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Home , 311 BC, Seleucid Empire, Sippar

Academy Colloquium

“The efficiency of Markets in Pre-industrial societies: the case of (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 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 . 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 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 , but also more mundane things like deeds of kings (visits to , 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 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. In modern literature the capacity is computed as being 0.946 and 0.842 litres. Slotsky (1997) uses both measures on one page (p. 46, one in the text, one in table 1). For the mina Slotsky also uses a double standard: 453.60 grams in the text, c. 505 grams in table 1. Fortunately, Marvin Powell, an expert in ancient metrology, has suggested in view of the uncertainties to stick to one litre for a qa, 500 grammes for a mina (thus 1/60th = 8.333 grammes for a shekel) and 50 cm. for a cubit, since these measures are related to each other, give a fair measure of accuracy and avoid errors: obviously a wise advise indeed (Powell 1984, 33, 41-42, 46). Consequently, her table 1 should be discarded. One qa is one litre, one kur is 180 litres. 4 Actually our tables contain everything: dates according to the Babylonian and the , recordings of litres per shekel, prices in shekels and in grams of silver per 1000 litres and per tonne (with the conversion rate of 1 litre barley = 0.62 kg and 1 litre of dates = 0.75 kg). Jursa and Pirngruber use prices of shekel per kurru (=180 l.). in mind that the Babylonian months moved backwards a whole month in the solar year within three years, before the situation was redressed by the insertion of an intercalated month. Consequently, the first month of the Babylonian year, Nisan, could start between March 24 and April 23; in one year April could roughly correspond with month XII, in another year with month I. Therefore, we converted all Babylonian months into Julian months. The editors have numbered the diaries corresponding to the Babylonian years before according to astronomical usage, which means that diary no. -330 corresponds to 331 BC, that is: the Babylonian year -330 runs from April 13, 331 to April 2, 330 BC. The Babylonian calendar is conveniently converted into the Julian calendar by Parker and Dubberstein (1956; http://www.tyndalehouse.com/egypt/ptolemies/chron/babylonian/chron_bab_cal.htm ); minor corrections are given by Sachs and Hunger. In their edition different tablets concerning the same year are marked with A, B, C etc. In sum: when we speak about diary no. -330 I, we refer to the diary concerning the month Nisan of year 331 B.C. The new corpus of Babylonian price lists (Slotsky & Wallenfels 2009) is startling. The compilers of these lists seem to have had a real scientific interest in the development of prices. One tablet (no. 7) for instance collects prices of dates of the months VIII (harvest month) of the Seleucid years5 178 – 185 (134 – 127 BC), but others try to give a complete overview of all months (no. 8) of the years SEB 185 – 190. While the astronomical diaries give the exchange value of one shekel of silver, these texts often have two shekels as point of reference and twice it is even 1 mina of silver (60 shekels). Where we can compare the prices with the astronomical diaries it is striking that the prices of these price lists confirm the prices of the diaries; sometimes exactly, sometimes one document has average prices of a month where the diary has more detailed information (beginning, middle and end of the month). As in the diaries, the price lists convey more and more detailed prices per smaller parts of the month (days or cluster of days). The pricelists have enhanced our knowledge of the prices considerably. One text is of extreme interest: text 6 r. 12‟- 15‟. It gives two distinct exchange values of barley (for two shekels of silver) for month III 175 SEB = 27 May – 25 June 137 BC: 2 pan 2 sut (= 84 litres) in staters of Demetrius and 2 pan (= 72 litres) in staters of Arsaces6.

5 From 311 BC a real era is used: the (SE). According to the Babylonian calendar (SEB) it started Nisan = April 311 BC, but in the Macedonian Calendar (SEM) the new year, and hence the era, started with Dios (=October) 312 BC. Babylonian and Macedonian calendar are both lunar and the Macedonians took over the Babylonian intercalation system. 6 All Parthian kings had the throne name Arsaces. Wallenfels makes the interesting observation (2010: 94, n. 65): “The increased purchasing power (+6%) of the Demetrius staters is almost identical to the greater average weight of silver minted at on the by Demetrius II (+6.7%) over those of Mithradates.” The document refers to the time shortly after the abortive attempt of Demetrius in 138 BC to reconquer Babylonia from the Parthians. In his short reign a few months he apparently was able to introduce new coins, which had a higher weight than the Parthian coins. After the demise of Demetrius (he was captured), his coins apparently remained in use for some time. Some conclusions we can draw: 1. the Babylonians were well aware of the (intrinsic?) value of the coins, at least as regards weights; 2. the shekels mentioned in the astronomical diaries do not refer to exact silver content of the coins, but the coins as such. This may also confirm my earlier suggestion that by this time one shekel stood for two drachmas, hence two shekels for a : two shekels of Arsaces have less value than two shekels of Demetrius. The resulting data concerning the commodity prices cry out for a statistical study and it is a good thing that Alice Slotsky (1997) took up the challenge and produced a book in which she has made these price notations accessible for a wider readership, especially in the table of all commodity quotations reported at the end of the month (Appendix B, p. 133-146), and pre- sented a statistical analysis of this dataset. Although a pioneering study, her analysis was still limited. This changed with the article of Temin (2002) who concluded that price movements were unpredictable, hence, indicative of weak market efficiency. A similar conclusion, using different techniques, was reached by Van Leeuwen and Földvári (2010). It is the purpose of this colloquium to study the Babylonian prices in the context of the history of prices. We will take as our guide the study of Karl Gunnar Persson, Grain Markets in Europe 1500-1900 (Cambridge 1999)). This book shows that volatility of prices is a common feature of pre-industrial societies and is caused by non-integration of markets. Persson argued that in pre-modern societies “given the high costs of transport, the slow flow of information and the risky nature of local harvest carry-over, harvest fluctuations necessarily had a large impact on supply and prices. (...) The basic idea applied here is that market integration is related to the homogeneity of information in different markets and the opportunities for arbitrage and trade – that is, for exploiting the gains from moving goods from where prices were low to where prices were high” (Persson (1999) 91). Hence Persson expects “price volatility to decline with the extent of market integration and over time” (Persson (1999) 93; italics Persson). In other words: in integrated markets high prices will fall thanks to imports from abroad and low prices will rise due to good opportunities for export. If we take this into account, one must conclude that the integration of the food market of Babylonia with the rest of the (Seleucid) world was poor. Though the oscillations in price are far less substantial than the oscillations in litres, they are still noteworthy. Even in the rather stable period of Babylonian history, i.e. from 300 to 141 BC, prices of 1000 litres of barley fluctuated from 2.56 shekel to 41.67 shekel, i.e. the highest price is more than sixteen fold of the lowest price. A new sophisticated theory for the comparison of volatility, taking into account the height of prices, has been propounded by and worked out for Babylon Péter Földvári and Bas van Leeuwen (2011).

3. Discussion of the Babylonian prices. a. Babylonian methods of recording. 1. The prices are given in money, that is, in weight measures of silver. The shekel was the basic monetary unit in Babylonia since millennia: it is a weight measure of ca. 8.33 (8 1/3) grams of silver, slightly less than the weight of two drachms. Several documents, Greek, and cuneiform, maintain that the shekel is the same as two drachmas. Coinage was of recent date in Babylonia. It existed in the Achaemenid , but then the use of coinage was largely restricted to the western part of the empire. The introduction of coinage in , effectively only in the , was different from the introduction of coinage in . In Greece the introduction of money and coinage went hand in hand and was the same process, in Mesopotamia the introduction of coinage was only a paragraph in the history of money. 2. The Babylonians usually had a peculiar method of recording prices. As a matter of fact they did not give prices, but exchange values, i.e. the exchange value of one shekel of silver on the market. The full formula is as follows: “That month: 180 litres of barley were given for one shekel of refined silver in the streets of Babylon.” Most often the formula was abbreviated to: “That month: the exchange value was: barley 180 litres, dates: 160 litres; etc.” Very often the time scale was more precise: “The month: the exchange value was: barley, beginning of the month: x litres, middle of the month: y litres, end of the month: z litres; dates etc.” Thus the texts give what I now call upon the advice of Dominic Rathbone “exchange values”. The Babylonian word is derived from the verb mahāru, “to receive”, and is used for “market”, “purchase”, “merchandise”, and the like. Often the word is translated as “price”, and in some cases it is correct, and in a certain sense it is also correct in our texts: it is the price of silver, or better the purchasing power of silver, namely what you can buy for one shekel of silver. b. Why was it done this way? There are several good reasons. 1. It is much easier to differentiate between different values. If you would express the difference between 180 and 170 litres for a shekel in real prices, you must turn to very small fractions of the shekel when you want to give a real price: 0.00555 vs 0.005882 shekel. That does not work at the market place without an electronic calculator. So you may imagine the stallholders shouting: “barley: one hundred and eighty ...... ; dates 120”. 2. Thinking in exchange values facilitates trade by barter. When you know that you can buy 180 litres of barley and 120 litres of dates, you can also exchange these two items. 3. Small change is a recurrent problem in Antiquity, in Greece as well as in Babylonia. Other products than silver functioned as money, especially barley. As a matter of fact: wages were often paid in barley. Silver was accepted as the more or less fixed reference point, so it was useful to know what the exchange value of barley was in relation to the shekel. c. Why the litres should be converted into prices. In modern times we are used to thinking in prices and that impedes thinking in exchange values. Hence, in modern editions of the Babylonian prices it is necessary to convert the exchange values into prices. Unfortunately, Alice Slotsky and Peter Vargyas in their editions of the Babylonian prices both presented lists of Babylonian exchange values, i.e. litres per shekel, but did not convert these figures into real prices. One of the main reasons we have made a new edition of the prices, is that we want to present real prices. I admit that converting litres into prices certainly has one drawback: it is necessary to round up or round down the figures, which may cause increasing deviations in the process of making calculations and statistic analyses. So any scientific publication of the list should also contain the exchange values. But NOT converting litres into prices leads to much more serious errors. Let me explain why. In the first place it simply leads to distortion in one‟s head when one constantly has to realize that a high figure means a low price and vice versa. This is really cumbersome and may lead to error and did lead to error, especially in Vargyas‟ book. But in statistical analysis serious mistakes are inevitable if exchange values are not converted into prices, as is shown by both the editions of Alice Slotsky and Peter Vargyas. The average amount of litres per shekel converted into shekels or grams of silver per litre does not give an average price, as Slotsky thought. That should be computed on the basis of taking the average of real prices, as I have explained on the IISG website (Van der Spek 2005). That something was wrong with Slotsky‟s figures (p. 52) was noted by my colleague Kees Mandemakers, who observed that contrary to expectation from the vantage point of the economic historian, in Slotsky‟s figures the average barley price was lower than the median price while in normal cases the situation is the other way around. That this is the case is explained by the very inelastic nature of the demand for basic foodstuffs: people do not eat much more when the supply of grain is vast, but they pay much more, when supply is scarce. So prices can rise sky high in times of war, but cannot fall below zero in an abundant market. From Slotsky‟s figures we would be inclined to think that something abnormal was at stake in the Babylonian economy, while in actual fact in this case nothing strange was at hand. As in our fictive example. There is another reason why it is necessary to convert exchange values into prices. When the prices are high, a difference of 10 litres for a shekel is much more substantial, than when prices are low. The difference between 180 and 170 litres leads to a price difference of only 0.32 shekel, while a difference between 40 and 30 litres produces a difference of 8.33 shekel. This fact again leads to very different graphs. A graph in litres shows a far steeper oscillation, than a graph in prices as may be illustrated on the sheets. The reason for this is easily understood when one realizes that the amount of litres for a shekel may theoretically reach infinite high figures, which means increasingly lower prices, but –as said- prices cannot fall below zero. Though the oscillations are still noteworthy, they are not as spectacular as is commonly thought and it is much easier to discover trends in prices. The point is that extremely high exchange values lead to prices that are practically only a little above zero, so that difference here does not matter very much. When exchange values are recorded as 390 and 372 litres for a shekel, as happened in 188 and 166 BC, it actually meant that grain was sold practically for nothing (2.56 and 2.69 shekels respectively for 1000 litres = ca. 620 kg. of barley) and in modern times the grain would be taken from the market. This was probably not done in Antiquity, but the grain may have suffered the same fate: it rotted away in the granaries and subsistence farmers could spare the trip to the market. d. Statistic analysis of the prices. Though we have for ancient standards an incredible amount of prices, it is far from complete and the amount of information is distributed unevenly. Not all astronomical tablets have been recovered (most of them were found in illegal diggings and sold to the at the end of the 19th century), but the tablets we have are nearly all badly damaged. But enough survives to make reliable statistical analysis possible. Fortunately Földvári and Van Leeuwen developed a model to cope with this problem (Földvári, van Leeuwen, 2010B).

4. Discussion of the character of the Seleucid Babylonian economy.

It is impossible to repeat the discussion on the character of the Ancient Near eastern and Hellenistic economies. Grand models have been attributed to them. I need to mention only the Marxist model of the so-called Asiatic mode of production; the theories of a marketless economy as advanced by Karl Polanyi (see above); the discussions about the role of slavery, the role of the state and the role of private property; the discussion whether the was a Graeco-Macedonian, an oriental state or a mixture of both. Without embarking on these discussion again, I would like to make a few statements about these issues as are relevant for the Hellenistic Babylonian economy. As our focus is on Babylonia, which belonged to the of the Great and the Seleucids until 141 BC and to the thereafter, it is good to take account of the character of the Babylonian economy in the first millennium BC. Though we have detailed information on prices and historical events in the Hellenistic period, our information on other aspects of the economy is rather limited. Much may be extrapolated from our knowledge of the earlier period, for which Jursa et alii 2010 is ground-breaking and fundamental.

The economy was primarily an agricultural economy, as in the rest of the Mediterranean world. It differed from the most parts of the Mediterranean world, however, in that it was an irrigation agriculture, which allowed very high returns of minimal 1:15 seed – yield ratio, but on occasion perhaps higher: 20 to 24 fold (Jursa 2010: 319, n. 1848). These high returns were made possible by abundance of water, by well organized canal building, by sophisticated sowing systems (using seeder ploughs in carefully computed furrows instead of broadcast sowing) and by crop rotation. The agriculture was from time immemorial dominated by big institutions, viz. temple and palace. Temples owned large tracts of land, which were cultivated directly by temple personnel, given as land for service to functionaries and leased to outsiders. Our information from the cuneiform documents is much more copious concerning temples than concerning royal land. The temples used cuneiform writing, where the palace assets were apparently administered in Aramaic and Greek documents. Apart from farmers a lot of other people belonged to the temple community, like carpenters, millers, bakers, builders, herders, and others. They received “rations”: monthly distributions of portions of grain, oil, meat, etc. For this it was necessary to build extensive storage facilities. This brings us at the vexed question of storage. Especially in regions where rain agriculture prevails in a climate with precipitation of hardly above 250 mm. p.a. and consequently harvests regularly fail, wise farmers are expected to store grain for the case of emergency (Reger 1994: 90-5). This has nothing to do with storage for market purposes, to manipulate the market and obtaining good prices in years of scarcity, but is rather a buffer for bad years and but can better be called, as dubbed by Poynder (1999), “convenience yield”. One of the questions raised in this project is: what was the role of this storage, either storage for marketing or for private consumption in a difficult year? Were great organizations or common people able to store grain for longer periods, esp. for periods of longer than one year, that is even after the next harvest? Storage may in ideal circumstances mitigate the volatility of prices as storerooms can be opened in times of scarcity and decrease the amount of surplus in times of overproduction. On the other hand, as Persson (1999: 60ff) correctly observes, storage may also have the reverse effect. When harvests are abundant, there will be an increased supply (of seed-corn) next year, and when prices are high in case of a bad harvest, prices will increase as the granaries are empty, problems of supply are aggravated the year after. We know that in Greek cities in Asia minor the city authorities created funds in order to buy grain in years of scarcity (Migeotte 1997) . But if I understand this well, they relied on funding in order to purchase grain, rather than on storing surplus grains. The first results as regards storage in Babylonia , arrived at independently by Jursa (2010: 591), and Van Leeuwen, Földvári, and Pirngruber (2011), point to the conclusion that storage for longer than one year was hardly possible, although the great organizations as the temples had ample opportunities for it. They did store of course (as any farmer should) to keep provisions for the whole year and to have seed-corn the next year (and perhaps some “convenience yield” for direct needs the next year, not dictated by considerations of market). But substantial harvest carry-over apparently did not exist. Jursa observes that as regards the date production of the Ebabbar temple in “by and large the temple did not hoard dates with the intention of making them available to outsiders after the intensive phase of selling following the harvest.” It may be “a reflection of the temple‟s pressing need for money: the evidence suggests that Ebabbar had to attempt to sell a maximum amount of its major cash crop in as short a time as possible.” (Jursa 2010: 591). There are several documents that state that the temple bought grain and dates on the market. Michael Jursa provides evidence for it in his magnum opus (2010) 93; 101-2; 112, and it is attested in the Rahimesu archive from Babylon, c. 93 BC (Van der Spek 1998: text 13: 8; 18: 5). This fits in with the conclusions of McCloskey and Nash, shared by Persson (1999: 68) that harvest carry-over was negligible in Medieval England.

Trade A good export market for grain products outside Babylonia would have been Seleucis in , the region where the new Greek cities were founded, but this was probably too problematic. Ships should have been pulled against the current of the Euphrates up to Thapsacus and then via an overland route to , but that was probably too difficult for bulk goods. The trade route the other way around, from into Babylonia, is better documented, but not for grain (Hdt. 1.194; Diod. 14.81.4; Arrian, Anab. 7.20.4; Oppenheim 1967; Briant 2002: 377-83). Transports like this entirely over land are also practically impossible. The second barrier to international trade is the quality and desirability of the product. Babylonia had good harvests, but it concerned harvests of barley, not of wheat. In the Greek world barley was much cheaper than wheat, and though it was a larger part of the daily menu of the common man, it was considered by the as of low quality and in the first place a diet for animals. So it would be hardly profitable to bring barley all the way from Babylon to Antioch in Syria. If there was no grain export, were there perhaps other exports? Babylonia was rich in agriculture, but it was poor in other respects. There was no timber (the date palm is the most important tree, but unsuitable as timber), there are no minerals (gold, iron, copper, tin), no stone quarries. All this had to be imported. If there was no grain export, other kinds of export must have existed, in order to procure silver and other necessities. We have not much information about exports, but some products come to mind. In the first place textiles of wool and flax. was a center of flax production (Strabo 16.1.7). In the second half of the first millennium Babylonia seems to have greatly increased its own linen production (Oppenheim 1967: 251. Woolen textiles were exported already in the Old Assyrian period (Veenhof 1972: 98-103) and this may have been the case in the Seleucid period. The prices of wool may give a clue here. While prices of food fluctuate heavily, the price of wool is relatively stable, but show long-term fluctuations. In the late Achaemenid period the shekel buys gradually more wool: 1 pound in 419 BC (= 1 shekel per pound) to 5 à 6 shekels (0.2 à 0.16 shekel per pound) just before the advance of . Alexander and the early successors drive up the prices like the other commodities: 1 à 1.5 pound until 293 BC. These high prices must be attributed to the same factors as the high prices of other products: wars and inflation. Prices then return to exchange values of ca. 3-5 pounds per shekel until the 150s BC, i.e. 0.67 to 0.40 shekel (ca. one drachm) per kilo. Market integration was probably stronger here. A remarkable rise in prices of wool, more extreme than other products, is recorded in the Parthian period. Other export products may have been salt and bitumen. That salt was taxed is well documented from and Seleucia (cf. Rostovtzeff (1932) 81, McDowell (1935) 180-4; Aperghis (2004) ch. 8.2). Long distance trade is badly documented in the Babylonian cuneiform evidence. In my second paper, written in co-operation with Bas van Leeuwen, I shall deal with the purchasing power of silver in different regions and discuss the assumption that silver –in a well integrated market- should flow to the regions where its purchasing power is highest.

What does it mean: market economy? The central question is, whether or not the Babylonian economy was a market economy. The answer is: yes, but this statement should be qualified. From the Babylonian documents it is clear that prices were ruled by the law of supply and demand. This observation can be gleaned from all kinds of document which testify to the notion that prices rise before the harvest and fall after, that people try to get information in which cities in Babylonia can best be bought. It was formally tested by Peter Temin (2002) with statistical methods. But market prices had not the same value as in our modern society. Many small farmers will have been subsistence farmers; they consumed their own products without bringing it to the market; temple personnel often did not receive wages in money, but in kind. Money (silver in shekels) existed since time immemorial, but it did not replace barter completely. One of the features of Babylonia in the first millennium BC, however, had been an increasing monetization. “Rations” were increasingly paid in silver. Every society has its own market. Babylonia had great economic organizations like temples and palace, which are lacking in the Greek and Roman republican societies. Labour was organized differently in Babylonia, the , the and the later , let alone early modern France or 20th century USA.

5. The information of the prices.

The level of prices is determined by supply and demand. The price level may also rise, however, without being affected by supply and demand. The increase of money in circulation has its own role in pushing up prices, if growth of production does not accompany it.

The supply side. Supply can change due to good or bad harvests. Good harvests are caused by sufficient water supply, sufficient seed corn, sufficient labour, sufficient land and sufficient management, and, last but not least, political stability, so that corn can be sown and harvested. Prices remain stable when at the demand side no disastrous developments occur. Population growth need not lead to shortages if sufficient land is available and if growing production, e.g. by reclamation of new land, is not overtaken by demographic growth. Bad harvests can be explained when these factors are absent or disturbed. Thanks to among other texts the Babylonian chronicles and astronomical diaries, we have a lot of information about these factors. We have good information on the water supply and the weather, since the astronomical diaries report these phenomena too. Studies have been made about the relation between the level of the Euphrates ( Brown 2002, Gerfrid Muller 1996; Joost Huijs is working on it) and these studies reveal a certain relationship indeed. Sufficient seed is of course dependent upon a good harvest in the year before. Political stability appears to be a very important factor and fortunately we are well informed. It is fairly clear that excessive high prices have always something to do with war, especially war at home. Wars cause an enormous increase in demand when an army is around. Furthermore armies tend to be very destructive, if wars are fought in city and countryside. So there can be no doubt that the high prices in the days of Alexander and the successors are caused by the presence of Alexander‟s army, the wars between Antigonus, Eumenes and Seleucus in the very precincts of Babylon. The Greek sources confirm the outbreak of famines in these periods. There can also be hardly any doubt that the political situation in the time of the Parthians was very instable. The land changed hands very often: the Parthian power was challenged by the Seleucids (Demetrius I in 138 BC, Antiochus VII in 130-129 BC), the Elamites, Messene (king ruled a few months in 127 BC) and rebellious Parthian . Furthermore the diaries report frequently: “the attacked as usual”.

The demand side. Severe increase in demand apparently only temporarily affected prices, namely when armies passed by. We know that the Seleucids actively fostered immigration: Seleucus founded Seleucia on the Tigris (35 km. below ), Antiochus III or IV introduced a Greek colony in Babylon itself (early 2nd century). Both measures did not affect prices to a large extent. The founding of Seleucia was apparently supported by reclamation of land in the Diyala region, as is documented by surveys in the region (Adams 1965; 1972; 1981), while emigration from Babylon to the new city may have diminished the pressure on the Babylonian arable land. The introduction of the Greek colony by Antiochus seems not to lead to rising prices, but may have affected consumption patterns (cf. contribution by Pirngruber, this colloquium). It seems that arable land was abundant enough at this juncture. Seleucia and Babylon could be fed by their respective hinterlands (Van der Spek 2008). It was, by the way, Stolper‟s conclusion that land was cheap in the Persian period as well, while movable factors were costly and water was very costly (Stolper 1985: 143) .

The role of money. It is widely assumed that the conquest of the by Alexander the Great brought wealth and prosperity. Especially the fact that he opened the treasuries of the Achaemenid kings (variously handed down as170,000 – 190,000 talents = 4.4 – 4.9 million kilograms of silver and coined it, would have introduced a monetary economy, which would have fostered trade; especially the introduction of the Attic standard in his realm would have been beneficial (Rostovtzeff 1953: 129-135; Heichelheim 1970: 10; Golenko 1993; see Aperghis‟ paper). These contentions are at least questionable. In the first place, Alexander did not introduce a monetary economy at all. Money in the form of silver existed for millennia in the Near East. Weight and quality were carefully controlled and the fact that money was weighed rather than counted, facilitated exchange. The introduction of coinage was hardly advantageous. It meant that trade was hampered by different currencies, which increased transaction costs. Even the contention that Alexander introduced the Attic standard is not upheld anymore by modern numismatists. That Attic standard gradually spread, but was not accepted everywhere. The decree is a good case in point. The drachma of the Attic standard (in use in the Seleucid empire) had a weight of about 4.46 gr., while by 295 BC the Ptolemaic drachma weighed 3.57 grams (Von Reden 2007: 39-48). Nevertheless the coinage decree ordered that the foreign drachmas had to be changed into Ptolemaic drachmas at the rate of 1:1. In addition, the bulk of the coinage consisted of tetradrachms, which weighed 17.2 grams, a far too heavy denomination for the use in daily trade. The Babylonian shekels could be divided into smaller units up to 1/40th of a shekel (Jursa 2010: 631). For this reason coins were still weighed in Babylonia. Cuneiform transactions continue to reckon in shekels, even if it is stipulated that the shekels were to be paid in “staters of Seleucus” or of any other reigning king. Sometimes we see coins from which minor parts were stripped of, apparently to get at the just weight in shekels. Actually the only real innovation was the introduction of bronze coinage, new in that is was fiduciary money, so more “money” than silver. It was useful for small exchange, but in official documents it played no part. Silver remained the standard, in the Greek, as well as in the Babylonian world, but differently in . All this does not rule out that monetization increased in the Hellenistic period and this indeed seems to be the case. It was, however, a process that began in the Neo-Babylonian and continued under the Achaemenids (Jursa 2010: 657-60). It meant that farmers had to sell products in order to get silver and it will have farmers solicited to produce for a market. The Murashû firm in the Achaemenid period is a telling case in point of an enterprise that profited from this royal policy (Stolper 1985: 150-1; Van Driel 2002: 165; 239; Jursa 2010: 405-14). The Seleucids continued this policy and it probably meant that the ration system in Babylonia retreated. A sign of this change is the fact that the word kurummatu „food portion, ration‟ (in opposition to idū = „wages‟ in money) increasingly was used for silver payments. Though this occurred already in the Old Babylonian period, it is attested more often in the Achaemenid period and seems to become more common in the Hellenistic (CT 49, 21(311 BC); 50 (311 BC); 118 (262 BC); 128 (253 BC) and especially Parthian periods. In the Rahimesu-archive (93 BC) all rations are paid in silver, though this feature may be due to the character of the archive: the administration of offertory boxes of temples in which silver was deposited. More telling are the legal documents concerning the assignment of rations to certain astronomers: in one text, dated to 127 BC, the “ration” is two minas of silver (= 120 shekel = ca. 240 drachmas) per year; in the other, 118 BC, it is one mina plus an unspecified tract of arable land (cf. Van der Spek 1985: 548-55). Secondly, the bringing into circulation of large amounts of bullion, does not contribute to production and growth in itself. If the growth of the volume of money in circulation exceeds production, inflation is the result. That is precisely what we see in Babylonia during the reign of Alexander and a few years after him. Prices of the main commodities rise so sharply that it must have had a devastating effect on the economy [cf. the paper of Aperghis] (apart from the devastations of Alexander and the successors themselves made with their armies) (Grainger 1999; Van der Spek 2000). However, after ca. 300 BC, prices became much lower and no long-term inflation took place until ca. 150 BC. This may be due to the peaceful period Babylonia experienced with consequent good agricultural management, but scarcity of silver may also have played its part. It is a point of debate whether the Seleucid kings conducted a conscious monetary policy. Aperghis thinks so [see his paper]. In his opinion the Seleucids tried to keep a constant amount of coins in circulation, enough for the payment of taxes, enough to restore loss and wear. He distinguishes between “a „peace-time‟ coinage, issued primarily to facilitate payments by the administration and the collection of taxes and secondarily for private exchanges in Seleucid Mesopotamia and „wartime‟ coinage in which the output could be doubled (Aperghis 2004; this colloquium). It may be that this was the result, but I doubt if there was a Seleucid central planning bureau that calculated the need of coins to be issued. We may well agree with his conclusion that the purpose of tetradrachms in Seleucid Mesopotamia seems to have been principally to facilitate the payment of its expenses by the administration (the bulk being military pay) and the collection of its revenue (cf. De Callataÿ 2000b). That not too much silver came into circulation will in the first place not have been the result of coinage policy, but rather a shortage of silver. Silver was and remained a scarce product. It was not found in Mesopotamia, probably in SE Asia Minor, probably in . It could not easily be imported from abroad, since it was sought by everyone. It could be earned by export and the Phoenician seaports (but from 300 – 200 in Ptolemaic hands) and the new Greek ports Laodicea and Seleucia on the Sea will have played some role. Sometimes success in war could bring a lot of bullion. A striking example is the booty from Egypt brought back by Antiochus IV in 168 BC (Pol. 31.6; Cf. Aperghis (2004) 8.8). On the other hand, a lot of money flowed out of the country. Greek mercenary soldiers brought money home to Greece; some kings spent a lot of money in prestigious building programs in Greek cities in Hellas (Antiochus IV). Antiochus III had to pay 15,000 talents of silver to the Romans in 188 BC. The Seleucid kings, in spite of their scarcity of silver, maintained a high standard in their coinage until mid second century BC. All this prevented price inflation. Then credit. One way of creating money is issuing fiduciary money, bank notes, marketable securities or other negotiable credit instruments. As noted above, bronze coinage circulated and was in fact fiduciary money (Houghton, Lorber 2002, vol. II: 1-36). It is interesting to note that the Babylonian Astronomical diary (AD I No. –273 B „Rev. 33‟ and Upper edge 2) concerning the year 38 SEB (= 274/3 BC) tells – apparently because the had withdrawn so much silver for Antiochus‟ campaign against Egypt in the first Syrian war – that “purchases in Babylon and the other cities were made with Greek bronze coins.” The phenomenon was strange in the eyes of the Babylonians, and a sign of hardship. The astronomer records this: “there was famine in Babylonia; people sold their children. People died of .… That year there was ekketu disease ....” Nevertheless, the Babylonians were not unused to paper money, or better clay money. A fine example is CT 49, 173, a record of deposit from ca. 274 BC (edited and discussed by Stolper 1993: 25-28 and 60). The document concerns a deposit of “12 shekels of refined silver, staters in fine condition, wrapped up and under seal” and stipulates: “Any authorized person who holds the document may collect that 12 shekels of silver, that is, that deposit, according to the royal decree (data – Iranian word!).” Two other examples are from the Arsacid period (125 BC and 93 BC), where the word tahsistu seems to mean something like “security note”, “bank note” (Van der Spek 1998a, texts 1 and 32). It is hard to speculate about the economic significance of the phenomenon. The paper of Joris Aarts discusses the possibilities of credit in Roman State finance. It is interesting to note that Mayhew in his paper points to the fact that credit itself is dependent on the money supply. If the „taxes and trade model‟ of K. Hopkins (1980; 1995/6) has value for the Roman empire, it must also be meaningful for the ancient oriental empires. These empires extracted large sums of money by means of taxation, tribute and booty, and this money was spent, foremost in the capitals, but also in the armies which were garrisoned all over the empire. Subsistence farmers were obliged to sell part of their surplus on the market in order to get money for paying the taxes. This furthered the monetization of the economy. The phenomenon was already described for the Achaemenid empire by Kippenberg in 1978 (Kippenberg 1978: 49-53). Some people suffered from it, like the small farmers who sold their children to be able to pay their taxes (Nehemiah 5:4); others set up flourishing companies who earned money by converting taxes in kind into silver, like the Murashû firm in (Stolper 1985; Van Driel 2002: 314-322; Jursa maintains that Nippur has turned into a back-water (2010: 405-18). Aperghis‟ paper deals more elaborately with the monetization of the Seleucid empire. As said the effective introduction of coinage started immediately with the reign of Alexander the Great. But as Jursa has pointed out, monetization without coins (perhaps better called “silverization”) was well underway before Alexander.

6. Wages Prices are more telling if we know the level of wages. Recently, a precious document, dated to 7 January 321 BC, was published recording the wages paid to five hired workers who removed the debris of the temple (Jursa 2002: 120 Nr. 8), apparently as part of the job undertaken by Alexander the Great for the reconstruction of the temple tower (mentioned in Astronomical Diary No. –321 Rev. 14‟: “the debris of Esagila was removed to the west bank” (August 322 BC)). The tablet mentions the wages for the 15th of month X to the 16th of month XI = 10 January to 9 February 321 BC. The way the salary is expressed is especially interesting and unique in that it is given both in shekels and staters: “1/3 mina (= 20 shekels) of silver, the weight of 10 staters”. It means that the weight of a Babylonian stater (lion stater?) was set at 2 shekels, and that the monthly wage of these workers was two staters or four shekels. We also have barley prices for this year from the diaries: one shekel could buy 12 – 13.5 liters of barley in January, February and September 322 BC (Vargyas (2001) 66). Four shekels is surely a high wage (in the Achaemenid period monthly wages fluctuated from one to four shekels (table Jursa 2010: 674-6 – with outliers up to 10 shekels), but four shekels could buy only 48 - 54 liters of barley i.e. just subsistence level, since an average male worker needs a minimum income of ca. 50 liters of barley per month (“barley equivalent,” for a full evaluation of the material see Van der Spek 1998a: 246-253). According to I.J. Gelb, in early Mesopotamian history the standard monthly ration for an adult male was 60 liters of barley, for women 30 liters, for children 10-25 liters (Gelb 1965: 236). The average ration for individuals in the Achaemenid period was ca. one liter of barley per day with additional allowances of beer, salt, mustard/cuscuta, vegetable oil, and other foods (Dandamayev 1984: 239-241). The standard ration for a family was ideally 1 kur = 180 liters per month, and this amount is still attested in the late Achaemenid period (Jursa 2002: 112; Dandamayev 1984:115, 500-1; 638, Boiy 2001: 225-6; Jursa 2010: 532).7 The year 322 BC was certainly not an average year. It was just one year after the death of Alexander and the presence of his army and the abundance of silver must have caused hunger and inflation. More information comes from Parthian Babylon. Monthly wages mentioned in the so-called Rahimesu archive (94/3 BC) are: 1 shekel for a porter of the Day One Temple, but only 0.67 shekel two months later; cleaners of the Day One temple receive 1.5 shekel; a parchment scribe 2 shekels, all this in a time a shekel could buy 90 liters of barley. It is a little better, but not enough to sustain a family. And indeed, the astronomical diaries report hardship for July 94 BC: “there were many sick and dead in the land,” whereby the sickness could well have been caused by lack of food or of a diet which was too one-sided (cf Van der Spek 1998: 252-3; 2004: 318-20). Unfortunately, we have no information about wages in the Seleucid empire, only just before and just after. Hence we may only speculate about wages in Seleucid Babylonia. If I

7 The normative relation was: 1 shekel = 1 kor (180 liter) = 1 monthly pay. Though this norm was not completely illusory, economic reality often diverged from this ideal, especially in times of war and bad harvests. may make an educated guess, I assume that wages did not follow price volatility closely, that high prices simply caused famine and that the wages of ordinary laborers will not have exceeded the 4 shekels of 321 BC and not have fallen far below the 0.67 shekels of 93 BC. Hence a wage laborer who earned 2 shekels of silver could buy 60 liters in poor years and 780 liters in 188 BC. Finally, we must be cautious when dealing with wages. Many people lived off rations they received from the temple and the palace. Price fluctuations did not bother them, if the amount of grain they received did not change. In Seleucid Babylonia people still lived off rations. Other forms of income were the leftovers of the sacrificial meals in the temple from which prebendaries derived a part of their income (Funck 1984, McEwan 1981: 67-120; Corò 2005). Subsistence farmers (among them private proprietors, tenants of temple fields, soldiers (klērouchoi)) lived off their land and the market was of marginal importance for them. Thus the grain-prices as recorded in the astronomical diaries were important for Babylonians who did not get rations, or did not own a sufficient parcel of land for their own sustenance, so that they had to buy (additional) grain and dates in the streets of Babylon. It was also important for subsistence farmers to sell a surplus in order to be able to buy products they could not produce themselves. The prices were also important for Babylonians who grew cash crops – like sesame, and water cress in the Astronomical diaries – and bought barley with the money they made in selling them. Conversely, people may have sold part of their barley rations in order to buy additional foodstuffs. Finally the great organizations themselves went to the market (in the streets of Babylon), either to sell their surpluses, or to buy food in times of shortages. Thus they must have intensified upward and downward tendencies in the price movements.

Central points of discussion

1. Volatility of prices as indicator of market integration and market efficiency is the central issue of our colloquium. Unfortunately we have in the Hellenistic period only prices from Babylon and some proxy data from other cities, esp. Uruk. So we can study the volatility of the prices in comparison with cities and places of other periods, but not with contemporary cities in the region. We have of course the information of far away regions like Egypt (paper Sitta von Reden) and (Gary Reger), but if Babylonia constituted an integrated market in foodstuffs is questionable to say the least. I hope to make some remarks on this in my paper on the purchasing power of silver. Nevertheless, Van Leeuwen and Földvári have developed a refining of the study of the volatility by taking into account the level of the prices. In times of higher prices volatility may seem higher, than in times of lower prices, but this may be deceptive. Sudden rises in price may have very different direct causes, like bad harvests (weather, level of Euphrates, bad management), wars, demographic changes, huge building activities and investments, plagues, etc.). The following points all have relevance for this main topic.

2. Dual-crop economies (e.g. grain and dates in Babylonia, grain and potatoes in Ireland, rice and grain in parts of China (see the papers of Liam Kennedy and Debin Ma). It is to be expected that dual crop economies can more easily cope with price oscillations, as there are more harvests and failure in one can be compensated by a good harvest in the other crop. This must be taken into account when we compare different economies.

3. Storage. The effect of storage is ambiguous. In the first place it has to be established how much storage there was. And if it existed the purpose must be examined, such as (1) keeping provisions for the entire year and have enough seed, (2) storage out of market considerations: selling in times of grain shortage, or even an expedient to elicit shortage in order to obtain higher prices in times of scarcity. This expedient is attested often in the Roman world and it is my suspicion that the Roman Lex Claudia of 218, which forbade senators to own large commercial ships, was intended to prohibit senators to accumulate strategic reserves, because quaestus omnis patribus indecorus est visus, “all profit-seeking was regarded improper for senators,” as Livy (21.63.4) says, where in my view quaestus does not so much concern profit as such, but speculative storage for irresponsible gain at the eve of the Second Punic war. (3) Did storage mitigate or increase autocorrelation and price volatility?

4. Market integration, trade and money. We shall first of all discuss flows of trade in basic foodstuffs, like grain, dates and potatoes and see if the market can reduce oscillations of prices, but we shall also take a look at the circulation of money. Until the 19th century silver and money were more or less the same. Since the third millennium BC silver was a commodity and means of exchange, hence money. But as commodity it was also subject to the rules of the market, to the rules of supply and demand (cf. Flynn 2009). It is to be expected that silver tends to go to place were the value was highest, where the purchasing power was highest. And of course circulation of money is an indicator of market integration. If coins remain in the region where they were minted, long distance trade apparently was limited. A wide circulation of coins is a marker for an integrated market. The fact that silver was a commodity presents another difficulty. If the value of silver is stable (but why would it in market economy?), there is not much of a problem. But when silver is scarce (and it often was), it will be expensive in relation to e.g. barley, which means that the purchasing power is high and the price of barley seemingly low. That does not automatically mean that it was easy for the common man to buy this cheap grain, when he or she did not have silver in his pocket. In times of silver shortage a last resort might be credit, but it seems questionable of credit is a resort in times of silver shortage (papers Mayhew and Aarts).

5. The role of the State. If a well functioning market is the best means of securing stable prices, we may assume that the role of the state is limited. This is one of Persson‟s most important conclusions: whatever governments may have tried with storage, distribution or funding, real price stability occurred when transport became easier and when information became easier to obtain, so that the market could do its work. But one might also consider special situations in which government intervention may be helpful. The volatility in Hellenistic Babylon may have been mitigated if the government had intervened more often by storage, by supporting investments, by facilitating imports. In a complete free market differences in welfare may grow so much that the free market does not work so ideal as one might wish, as in the 19th century, and in present day United States.

BRIEF HISTORY OF BABYLONIA IN THE FIRST MILLENNIUM;

… - 612: Assyrian Empire (, , Calah) Assurbanipal (669-631) 612 Fall of Nineveh by united forces of and Babylonians 612-539: Neo-Babylonian Empire (Babylon) (626-605) Nebuchadnezzar (605-562) (556-539) 539: Cyrus takes Babylon 539 – 331: Persian or Achaemenid Empire Cyrus (539-530) Cambyses (530-522) Darius (522-486) Xerxes (486-465) (465-424/3) Darius II (423-405) Artaxerxes II-IV (405-336) Darius III (336-331) 1 October 331: battle of Gaugamela Alexander the Great (331-323) 323-301: wars of the “successors”, esp. Antigonus and Seleucus; war on Babylon 311-308 311 – 141: Seleucid empire Seleucus I (311 „stratēgos of Asia‟; 305-281 king). c. 305: founding of Seleucia on the Tigris. Antiochus I (281-261) Antiochus II (261-246) Seleucus II (246-226/5 or 225/4). Emergence of Parthian empire in . Seleucus III (226/5 or 225/4 – 222) Antiochus III (222-187) 200: conquers S.Syria/ and Iran; 189: defeated by the Romans at Magnesia; 188 Peace of Seleucus IV (187-175) Antiochus IV (175-164). Greek colony in Babylon. Invades Egypt 169-168. Makkabean revolt. Antiochus V (164-162/1) Demetrius I (162/1-150) Alexander Balas (150-145) Demetrius II (145-138) 141: Parthian king Mithradates I conquers Babylonia. Seleucid Empire reduced to Syria. 141 BC – AD 224: Parthian or Arsacid Empire Mithradates I (165 – 132). 138: Invasion of Demetrius I, who is taken captive. Phraates I (132-127): 130-29: invasion of Antiochus VII of Syria, who falls in battle. 127: brief reign of Hyspaosines of Artabanus I (126-122) Mithradates II (121-91) c. 93: „Rahimesu Archive‟ (91-87) Orodes (80-75) Phraates III (70-57) Oct/Nov. 61 BC: last dated astronomical diary: 30 + 31 Oct: 37 litres of barley for 1 shekel. Money and weights in Hellenistic Babylonia See more: http://www.livius.org/w/weights/weights.html

Mesopotamia

1 talent (GÚ.UN; biltu) = 60 mina = 3600 shekel = 30 kg. 1 mina (MA.NA; manû) = 60 shekel = 500 gr. 1 shekel (GÍN; šiqlu) = 12 “grains” = 8.33 (8 1/3) gr. (c. 2 drachmas) 1 slice (bitqu) = 1/8 shekel = 1.04 gr. 1 “grain” (mahat) = 1/12 shekel = 0.69 gr. (Parthian, ? Late Achaemenid) 1 carat (girû) = 1/24 shekel = 0.35 gr. 1 chickpea? (hallūru) = 1/40 shekel = 0.21 gr. 1 barleycorn (ŠE, uţţetu) = 1/180 shekel = 0.04629 gr.

Note. The purity of silver: silver in the Neo-Bab. and Achaemenid period contained 1/8 alloy, i.e. silver had 87.5 to over 90% purity. Sometimes, and chronologically increasingly, silver is characterized as qalû, “pure” (Jursa 2010: 474-90). The tetradrachms of the Hellenistic period (see below) had purity well above 90%. Cf. Mørkholm 1991: 5.

Greek: Attic standard (and Ptolemaic standard)

Coins 1 talent (to talanton) = 60 minae = 6000 drachms = 25.86 kg. (21.45 kg.) 1 mina (hē mnâ) = 100 drachms = 431 gr. (357.5 gr.) 1 didrachma = 12 obols = 8.62 gr. (7.16 gr) [≈ 1 Babylonian Shekel] 1 drachm (hē drachmē) = 6 obols = 4.31 gr. (3.58 gr.)) 1 obol (ho obolós) = 8 chalkoi = 0.72 gr. (0.60 gr.)

1 stater (ho statēr) = 1 tetradrachm = 4 drachms = 17.24 gr. (14.30) 1 deben silver (Ptol. demotic)= 20 drachms

Note. In the Seleucid empire the standard coin was the tetradrachm, “stater”. Development of weights: Alexander: 17.28 gr.; In Antioch: ca. 300 BC 17.00 gr.; ca. 172 BC: 16.80 gr.; ca. 105 BC 16.30 gr. – decline well below 15.00 gr. Elsewhere in the second century the standard remained 16.80 gr.; New Style tetradrachms show a weight increase (!) to about 17.00 gr. from the 16.60/16.80 of the preceding issues. In the Ptolemaic empire I began reducing the weight to 15.8 gr. > 14.9 > 14.3/14.4 gr. in ca. 290 BC > 14.2 in the early first century BC. (Mørkholm 1991: 8)

MEASURES OF CAPACITY

Mesopotamia (Late Babylonian) Both dry and liquid

1 kor (GUR, kurru) = 5 bushel (PI, pānu) = 30 seah (BÁN, sūtu) = 180 qa (SÌLA, qû or qa) = 180 liters. 1 bushel (PI, pānu) = 6 seah = 36 qa = 36 liters. 1 seah (BÁN, sūtu) = 6 qa = 6 liters. 1 liter (SÌLA, qû or qa) = 1 liter (variously given as 0.84 and 0.97 liter) = 2 mina water 1 ninda (akalu?) = 0.1 liter 1 ardabu = 1 artabē (OP loanword; . Ardab) = ca. 52 l.

Greek (After G. Reger (1994), 351)

Dry measures (metra xēra):

1 medimnos (Attic) = 6 hekteis = 48 choinikes = 192 kotylai = 52.176 liters (54 l.) 1 choinix = 1.087 liter (Attic ration standard for wheat) 1 kotylē = ¼ choinix = 0.273 l. examples : ca. 28 l. 1 artabē = Controversial. 40 choinikes (Hell.); 30 choinikes (Roman)?

APPROXIMATE EQUATIONS

Money and weights 1 shekel = 2 drachms = 2 denarii = 8,x grams

Surface + capacity 100x100 feet = 1 pānu (36 l.) = 1 aroura = 1 iugerum = 1 “acre” = ca. 0.25 ha 1 Persian artabe = 1 medimnos, 3 choinikes (Hdt. 1.192) or 1 medimnos (Suid. Hesychius). 1 Egyptian artabe, 24 – 42 choinikes. (LS s.v.); Rathbone “almost 40 liters” = 1 pānu.

SOME BASIC PRICE TRENDS

Highest and lowest date and barley prices in grammes of silver per 1000 litres (log base 2 scale) per decade (299 = 299-290 BC).

Prices of barley and dates in grammes of silver per tonne

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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