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The Purchasing Power of Silver in the Seleucid Empire and Beyond

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The Purchasing Power of Silver in the Seleucid Empire and Beyond Academy Colloquium “The efficiency of Markets in Pre-industrial societies: the case of Babylonia (c. 400-60 BC) in comparative perspective” (19 – 21 May 2011) Introduction. The relevance of the Babylonian price data for the study of market integration and market efficiciency. (provisional paper; not to be quoted) Bert van der Spek 0. Prolegomena The purpose of this paper is to introduce the topic of the conference. Because the point of departure is a new corpus of data from Babylonia in the first millennium BC, I shall first present some information on this corpus and on Babylonian economy in general. The paper by Michael Jursa shall provide a deeper insight into the Babylonian economy. For much more detailed information I recommend his magnum opus (2010), which is the result of a great research project in Vienna on the character of the Babylonian economy in the first millennium BC. In an appendix I present some basic historical facts and information on weights and measures, which may be of help for people who are not acquainted with the history of the Near East in Antiquity. My second point of attention will be a short introduction to the points of discussion which I regard as basic for this conference. 1. Introduction The aim of this conference is to include the history of Antiquity into the discussions on market efficiency which has been a major topic of research for the last decades. This topic has gained more attention since the study of economic institutions and structures necessary for economic growth has been brought further and further back in time. The debate between formalist and the substantivist approaches in Ancient economic history, however, has hindered a role for economic historians in the modern debate. The substantivist stance, advocated by Karl Polanyi, holds that ancient economy cannot be studied with the standard modern economic principles like the working of the market, the profit-maximizing and want- satisfying logic and rationality of the homo oeconomicus, as the formalist economic view demands. Economy was embedded in social rules, customs, status, reciprocity, rather than in the hard rules of the market economy with prices set by the law of supply and demand. Thanks to the influential book of Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy (1973), research has long been dominated by the substantivist approach. Therefore, although the Finleyan theory was not always shared, the basically Finleyan research methodology was almost universally applied in Ancient history. This led to a divide between economic history and ancient history, the former largely applying economic theory and quantifiable analyses and the latter focussing on social and descriptive history. Nowadays the insight is growing that both approaches have their draw-backs, that neither ancient nor modern man is always fully acting as homo oeconomicus and that the formalist approach of the ancient economy may lead to the conclusion that in some respects it was primitive and in other aspects remarkably modern.1 A practical impediment for a formalist approach of ancient economies is the lack of quantifiable data, which prevented a thorough statistical analysis. It is therefore no surprise that, from a quantitative point of view, the discussion on the efficiency of markets largely focuses on the period from the Late Middle Ages onwards when data start to become increasingly abundant. Yet ancient historians increasingly acknowledge the necessity of quantification. In 2009 in Brussels a conference was organized by the Francqui foundation especially dedicated to this theme and the proceedings are in press (De Callataÿ, Wilson). In the present colloquium the focus is on prices, and collections of prices have been made, actually as early as 1930 by Heichelheim (1930 and 1954/5), but quantification can also concern the counting of shipwrecks, coin issues, the number of animal bones, the length of human body, number of settlements, etc. Survey archaeology is based upon quantification. But it is of course a great excitement for the ancient historian to find a very detailed recording of thousands of prices of food and wool over a period of more than four centuries, a really unique set of data. This evidence comes from a surprising source: the meticulous work of Babylonian scholars who in a quite modern way collected evidence and made databanks. The collection 1 The irony of the debate is that Polanyi (1957) took exactly the highly interesting corpus of cuneiform documents belonging to the Assyrian community in Kaniš (Kültepe – Southeast Turkey), 20th century BC, as the basis for his argument for a marketless economy in the Near East, which corpus on closer scrutiny reveals on the contrary a remarkable feeling for market relations, price setting, and profit-maximizing behavior (cf. Veenhof 1972: Dercksen 1996). which interests us here are the so-called astronomical diaries. These astronomical diaries are a dataset for research in the field of divination, a type of scholarship for which Babylonia was well-known (praised as well as condemned) in Antiquity. They contained a notation of celestial phenomena followed (in an increasing degree over time) by information on other (ominous) events that were supposed to be related to the position of the planets, like monstrous births, direction of the wind, the weather, the level of the Euphrates, but also more mundane things like deeds of kings (visits to Babylon, military campaigns), important events in Babylon and the level of the prices of six commodities: barley, dates, cuscuta (or some other spice used for the preparation of beer), water cress, sesame and wool. The basic purpose of Babylonian scholarship was to find out regularities in the relations between the position of the planets and other factors. In one field they were very successful: after centuries of scientific research the Babylonian astronomers were able to predict the constellation of the planets and the stars, and lunar and solar eclipses. Possibly less successful they were in another field: if there is regularity in celestial phenomena, one might one day also find regularities in other phenomena which seem irregular but may be not irregular like the death of kings, the level of the Euphrates and the volatility of prices. It would give them a real grip on the future. The study of omens and phenomena on earth and in the sky in a coordinate approach would help them as they believed that the signs in heaven concur with the signs on earth.2 The fact that these data were recorded at all thus means they were considered unpredictable and, hence, market prices. They therefore form an excellent source of data for the analysis of the efficiency of markets. In this workshop, our focus is therefore to connect the research into markets in antiquity with that of later periods to see if we can find some long-run trends. These astronomical diaries have become accessible to a wider readership by the publication of the tablets in three volumes in transcription and translation by the late Abraham Sachs and by Hermann Hunger (Hunger/Sachs 1988, 1989 and 1996). The prices have been collected in Slotsky 1997 and Vargyas 2001 (but cf. Van der Spek & Mademakers 2003). Recently a new corpus of texts has been published: documents containing just series of prices, hence without astronomical observations or other information (Slotsky & Wallenfels 2009). They seem to be the outcome of a real interest in prices as such. 2 The best study on Mesopotamian scholarship in this field is Rochberg 2004. Since 2007 a research project, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), has worked at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to analyse these prices and this colloquium is part of this project. The colloquium itself is funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). A file containing the Babylonian prices is uploaded on the website of the International Institute for Social History (IISG) (Van der Spek 2005) and also on the website of the “Early Economies Hub” of the Center for Global Economic History in Utrecht (http://www.cgeh.nl/early-economies-hub ) 2. The corpus of prices As pointed out before, the substantivist approach that no economic theory could be applied to ancient economies also implied that markets in the modern definition did not exist. Recent scholarship has departed from this assumption, but before going into this, we first have to make a few observations on the price data themselves. First, what I called prices in the previous section are as a matter of fact not prices, but notations of the purchasing power of the shekel (a weight measure of ca. 8.33 grammes of silver, roughly two drachmas) in relation to five basic foodstuffs: barley, dates, kasû (variously translated as mustard or cuscuta = dodder, in any case used as spice for the preparation of date beer), water cress (cardamom?) and sesame (all in litres3), and wool (in minas = pounds). Instead of, what we consider normal, to mention the price of say a hectolitre in shekels, they reported how much one could buy for one shekel. We converted this in our tables as normal prices expressed as grammes of silver per 1000 litres of barley, sesame, cress, cuscuta, dates, and per mina of wool.4 Second, the diaries are reported per month according to the Babylonian calendar. It was a lunar calendar, which consisted of twelve lunar months of 29 or 30 days, with the occasional intercalation of an extra month after months VI or XII in order to keep up with the solar year: seven intercalations in a period of 19 years. The system worked very well, but it must be kept 3 The capacity of the Babylonian litre (SÌLA/qû or qa (a fossilized accusative)) is subject to debate.
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