Labor in the Ancient World

559 Pages·2015·18.56 MB·English

by  Piotr Steinkeller, Michael Hudson

H S
LABOR IN THE ANCIENT WORLD T LABOR IN THE
U
E
The fifth volume in this series sponsored by the International Scholars Conference on D I
N
Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE) and the Institute for the Study of Long- S
O K
Term Economic Trends (ISLET) offers case studies about the way how labor was pro- N E
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cured, managed, and exploited in the early Meso potamian and Mediterranean World L
ANCIENT WORLD
E
and points to shared characteristics: the general insignificance of slave labor; the promi-
R
nence of corvée as the primary way of obtaining labor; the role of large building projects
as a tool of political integration; the use of hired workers as a way of dealing with the
systemic shortage of labor and the practice of compensating the employees of “great
organ iza tions” with the salaries in kind and/or field allotments.
L EDITED BY
A
B P S M H
Other books in this series: IOTR TEINKELLER AND ICHAEL UDSON
O
PRIVATIZATION IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST R
AND CLASSICAL WORLD
I
Edited by Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine. Archaeologists, economists, and N
Assyriologists describe the increasingly private control of land, handicraft work shops, and
T
credit from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity. (1996)
H
E
URBANIZATION AND LAND OWNERSHIP
A
IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
N
Edited by Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine. This volume examines the im pact
C
of debt, pivate land ownersip, and urbanization on ancient societies as evidenced by
I
archaeological data, surviving financial records, and other documents. (1999) E
N
T
DEBT AND ECONOMIC RENEWAL
IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST W
Edited by Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop. This volume places the origins
O
of interest-bearing debt in historical context by tracing its dynamics from Sumer down
R
through the Neo-Babylonian epoch. (2002)
L
D
CREATING ECONOMIC ORDER
RECORD-KEEPING, STANDARDIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
ACCOUNTING IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Edited by Michael Hudson and Cornelia Wunsch. This voume addresses the extent
to which accounting practices actively shaped economic life from early Uruk (c. 3300BC)
down through the Neo-Babylonian period, as well as Egypt, Crete, and Mycenaean
Greece. (2004)
I S C
NTERNATIONAL CHOLARS ONFERENCE
A N E E
ON NCIENT EAR ASTERN CONOMIES
2 VOLUME 5
L
ABOR IN THE
A W
NCIENT ORLD
VOLUME V
in a series sponsored by the
Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends
and the International Scholars Conference on
Ancient Near Eastern Economies
A Colloquium held at Hirschbach (Saxony), April 2005
EDITED BY
Piotr Steinkeller
Michael Hudson
2
Dresden
COVER ART: A stone relief of the Pre-Sargonic ruler of Lagash named
Ur-Nanshe (ca. 2400 BC = ED IIIa). AO 2344.
The upper register of the relief shows the construction of a temple, with Ur-
Nanshe carrying a corvée basket (tupšikku). In the lower register, a feast culmi-
nating the construction is depicted.
Photo by Philipp Bernard. Courtesy of the Louvre Museum.
Copyright © 2015 by ISLET-Verlag
All rights reserved.
Labor in the ancient world / edited by Piotr Steinkeller and Michael
Hudson. The International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near
Eastern Economies, vol. 5
664 p. 23 x 15 cm
ISBN 978-3-9814842-3-6
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Labor in the Early States: An Early Mesopotamian
Perspective
Piotr Steinkeller 1
1. Labor, Social Formation, and the Neolithic Revolution
C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky 37
2. Home and Work in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia:
“Ration Lists” and “Private Houses” at Tell Beydar/Nadaba
Walther Sallaberger and Alexander Pruß 69
3. The Employment of Labor on National Building Projects
in the Ur III Period
Piotr Steinkeller 137
4. Building Larsa: Labor Value, Scale and Scope-of-Economy
in Ancient Mesopotamia
Seth Richardson 237
5. Hired Labor in the Neo-Assyrian Empire
Karen Radner 329
6. Labor in Babylonia in the First Millennium BC
Michael Jursa 345
7. Labor and the Pyramids. The Heit el-Ghurab “Workers
Town” at Giza
Mark Lehner 397
8. Problems of Authority, Compulsion, and Compensation
in Ancient Egyptian Labor Practices
Ogden Goelet 523
9. Labor and Individuals in Late Bronze Age Pylos
Dimitri Nakassis 583
10. The Mycenaean Mobilization of Labor in Agriculture and
Building Projects: Institutions, Individuals, Compensation,
and Status in the Linear B Tablets
Tom Palaima 617
11. How the Organization of Labor Shaped Civilization’s
Takeoff
Michael Hudson 649
iii
1 2
4
5
3 8 6
9
7
11 13
10 12
17
14 16
15 18
Participants: 1 Walther Sallaberger; 2 Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky; 3 Heather
Baker; 4 Michael Jursa; 5 Lucio Milano; 6 Tom Palaima; 7 Seth Rich -
ard son; 8 Claus Ambos; 9 Karen Radner; 10; Dimitri Nakassis; 11
Michael Hudson; 12 Benjamin Studevent-Hickman; 13 Bob Englund;
14 Kristin Kleber; 15 Johannes Renger; 16 Piotr Steinkeller; 17 Geoffrey
Gardiner; 18 Cornelia Wunsch
Hirschbach/Dresden, April 2005

I
NTRODUCTION
Labor in the Early States: An Early Mesopotamian
Perspective
Piotr Steinkeller
Harvard University
Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money
that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver,
but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally
purchased.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book1,
Chapter 5, Paragraph 2, Of the Real and
Nominal Price of Commodities, 11776.
1. As far as we know, the Sumerians were the first people in history
to think of human work in abstract terms. Already at ca. 2400 BC, the
Sumerian word á, whose basic and original meanings are “arm, strength,
power, physical exertion,” signified “labor” in exactly the same way we
understand it today, namely, a quantifiable physical effort resulting in
the creation of goods and services. The Sumerians measured labor in the
units of time (days) needed by an average grown man to complete a par-
ticular task. The ability to count labor in abstract “work-days” (or “man-
days”) was a conceptual breakthrough in the history of accounting and
administration, since it allowed the conversion of any form of productive
human activity into a set of numbers, therefore opening up completely
new managerial possibilities, particularly in the area of economic plan-
ning.
In a related development, the word á eventually came to mean also
“wage, hire, rent.”1 This shows that even at that early date men realized
1 The first certain example of this sense of ádates to the Sargonic period. See
Yang Adab 297 A 663:1–5.
2 P. STEINKELLER
that labor not only was a function of time, but that it also had a meas-
urable monetary value, which could be expressed in terms of silver or
grain. Thus, the knowledge that “time is money” was likely shared by
the ancient Sumerians as well.2
2.The huge body of written records that the civilizations of ancient
Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean have bequeathed to us contains a
great deal of firsthand information about the economies of early states.
Although this information is of crucial importance to anyone wishing to
understand how the essential traits of modern economy have come into
being, a great number of economic historians (perhaps even the majority
of them) still tend to think that the first expressions of rational economic
behavior came with the civilizations of Greece and Rome, and that,
therefore, all that preceded them was so primitive and rudimentary as
not to deserve scientific scrutiny.
A good illustration of how defective the knowledge of ancient con-
tributions in the area of economics continues to be is the recently pub-
lished popular book by Jane Gleeson-White (2012), which attributes the
invention of the double-entry book-keeping, in her words “one of the
greatest advances in the history of business and commerce,” to the mer-
chants of the late 15th century Venice.3 This “discovery” will come as a
surprise to Assyriologists, however, since for many decades now it has
been common knowledge among them that an early form of the double-
entry account was known –– and widely used in connection with all man-
ner of economic activity, even an abstract one such as labor –– to Baby -
lonian administrators already at 2100 BC !4 Economic historians and
general public are equally ignorant of the financial instruments and
2 I am saying this without being facetious, merely to underscore the precocity
and sophistication of ancient economic systems. Nota bene: while the
Sumerians had a word for “labor,” theyapparently lacked the abstract notions
of “time” and “money.” But note that, already by 1,900BC, the expression
“to make money (lit.: silver)” (kaspam epēšum) was known to the Old As -
syrian merchants (Veenhof 1997: 363).
3 The same lack of understanding of the true nature of ancient book-keeping
is displayed by the recent study of the history of accounting by Soll (2014:
2–3), who thinks that “ancient finance was limited to stores accounting, that
is, basic inventorying,” and that, in Mesopotamia specifically, accounting exist-
edonly “in its most rudimentary form.” It is characteristic that Soll’s bibli-
ography does not contain even a single reference to the vast Assyriological lit-
erature dealing with this subject.
4 See Hallo 2004.
INTRODUCTION 3
operating procedures that were used, around 1,900 BC, by the Assyrian
merchants, which, in terms of their complexity and sophistication, ri -
valed those employed two and a half millennia later in the banking houses
of Renaissance Italy (Veenhof 1972; 1997; 1999; Larsen 1976: 92–102).
It was mainly in an effort to correct this situation that, back in 1994,
Michael Hudson and C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky formed an informal study-
group, whose objective was systematically to investigate, via the medium
of several colloquiums, various aspects of the economies of early states,
and to make the results of these investigations available to broader audi-
ences, especially economic historians, archaeologists, and anthropolo-
gists. Among the issues treated by the previous colloquia were the role of
private economic activity (Hudson and Levine 1996), the forms of land-
tenure and land ownership (Hudson and Levine 1999), the problem of
debt and the native solutions to deal with it (Hudson and Van de Mieroop
2001), and record-keeping and accounting (Hudson and Wunsch 2004).
In April of 2005 our group convened again in Hirschbach near
Dresden to tackle the issues related to human labor.5 The objective of
this colloquium was to offer a systematic discussion of the status of labor
throughout the whole span of ancient Meso po ta mian history, as well as
to obtain comparative perspectives from other ancient civilizations of the
Old World, such as Egypt and the Aegean. A secondary theme of the
meeting was the use of corvée on large public projects.
The present volume grows from that meeting, presenting a number
of papers that were originally read at Hirschbach, as well as a number of
additional contributions, which were solicited subsequently to make the
coverage more comprehensive.
The final result is a collection of twelve papers. Apart from this con-
tribution, which is meant to serve as a general introduction, and focuses
on third millennium Mesopotamia, there are six papers devoted to
Meso potamian labor. Thus C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky treats the question
of prehistoric labor in greater Mesopotamia; W. Sallaberger and A. Pruß
study the labor-related issues in the Pre-Sargonic city of Nabada in the
Khabur Region; P. Steinkeller and S. Richardson discuss the use of labor
on large building projects, as documented in the Ur III and Old Baby-
5 We were hosted there by Cornelia Wunsch, in her private house. Cornelia
and her parents provided us with a truly ambient atmosphere, delicious food,
and a perfect setting for our discussions. On behalf of all the participants of
that meeting I extend to them our warmest thanks. Their wonderful hospi-
tality will be remembered by us forever.
4 P. STEINKELLER
lonian periods respectively; K. Radner studies the hired labor in Neo-
Assyrian times; M. Jursa offers an overview of labor and labor relations
in Babylonia in the first millennium BC. In addition, the volume con-
tains two papers devoted to ancient Egypt: M. Lehner investigates the
use of labor invested in the construction of the Old Kingdom pyramids,
while O. Goelet gives a characterization of labor in the period from the
New Kingdom up to the beginning of the Hellenistic era. Two other
contributions, by D. Nakassis and T. Palaima, study the organization,
mobilization, and usages of labor in the Mycenaean Greece. The volume
concludes with the summary observations by M. Hudson, which offer a
modern economist’s view of the role of labor in the development of the
world’s civilization.
In the following pages I offer a brief discussion of the principal
sources of labor in the third millennium Mesopotamia, while also citing
some comparative evidence (though only sparingly) and offering a bit of
theoretical introduction. My objective here is to provide the reader with
a basic historical framework against which later Mesopotamian manifes-
tations of labor, such as those described in the contributions to this vol-
ume, may productively be compared and evaluated. Such a framework
may likewise inform the understanding of the status of labor in the
Egyptian and the Mycenaean worlds, which are also examined in this
volume. The particular value of the third millennium economic records
lies not only in their great antiquity (which obviously makes them of
special interest for the universal history of labor, as they allow one to
study the very beginnings of organized economic activity), but also in
their quality, due to their enormous volume and mind-boggling detail.6
6 The number of third millennium economic and legal records presently avail-
able may be put at ca. 120,000, of which nearly 100,000 come from the Ur
III period. Similar documentation survives in abundance from all the later
periods of Mesopotamian history, with the Neo-Babylonian and Old Baby -
lonian records being particularly numerous (ca. 50,000 and 40,000 individ-
ual tablets respectively). Other large corpora of economic and legal records
survive from Old Assyrian Kaneš in Anatolia (ca. 23,000 tablets) and first
millennium Persepolis in Iran (ca. 15,000–18,000 tablets). See Streck 2010;
Jones and Stolper 2008. This profusion of first-hand data provides Assyrio -
logists with a huge advantage over the students of the econ omies of Greece
and Rome, who for the most part must rely on secondary types of informa-
tion. See the following characterization of the dilemma facing the historian
of Roman economy: “The Romans recorded most of their day-to-day trans-
actions by incising the wax covering of wooden oblongs about the size of