; cf. Hallo 1992, 355f.
34 Powell 1979, 107.
35 J. G. Westenholz, MSL 10 (1970), 49-50.
the economy was insignificant, and I think that is the main point on which not only I but a lot of other Mesopotamian specialists disagree with J. Renger.
When one turns to the problem of balances, one is, by contrast with weight specimens, faced with an almost complete lack of evidence. We do not, in fact possess any intact surviving balances from ancient Mesopotamia, and they are relatively rare from antiquity as a whole, though a considerable number of steelyards has survived from the Roman period.36 It is therefore not possible to actually control the accuracy of Mesopotamian balances, but, as I have just said, deviation in the weight specimens themselves indicates that balances as a whole weighed more accurately where heavier masses were concerned. The two-talent weight of Ur-Ningirsu referred to above is evidence that balances capable of weighing this substantial mass already existed before the end of the third millennium.
Only two representations of balances from Mesopotamia are known to me, both Assyrian (9th/8th century), and show the weighing of prismatic and spherically shaped ingots. Thus, the material evidence for balances (both illustrated in K. Radner's symposium contribution) has not changed much since F. Delitzsch published a composite drawing of them in his popular booklet Handel und Wandel.31 There is also a Syro-Hittite relief in the Louvre of unknown provenance showing a merchant holding in his right hand a balance and carrying in his left what must be the leather bag in which merchants transported their weight stones and also their silver.38
That Assyrian balances were capable of weighing masses as heavy as the two-talent duck weight of Ur-Ningrisu mentioned above is indicated in a letter (ABL 292) sent by Ashurbanipal to the governor and people of Nippur in which he urges them to capture an enemy and promises to put him in a balance (ina zibaniti) and to use him as a counterweight to measure (hdtu) his weight in gold and give it to whomever killed or delivered the enemy, just as Sennacherib had done in silver for capture of another enemy. Moreover, the two-talent duck weight of Ur-Ningirsu shows that this capability must have been in existence already in the third millennium. Balances and their parts are treated in ten entries in the lexical series HAR-ra = hubullu?9 but, like many technical terms, most of them are somewhat obscure, with the exception of the terms for balance itself (gis.erin2/gwnraiw) and balance pans (dilim/itqurtu). The question, therefore, of how old weighing was in Mesopotamia is not easily answered: neither the archaeological nor textual evidence is sufficient. However, for what it is worth, the earliest clearly reconizable weights, which are shaped a bit like a pair of sheep testicles and are pierced at the top for attaching to the arm of the balance, seem to come from around the mid-third millennium or a bit later. The only published one is inscribed"mana of wool rations: Dudu the sanga" and weighs 680.485 grams.40 The heavy norms, special norms for wool, and the fact that the weights are pierced may imply an early stage in systematic weighing, and therefore would fit with the fact that our first evidence for systematic
36 Kisch 1965; Skinner 1967; Powell 1971, 182-184.
37 F. Delitzsch, Handel und Wandel in Altbabylonien (Stuttgart 1910), 30-33.
38 CAD K, 430-432; A. Salonen, Hausgerate der alien Mesopotamier (1965), 191f. + pi. XCVII; J. B. Pritchard, ANEP, fig. 117 + p. 263 = Louvre AO 19221 / 9th century; Kisch 1965, 29-31 fig. 3.
39 MSL 6, 60f.; Powell 1971, 238-242.
40 Langdon, JRAS (1921), 575-577; Powell 1971, 255, and note that this Dudu is distinct from the later Dudu, also sanga, with a mina of 497.5, contrary to Powell's assumption on page 198.
weighing and paying in metals comes from the Fara period. About all one can presently say is that it is there by about mid-third millennium, and textual evidence reveals a progressively refined system with fractions of the shekel (one-sixth, one-third, one-half, etc.) evolving into practically the equivalent of monetary units by the Akkad period.41
4. The Great Estates and Mesopotamian Economy
I think it is safe to say that from its first securely attested appearance in the third millennium, money was always important in all segments of the economy. Naturally, the picture we get from the economy of the great estates is different, but, as G. van Driel emphasized in his symposium contribution, they, too, needed and used money. After all, we should expect this: they probably owed their origins and certainly their continued survival to economic factors as much as to any set of socio-cultural factors.
These great estates seem to go back into the fourth millennium, so there is little chance that one will ever have the kind of evidence necessary to reconstruct their origins except in the most general sort of way. However, wherever one can more or less see what they are doing in later periods, their organizational principle is fundamentally self interest, and wealth is shared by the elite in these institutions only insofar as unavoidable custom and economic necessity demands. There is no reason to expect it to be otherwise: their size and success is probably to be attributed primarily to economic causes.
Agriculture was the basic economic activity in ancient Babylonia. Independent subsistence farming, which can be carried on by a relatively small group of people under dry farming conditions, was not a viable option in Babylonia. Annual rainfall in Babylonia today varies widely from about 50 to 150 milliliters. Most of it comes in the planting-growing season (roughly November-March), but actual precipitation varies greatly. Rain could not be depended upon even to provide enough moisture for germination, which had to be done artificially by damming a channel of the river or of a major canal to raise the water level, and sufficient water for maturation of the crop had to be supplied. This cannot be done independently, and responsibility for control fell naturally to the temples and later to the crown. The same is true of flood control in the spring.
Moreover, Babylonia was characterized by monoculture. The ubiquitous dependence upon barley is one of the reasons it comes to function like money. Diversification is extremely difficult in a monocultural agricultural regime that is absolutely dependent upon irrigation. Indeed, evidence for diversification comes only from the large estates. The bulk of the agricultural population seems to have raised and consumed primarily barley.
All small holdings are somewhat unstable in an agricultural economy and the degree of instability rises with the tendency toward monoculture, because monoculture increases the risk of failure and starvation. Large estates like the temples in ancient Babylonia were, in spite of their own dependence on grain agriculture, more"diversified" because some of their lands had a chance of a making a crop even in a very bad year. They could also undertake a late fall planting, or a summer planting of sesame or millet. And they had much more extensive storage options and could if need be ride out a difficult year or even
41 Powell 1989-90, 508-517.
several. These factors favor ownership of agricultural land by large economic entities and tenancy rather than ownership among individual farmers.
This also explains why land appears to be cheap. Agricultural land is valuable precisely for that: agriculture. The value of the potential crop determines the value of the land. This is one reason we see so little evidence of private ownership of farmland in ancient Babylonia: there is not much point in owning it unless one is able to cultivate it on a regular basis.
Moreover, labor is a major problem for all agricultural regimes that operate under conditions of low level technology, in any case, outside of the tropics. Successful farmers in the United States are usually overcapitalized in machinery. Modern farm machinery has a very high relative cost because of the limited period during which it is used. Successful agricultural regimes in antiquity, on the other hand, tended to be overcapitalized in labor -whether in slaves or dependent tenants. The reason for both phenomena is at bottom the same: all agricultural regimes have optimum periods in which certain things must be done as quickly as possible to maximize success. Lack of labor, a broken plow, lack of oxen -all these blueprints for disaster were avoided with relative ease by large estates but not by small, independent farmers. Even where subsistence agriculture could be practiced - not a viable long-term option in Babylonia - survival demanded constant preparation. Here the voice of wisdom is Hesiod.
It is therefore natural that the great estates dominated the economy in Babylonia. This is a far cry, however, from saying that they control everything directly or that they are the only significant economic factor in the society. The precise relationship between any particular individual and the temple or crown is impossible to reconstruct fully, not only because we never have all of the once existing documentation but also because it is quite certain that even if we did have it there would still be vast blank areas due to the principle enunciated by Miguel Civil of not recording the obvious. It is assumed here as a methodological principle that the data about prices and the like that stem from the accounting procedures of the temple and palace must be taken seriously and evaluated on their merits in each individual case. In other words, the prices that we see, even in the Ur III temple/palace records, reflect some underlying economic reality and are not simply imposed without concern for quality or supply and demand. Having stated this methodological principle, which cannot in my opinion be refuted by the textual evidence, let us turn to a consideration of the problem of money"purity".
5. The Problem of Purity and Forms of Money
If the just stated premise were not true, there would be no point whatever in discussing money itself, to say nothing of its purity. Even so, assessing the"purity" of silver (or any other metal money) in any particular situation where it functions as money is, in most cases, an intractable problem. The reasons behind this are similar to those that have occasioned such differing reconstructions of merchant activity: the texts never tell us all we need to know. I have called attention in my last paper to the possible existence of systematic alloying in the Chaldean and Persian periods.42 How radically different the problem appears when one or two key assumptions are changed will become apparent
42 Powell 1996, 232f.
when we come to consider P. Vargyas's new theory about silver in the early Achaemenid period (see below). For earlier periods, the extensive collection of evidence by Karin Reiter (1997) now enables us to get a better grasp of the problem, but in most cases defining the quality or purity of metals used as money remains difficult.
As an example of the possibilities and limitations imposed upon us by our sources, the evidence for gold is well suited. The only usable criterion for the purity of gold is its price in silver, whereby one can already see that we can never come entirely free of circular reasoning. Gold prices in Babylonia prior to the Ur IE period are extremely rare, but it is worth noting that one text explicitly states the ratio as being 1 shekel of gold to 8 of silver and moreover transforms"one-third mina minus one-third shekel of gold" into"two and a half minas seven and one-third shekels of silver" (ITT 2 4647). I am now inclined to believe that this is very close to the"standard" rate for"pure" gold and"pure" silver throughout most of the Bronze Age. This may sound strange, considering that silver:gold price ratios running from about 2:1 to 21:1 are attested,43 however, let us first consider the Kassite evidence before trying to deal with the problem of what the wide spread of gold equivalencies means.
Thanks to K. Reiter's discussion of"red gold" and"bright/silvery gold",44 a plausible explanation of the same Kassite terms, kug.gi sas versus kug.gi babbar can be attempted. The Kassite silver ratios with"red" and"silvery" gold were 8:1 and 4:1, and, as I pointed out in my paper on long-term price trends, the 8:1 ratio seems to represent pure gold to pure silver, being near the top of the range for gold values throughout the Bronze Age.45 I was unable, however, to propose a solution for the 4:1 value of"silvery gold". Reiter's study of the problem now allows the reasonable postulate that"silvery gold" represents a consciously intended alloy of silver and gold. The problem then becomes: 1. what are the percentages of silver and gold in the alloy? and 2. how would the ancient metallurgist have approached the problem using contemporary units of mass? If we proceed from the given that 1 shekel of gold = 8 of silver, then each one-eighth shekel of gold would correspond to one shekel of silver, and determination of the alloying ratio in"silvery" gold becomes a matter of calculating how much pure gold and pure silver must go into one shekel in order for it to equal four shekels in pure silver. This must, however, agree with the metrological system (summarized in Powell 1989-90, 511-513), because alloying presupposes actual measurement rather than just reckoning. The closest one can approximate these ratios in Babylonian terms is this: [Tabelle ließ sich nicht scannen)
43 Now easily accessible in Reiter 1997, 19-35.
44 Reiter 1997, 36-42, 53-59.
45 Powell 1990, 80f. + n. 43.
As one can see, the shekel of alloy is missing 2.5 barleycorns. One would expect that a self-interested moneyer would not fill up the missing weight with gold but rather with silver. We cannot, however, be sure about such things, even if the theory underlying this reconstruction is essentially correct. One might also have built the whole system on the basis of the giru,"carat", and figured 11 carats of gold to 13 of silver, which is a richer alloy than the one sketched out above. On the other hand, it could have been 10 gold to 14 silver. There is no way to decide such questions, because we have no way of controlling what was going on. Much finer approximations of the 1:4, gold:silver, ratio are possible if alloys were calculated at the mina or talent range of mass. In any case, the precise 2:1 ratio between"silvery" gold and pure gold in Kassite texts makes it clear that we have got to reckon with the possibility of consciously produced alloys that served for money.
To what degree this was also the case in earlier eras is impossible to say. However, I must repeat that the fine distinctions that occur in Ur III texts cannot be explained as fineness grades, because there was no way for ancient technology to distinguish such minute differences in quality without destroying the objects in question.46 They have to represent"added value", and as I have also said in my study of price trends,47 while labor costs were relatively low, nothing in the textual record justifies assuming, because one particular account document seems to equate wool with cloth, or bread with flour or barley, that they were in fact treated as equal, unless one can exclude compensation somewhere else. This is the problem of trying to analyze the temple and palace economies in a nutshell: we can never reconstruct the whole situation. K. Reiter has arrived at similar conclusions.48
So what do we do about the"purity" problem? At the moment, the best thing is to keep an open mind and try to figure out what is going on. How profoundly all of our assumptions can be affected by the change in one key assumption is illustrated in a brilliant piece of historical detective work by P. Vargyas to be published soon in the Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie. Since Vargyas's theory has such profound implications for the whole array of issues discussed at the Leiden symposium, I summarize here his main points that pertain to money in Babylonia: 1. kaspu ginnu,"gmrcw-silver" is indentical with kaspu pesu sa ina isten siqli bitqa,"white silver in which there is one bitqu (= one-eighth part alloy) per shekel", and both of these are names for the early Achaemenid silver sigloi! 2. Introduction of this begins only under Cyrus, when there was apparently, a prohibition against melting down or cutting them up in the way that silver transactions had been carried out for centuries. 3. Darius abandoned this policy and used the sigloi as propaganda. 4. kaspu la ginnu"silver which is not ginnu", probably refers to Greek, i.e., non-Achaemenid coins, and represents the same purity, i.e.,.875 fine.
The most persuasive aspect of Vargyas's theory is that it enables us to make sense of the evidence. As I pointed out in my last paper,49 Xenophon and the Greek soldiers who went to Babylonia with Cyrus the Younger in 401 BC must have used coins to pay for their purchases. Moreover, Xenophon likewise attests the existence of market mechanisms: in the region around Assur, enterprising Mesopotamians were even willing to transport the commodities across the river! When one considers the implications of
46 See already Powell 1990, 80f.
47 Powell 1990, 8If. n. 17.
48 Reiter 1997, 26-29.
49 Powell 1996, 234.
crossing over to sell wine and food to an army of ten thousand Greek soldiers, it will be apparent that the"capitalist" motives so apparent in Old Assyrian documents were still alive and well.
This is exactly as we should expect. It has long been known from the fragmentary Babylonian chronicle describing the troubled years following the murder of Seleukos I in 280 B.C., that Greek copper (bronze) coins were used in Babylon to transact business, presumably as a result of the scarcity of silver due to the extraordinary taxes imposed by Antiokhos I.50 The term for coin is zipu (ze^pu), and it is instructive about how much cuneiform texts hide from us that this usage is not attested prior to the Seleucid period. Like markets, coinage was there before the Greeks. Neither are mentioned, because it was not necessary to state the obvious. Besides, the only significant difference that coinage makes in money transactions is the guarantee of quality: in Babylonia, as elsewhere, silver coins were cut up just like other silver and put in the balance pan. P. Vargyas's paper brings a lot of additional arguments in favor of this theory that I have long advocated51 and which is now increasingly assumed for the early stages of Mediterranean coinage.
We may conclude by discussing a case from the early Achaemenid period which illustrates how profoundly the correct or incorrect definition of one element can clarify or distort the rest of the picture. Two texts dating to the last year of Cambyses (year 7, perh. month 8, day 26: Hecker Giessen 47) and the first month of Bardiya/Smerdis (Strassmaier ZA 4, 123ff. Sm. 2) connect Itti-Marduk-balatu of the Egibi family and Marduk-suma-usur, one of his business associates, with the town of Humadesu in southwestern Iran.52 The earlier of these (Hecker Giesen 47) records the transfer by Marduk-suma-usur of 12 minas of"white silver of which there is a bitqu in each shekel" and specifies that Itti-Marduk-balatu will deliver (perhaps 3 months later) to Marduk-§uma-usur's brother in Babylon"this silver, 12 minas, 12 sibirtu (kug.PAD.DU) of 1 mina each".
Looking at these descriptions of silver without the perspective introduced by Vargyas's identification ofkaspu ginnu with silver coins and further with an alloy of"3 gzrw/carats", one is almost doomed to conclude that sibirtu, which should mean"broken up", actually denotes an ingot of some sort.53 However, the context of this text and the closely related text dated perhaps five months later to Smerdis 1, both of which were written in the same Iranian town, clearly show this cannot be the case. If the sibirtu had been composed of scrap silver collected here and there, it would require an incredibly complex para-theory to explain how all of it could be defined by the same purity grade. Clearly, Vargyas is right: these are coins, and, moreover, the twelve sibirtu of one mina each are likewise not ingots but coins that have been weighed and put into twelve bags and sealed up. What was this profitable business that took an old man like Itti-Marduk-balatu off to southwestern Iran, hundreds of miles away from Babylon? Doubtless
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