Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 57 (2014) 173-202
brill.com/jesh
Factor Markets in Babylonia from the Late Seventh
to the Third Century BCE
Michael Jursa
University of Vienna
[email protected]
Abstract
This paper studies the evidence for the existence of a labour market, a market for agricultural land, and a market for capital in Babylonia from the sixth to the third century
BCE. The argument is informed by our current understanding of the performance
of Babylonian commodity markets, for which abundant quantitative information is
available. I attempt to establish a connection between the general political and
­socio-economic development in Babylonia from the sixth century onwards and the
increase and decrease of the role that can be attributed to factor markets.
Keywords
Babylonia – factor markets – commodity markets – monetization – labour – landownership patterns – market performance
1
Introduction: Economic Background and Commodity Markets
This paper discusses the existence and, as far as possible, the efficiency (or
inefficiency) of factor markets in Babylonia from the late seventh to the third
century BCE, with a focus on the best-documented part of this period, the
* This paper is based on research conducted under the auspices of a project entitled “Official
Epistolography in Babylonia in the First Millennium BC,” which is part of the Imperium &
Officium Research Network and is funded by the Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen
Forschung (Vienna). E.E. Payne kindly corrected the English of this contribution; she should
not be held responsible for remaining weaknesses in this respect.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/15685209-12341346
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“long sixth century” (from 626 to 484 BCE; on this term, see Jursa 2010: v). The
“factor markets” in this period—if we may use the term before proving it
justified—functioned in a system of fairly dynamic and efficient commodity
markets, which have to be treated first, at least briefly.
The existence of commodity markets in Babylonia is well established, at
least from the late seventh century BCE onwards.1 The efficiency of these markets has been discussed especially for the Late Achaemenid and Seleucid data
found in the Astronomical Diaries (see van der Spek’s article in this issue of
JESHO and the references given by him), while their context is better understood in the Neo-Babylonian and Early Achaemenid periods.
The fact that the prices in the Astronomical Diaries are market prices has
been demonstrated mathematically. They move in a perfect random walk, that
is, it is statistically impossible to predict at any given moment future price
movements on the basis of past price movements, an effect that only markets
can produce (Temin 2002). Using quantitative indicators, Babylonian commodity markets can be shown to have functioned little worse than, or as well
as, commodity markets in later pre-modern economies (price volatility in
many parts of medieval Europe and in parts of medieval and early modern
Asia was much the same as in Babylon, i.e., it was high). The reach and integration of these markets and their dependence on underlying structures of social
and economic change have been studied mostly on the basis of data from the
late seventh, sixth, and early fifth centuries BCE.
The long sixth century is unique in Iraq’s ancient history, in that the rich and
coherent quantitative data on economic exchange are accompanied by a
nearly inexhaustible wealth of qualitative information that allows us to put
them in context: the quantitative data can be properly understood only by taking an integrative view of the structure of the Babylonian economy during the
period. Summarizing briefly, Jursa 2010 proposes a model that suggests a period
of “Smithian” growth due to the juncture of several independent demographic,
social, economic, and political factors. This “commercialization model”2 sees
1 For the Late Achaemenid and Seleucid periods (fifth-third centuries BCE), see Pirngruber
2012; for the Neo-Babylonian and Early Achaemenid periods (late seventh-early fifth centuries BCE), see Jursa 2010. For other approaches to commodity markets in the ancient Near
East, see Graslin-Tomé 2009: 148-78.
2 For variants of this basic model that have been applied to ancient and medieval economies,
see, e.g., Hatcher and Bailey 2001: 121-173; Hopkins 1978; Millett 2001. For its application to the
present period, see Jursa 2010: 783-802. Certain aspects of the model and of the reconstruction proposed here for the development of the Babylonian economy in the sixth century and
later parallel closely the conceptualization of economic development in early Islamic Iraq;
see Van Bavel, Campopiano and Dijkman in this issue of JESHO: 281-284.
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the population growth, which started at a low level after the long period of
ecological (climatic), economic, and political crises that began at the end of
the second millennium BCE, as a stimulus for agricultural and commercial
development and technological progress. Helped by state-controlled investment in the agrarian infrastructure and generally lavish state spending that
profited from the cheap availability of capital (the spoils of empire) and
labour,3 population growth and concomitant urbanization set in motion a
positive-feedback cycle in the economy, leading to increases in demand and in
aggregate and per capita production. Agrarian productivity increased as a
result of specialization and a wide-spread focus on intensive horticulture and
the cultivation of cash crops.
The resulting economic growth thereby offset, at least for a time, the
Malthusian threat accompanying demographic growth. Urbanization allowed
an increasing division of labour and economic specialization and thus led to
higher productivity. As administrative, religious, and economic centres, cities
were foci of high consumption and depended on an increasing pool of nonagricultural labour. They stimulated the production of a growing agricultural
surplus through offering market opportunities. This model thus establishes a
causal link between agricultural development and economic phenomena,
especially commerce, which the city-oriented documentation allows us to
observe in an urban setting only (Graslin-Tomé 2009; Jursa 2010). The model is
useful in explaining the sixth-century economy, as it is supported by the evidence, as follows (Jursa 2010: 785).
Archaeological surveys prove demographic growth and increasing urbanization; the textual and archaeological records show agrarian expansion in
terms of an extension of the cultivated area but also of an intensification of
agrarian production, as well as local and even some regional specialization of
agriculture and cash-crop production; there was a distinct monetization of
economic exchange in the cities and in the countryside, and credit for productive purposes was available; we find commodity markets and an infrastructure
allowing efficient marketing of agrarian surplus production, a reasonably
efficient transport system, and a framework of legal and social institutions
which are conducive to commercial activities; individual subsistence strategies do not necessarily presuppose an important involvement in agricultural
production, as many households (private and institutional) were not geared
structurally towards the ideal of (agrarian) self-sufficiency; there was a marked
division of labour and non-agrarian labour specialization and an important
role for hired labour. Importantly, going beyond the scope of a traditional
3 State involvement is decisive in the commercialization model proposed here; see below.
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c­ ommercialization model, the state arguably had a crucial role, especially during the Neo-Babylonian empire, as a catalyst sustaining the process of agrarian
change, monetization, and commercialization of economic life by directing
into the economy (some of) the “benefits of empire.” This process benefited
the economy directly, when the state initiated land-reclamation schemes and
invested in the repair and extension of the crucial network of irrigation installations: during this period, the latter underwent a gradual but cumulatively
significant quantitative extension as well as a substantial qualitative change,
through the formation of truly interconnected trans-regional irrigation systems. Indirect benefits of state investment can be observed when royal prestige
building projects, such as temple and palace construction, directed a large
quantity of silver into the hands of the free hired workers who made up a
large part of the labour force, allowing, or perhaps even forcing, this workforce
to subsist in the cities on money wages alone.4
This argument is based primarily on evidence from the long sixth century,
for which the comparative efficiency of the commodity markets is also proven
by the relative coherence of the price data. The model need not be equally
valid for the later Achaemenid period, that is, for the second half of the fifth
century and for the fourth century. Pirngruber’s analysis of commodity prices
during the Late Achaemenid period, though hampered by a scarcity of data,
shows high prices throughout the period, which are, however, lower than the
prices of the late sixth century and which decrease even more in the fourth
century. Late Achaemenid prices are widely divergent and display much less
coherence than the best documented period of the sixth century (c. 570540 BCE). High interseasonal and year-to-year volatility suggest that the commodity market was not performing well compared with the (relatively) more
efficient economic system of the sixth century (Pirngruber 2012: 35-36; Hackl
et al. 2013).
Here the focus is on factor markets rather than on the better known commodity markets. The discussion of factor markets must necessarily begin again
with the long sixth century, with its coherent and rich data for commodity
exchange, as well as for hired labour, buying and selling of land, and (commercial) credit. For an investigation of the interplay of commodity and factor markets, this is the only period from first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia to which
one can really look. Evidence of structural changes in the later Achaemenid
period is discussed on the basis of the interpretation of the sixth-century data.
4 We have here, then, a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors that is structurally
similar to the forces determining the structure of the economy in Iraq in the early medieval
period: see van Bavel, Campopiano and Dijkman in this issue of JESHO.
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Labour Market
Of all the means of production, labour is the one for which there is the most
convincing evidence for the existence of a functioning market that is integrated with the commodity markets. There is no evidence in the sources that
free wage labour was considered degrading, as was the case in the GrecoRoman and Islamic worlds (Van der Spek; Van Bavel, Campopiano and Dijkman
in this issue of JESHO).
Sixth-century letters give some vivid anecdotal information on the importance of hired labour, especially in the sphere of the institutional economy.5
One temple official writes to another (during the reign of Cyrus or
Cambyses): “Apart from three men of Sukkāya, seven men from the royal stables, and two men from the stables of the Eanna temple, there are no workers
here. Of the four thousand cubits’ distance that we are supposed to dig, the
temple serfs are doing only one thousand; hired workers have done the remaining total” (al-la 3 lúérinmeš šá Isuk-ka-a-a 7 lúérinmeš šá é gu4me šá lugal ù 2
lúérinme šá é gu4me šá é.an.na a-kan-na ia-a-nu ina 4 lim qaq- qar míšiš-hu šá ina
ugu-i-ni al-la 1 lim qaq-qar lúrig7me ina lìb-bi ul i-her-ru-ú gab-bi lúhun.gáme
ih-te-ru-ú; YOS 21, 72, Uruk, c. 530 BCE)
Another: “Apart from two . . . there are no workers here. When I said to the
royal commissioner, ‘get some hired workers,’ he replied, ‘we do not have any
money.’ Now send me a full complement of workers or send money to the royal
commissioner so that he might get some hired workers and provide (me) with
a full complement of workers” (en-na al-la 2 x [x] érinmeš a-kan-na ia-a-n[u] u
a-na lúqí-i-pi ki-i aq-bu-ú um-ma lúhun.gámeš a-gur-ra-nu um-ma kù.babbar ina
igini-ni ia-a-nu en-na érinmeš šul-lim-ma šup-ra u ki-i kù.babbar a-na lúqí-i-pi
šu-bi-lam-ma lúhun.gámeš li-gur-ra-am-m[a] érinmeš lu-šal-lim [(x)]; YOS 21, 156,
Uruk, c. 530 BCE).
Some such letters report exorbitant demands made by hired workers in
times of labour scarcity (“each hired worker takes six shekels of silver as his
monthly wages” (lúhun.gáme šá iti lú 6 gín kù.babbar a-na iti-šú a-na i-di-šú i-naáš-ši; YOS 3, 69, Uruk, c. 530 BCE). Elsewhere, it is the labourers who are
clamouring for work: “Let [my lord] give (me) money to hire labourers. I am
beleaguered by men who are for hire, and my work cannot be done without
the(se) hired workers” (Jursa 2010: 680).
5 The importance of the institution of hired labour in Babylonia in this period may also be
deduced from the fact that the Akkadian verb “to hire,” agāru, passed into Aramaic and from
there into Arabic, where it is the source of ijāra, “contract of hire or usufruct” (van Bavel,
Campopiano and Dijkman in this issue of JESHO: 269-270).
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Such passages fit well into what is known of the background conditions of
the time, which were favourable for the development of wage labour on a large
scale. Population grew during this period, so manpower was available.
Nevertheless, the institutional sector of the economy—the temple households
and the royal establishment—clearly did not have access to a reservoir of
dependent labourers available for compulsory service that was sufficient for
the needs of an expanding economy: the period saw huge investments in agrarian infrastructure, as well as ambitious public building projects in the cities
(Da Riva 2008). Not only did much of the population lack institutional ties that
might have prevented it from seeking work wherever possible, but institutional
dependants also enjoyed a certain freedom in seeking independent employment, as did qualified slaves in private ownership (amply documented in
Dandamaev 1984).6 Much labour was contractual, based on written (or, presumably, oral) agreements between two parties who, in principle, entered into
the contract by their own free will—notwithstanding the pressure resulting
from economic stratification and the considerable differences in wealth documented in the sources.
Among the qualitative evidence for the foregoing, the ample documentation of hired mass labour that is found in temple archives stands out (Beaulieu
2005; Jursa 2010: 661-681). One finds there not only evocative anecdotal data,
such as the letters quoted above, but also dossiers giving details of the composition and remuneration of the workforce employed on certain building projects; in such cases, hired labour appears to be at least as important as
compulsory labour (Zawadzki 2005: 381-92; Jursa 2010: 663-668).7 Craft production in the city was dependent on monetized exchange and on the availability
of labour for hire; this led also to artisanal specialization and to the appearance
of new trades. The best evidence here concerns smithing (Jursa 2010: 688-694)
and the freelance laundry business, a branch of the economy in which women
entered the market place (Waerzeggers 2006), but there are many other examples.8 Much, perhaps most, privately owned land was farmed out to free tenants or, on similar terms, to slaves. Otherwise, slaves appear in private farming
in a supervisory, managerial capacity; only occasionally were they a minor part
6 Arrangements were structurally identical to those made for slave artisans in early Islamic
Iraq, see Van Bavel, Campopiano and Dijkman in this issue of JESHO: 275-276.
7 Here, hired workers demonstrably outnumbered compelled workers by a ratio of 2:1. The
data also include evidence for labour shortages and for bargaining for high wages during
harvest time (Jursa 2010: 662-663).
8 Specialized baking was one of them: one baker’s apprentice was supposed to learn to make
“common bread, baguettes (urāku) and Egyptian bread” (Jursa 2010: 708 note 3671).
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factor markets in babylonia
179
of the work force (Dandamaev 1984: 252-278; Jursa 2010: 234-235). Finally, the
whole system of compulsory labour and military service for the state relied
heavily on the availability of substitute workers and soldiers whom the holders
of land grants (i.e., fields encumbered with service obligations) and of taxed
properties in general could hire for service in their stead: these substitutes
were paid high cash wages (Jursa and Waerzeggers 2009; Jursa 2011).
Pertinent quantitative data are scarce compared with the information available on commodity prices. We have only two dozen cases of quantifiable
monthly wages paid for full-time physical labour (such as construction and
military service) from the long sixth century.9 Any statistical treatment of such
meagre data is problematic, but simply plotting the available wages against the
movement of commodity prices shows that wages for full-time employment
were in step with commodity prices, that is, that they were negotiated by the
parties to the contract, with a view towards the movement of commodity
prices and living costs that they had to cover. In fact, wages were comparatively
high; the average wage in wheat of a free manual labourer in full-time employment was well above ten litres per day (Jursa 2010: 811-816), conspicuously
higher than in the Hellenistic or Islamic periods (Van der Spek, Van Bavel,
Campopiano and Dijkman in this issue of JESHO).
This conclusion is confirmed by the trend of slave prices (Jursa 2010: 741745), which also reflect labour costs and therefore can be used as proxy data for
extrapolating wage variation over time in view of the scarcity of quantifiable
wage data.
The well documented slave prices follow the trend in commodity prices (for
which, see Fig. 1) closely, demonstrating that labour prices are subject to factors similar to those affecting commodity prices and confirming the connection between the cost of labour and general living costs that is suggested by the
less abundant wage data.
We must thus conclude that there was a relatively free labour market in the
long sixth century. Its survival in the later centuries of the first millennium BCE
must have depended on three main factors: (a) a continuing high degree of
monetization of the economy; (b) the absence of significant social change in
cities and in the countryside, that is, the continuing absence of widespread
social restrictions on labour mobility and a concomitant revival of compulsory
labour; (c) a continuing high demand for hired labour in urban and rural
contexts.
9 Cf. Van der Spek (this issue of JESHO: 224-225) for the even scarcer information from the
Macedonian, Seleucid, and Parthian periods.
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11
barley prices (sh/kurru)
wages (sh/month, full-time employment)
dates prices (sh/kurru)
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
‒600
‒590
Figure 1
‒580
‒570
‒560
‒550
‒540
‒530
‒520
‒510
0
‒500
Staple prices (moving ten-year averages) and wages for full-time employment ( Jursa
2010: 679) (one shekel (“sh”) = 8.3 g; one kurru = 180 litres).
Concerning (a): if the explanation for the increasing monetization of exchange
in the long sixth century advanced by Jursa 2010 is correct—that is, if much
of the vast quantities of booty and tribute brought from the western parts of
the Neo-Babylonian empire was spent by the Neo-Babylonian kings for their
prestige-building projects and thereby contributed to increased circulation
of silver money and, finally, to the inflationary tendencies visible in the economy from the reign of Nabonidus onwards—then a gradual contraction of
the money supply during the fifth and fourth centuries is to be expected a priori. The Persians directed the spoils of empire mostly elsewhere, towards
their heartland, thereby diminishing the influx of new precious metal into
Babylonia, and significant economic resources were withdrawn from Babylonia
by the new rulers over time, mostly in the form of labour and in kind, but also
in cash.10
10
Contrary to what has often been claimed, the Persians did not, from the reign of Darius I
onwards, directly and rapidly siphon off silver by extracting almost exclusively cash taxes.
See the survey of similar hypotheses in Stolper 1985: 143-146. The incorrect assumption
jesho 57 (2014) 173-202
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factor markets in babylonia
275
250
225
200
175
R2 = 0,3356
150
125
100
75
50
25
0
‒610 ‒600 ‒590 ‒580 ‒570 ‒560 ‒550 ‒540 ‒530 ‒520 ‒510 ‒500 ‒490 ‒480
Figure 2 Slave prices (shekels of silver) in the sixth century (90 male slaves).
Quantifiable data on prices and wages from the Late Achaemenid period have
been summarized by Hackl and Pirngruber 2013.11 Interest rates in the later
fifth century—and, even more, in the fourth century—tend to be higher than
in the sixth century and frequently rise to forty percent per annum, that is, to a
level double that common in the later part of the long sixth century (Hackl and
Pirngruber 2013; Jursa 2010; Van der Spek in this issue of JESHO): the cost of
borrowing money had increased. The movement of commodity prices can be
outlined only sketchily. The barley prices that are known from the late fifth
century are comparable to the high prices of the late sixth and early fifth centuries, but prices in the fourth century were lower, while price volatility
remained high. This is true also for other commodities, such as dates (Hackl
and Pirngruber 2013). Wage data are largely absent for the fifth and fourth centuries (Jursa 2010: 676), but this can be compensated for by comparison with
the salaries in kind paid to institutional dependants. In the long sixth century,
these salaries paid in kind (as “rations”) were demonstrably linked to wage
levels and the cost of living (Jursa 2010: 296-301), a connection that must have
existed also in the later period. It is therefore significant that institutional
11
that the Persians collected predominantly money taxes that were subsequently hoarded
is due mostly to Herodotus (Jursa 2010: 645-646; Jursa 2011: 174).
See also van der Spek in this issue of JESHO: slave prices in the Seleucid and Parthian
period were lower than in the early Persian period.
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s­ alaries in Babylon in the late fifth and the fourth centuries tended to be paid
out according to the ninety-litre and the sixty-five-litre norms or monthly payments (Hackl and Pirngruber 2013; see also Van der Spek in this issue of of
JESHO: 224). This corresponds to the standard rate in southern Babylonia in
the mid-sixth century but is significantly lower than the standard 180-litre
salary paid in northern Babylonia towards the end of the sixth century and at
the beginning of the fifth. This must mean that wages too had decreased in the
intervening period.12 Therefore, the available data are at least congruent with
the assumption of a gradual contraction of the money supply that follows from
the interpretation of the data of the long sixth century, in particular with
regard to the partly inflation-driven increases in prices and wages during the
late sixth and early fifth centuries.
The second point (b) concerns the question whether free labour continued
plentiful in the absence of widespread social restrictions on mobility and contractual freedom, or whether the fifth and fourth centuries saw a (relative)
return of compulsory labour. Pertinent evidence is painfully scarce. There
are, however, indications that conditions in the countryside, particularly
ownership patterns, had changed by the late fifth century. Much land was
now held by the Great King himself and by members of his family and other
Iranian nobles, and, secondarily, by elite members of Babylonian society who
owed their career and their families’ fortunes to their cooperation with the
Iranian conquerors (Stolper 1985: 52-69; van Driel 1989: 194-203; van Driel 2002:
230-232).13 Royal estates are known earlier as well, from the period of the
Neo-Babylonian empire and from the Early Achaemenid period,14 but, in comparison with the generally far less numerous sources from the fifth and fourth
centuries, the frequency of their appearance in this later period is significant
and indicates an expansion of the king’s domains. Even more often, one hears
of royal land grants to officials of Iranian extraction. Land in the hands of
Persian nobles and members of the royal family is likewise well attested, as is
land held by royal officials of Babylonian origin.15 This new group of landown12
Late Achaemenid slave prices, on the other hand, do not seem to fall significantly below
the high levels reached in the Early Achaemenid period (Hackl and Pirngruber 2013), but,
as the data available are few, it seems advisable to refrain from interpreting this fact.
13 This aspect of landownership in Late Achaemenid Babylonia has been studied mostly in
the Murašû archive. We will refer to a few non-Murašû texts as examples to counterbalance this bias in scholarship—an understandable bias, given the richness of the archive.
14E.g., BE 8, 118 (reign of Darius I), BE 8, 13 (Nebuchadnezzar II).
15 Royal estates in Stolper 2007: no. 19; land grants to Iranian officials: e.g., BE 9, 102, OECT 12
AB 243, OECT 10, 192; see Stolper 1995: 224; estates of Persian nobles and members of the
royal family: e.g., Stolper 2006, 2007: nos. 6 and 15; estates of royal officials of Babylonian
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factor markets in babylonia
183
ers may have, in part, held newly reclaimed estates, especially in the geographically somewhat isolated Nippur region (Jursa 2010: 405-418); in general,
however, their rise implies a decline in the fortunes of other social groups.
The Babylonian urban elites suffered severely at the beginning of the fifth
century, in the aftermath of the rebellions against Xerxes.16 Many important
clans of northern Babylonia practically disappear from our view. Their members were removed from their positions of power in provincial, city, and temple
administration, changes that are visible in the record and that demonstrably
affected the core institutions of Babylonian society. Uruk can be taken as a
model:17 in the aftermath of the rebellion against Xerxes, reprisals targeted
those leading families of the city whose roots lay in Babylon. These northerners, who had dominated the socio-economic life of Uruk, were removed from
their offices, the importance of the northern Babylonian gods Marduk and
Nabû in the local cult was drastically reduced, and the local god Anu was promoted to chief deity in Uruk. The Uruk priesthood transferred their offices
from Eanna to the Anu temple, which experienced a rapid ascendancy, while
the old Eanna temple was allowed to fall into ruin.18 That much is evident from
the available textual and archaeological records. What is less visible and must
be inferred from the record is the change in the countryside that the demise of
the fortunes of the northern Babylonians entailed: as they lost their property
in the city, houses, and temple offices, they must also have lost their fields, and
it is clear from the textual evidence discussed above that the beneficiaries
must have been the crown, Persian nobles, and Babylonian supporters of
Persian rule, in the case of Uruk mostly the local priestly families who must
have resented the domination of the northerners over their local temple.
16
17
18
extraction: e.g., OECT 10, 197; much of the evidence from the Tattannu and Bābāya (“Kasr”)
archives also belongs here, Jursa 2005: 61, 94-97.
The interpretation of the events of 484 BCE and of their effect on the Babylonian docu­
mentation have been widely discussed. For bibliographical references, see Henkelman
et al. 2011: 452-453. The material basis of the evidence, however, as presented by important
studies such as Waerzeggers 2003-2004, Oelsner 2007, and Kessler 2004, remains solid.
Some recent statements on the subject underrate the implications of the institutional
changes that occurred in or after 484 BCE. We will return to this matter in another
contribution.
The following is based largely on Kessler 2004, the importance of which has not been
taken into account sufficiently in the discussion of the events of 484 BCE.
A temple northeast of Eanna was destroyed by fire and not restored at this time (a text
dated to the reign of Darius gives a terminus post quem for the destruction): Kose 1998:
15 note 24. Boij 2011 points out the presence of at least one northern family in Uruk in the
Hellenistic period.
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jursa
Changes of this kind, analogous to those of the well-documented case of Uruk,
can be expected in all cities affected by the “end of archives” phenomenon—
effectively, they must have occurred, mutatis mutandis, all over Babylonia, the
capital city included. Thus, 484 BCE entailed an upheaval of property rights
and a shift of socio-economic power in the countryside. For the present
­purpose, the main implication of these changes is that they favoured a type of
landownership that was less strongly based on traditional and legally sanctioned property rights and had its roots instead in the political and military
power of a new rent-seeking elite.19 For this elite, the relationship between
landowners and tenants and labourers was largely dependent on patterns of
socio-economic domination rather than on contracts: it is no accident of textual preservation that much of the evidence for unfree labour in the countryside, and nearly all of this evidence that does not come from a temple context,
belongs to the fifth century.20 So, at least in the countryside, the fifth and fourth
centuries experienced an expansion of compulsory labour at the expense of
hired labour and thus a contraction of the factor market for labour.
A final point on labour, (c): as a corollary of the foregoing (b), it follows that
was there not only a change in the supply side of the labour market—because
a larger part of the rural population was tied to the land, or to their landlords,
in one way or another—but was also a reduction in the demand for hired
labour in rural areas. In the cities, the change from Neo-Babylonian to Persian
rule slowed the process by which the cities were transformed through massive
royal investment in the construction of public buildings—temples, palaces
and defensive works (although some public construction occurred under
Persian rule, too).21 Labour and service obligations loom large in the record,
and there was continuing demand for substitute corvée labourers and soldiers
19
20
21
John Ma appropriately titled a forthcoming interpretive essay on the business dealings of
an Achaemenid noble “Aršama the Vampire.”
Note that the new landowners also (perhaps especially) made gains at the expense of the
Babylonian temples, the bulwarks of compulsory labour in Babylonian society: see below
on the appropriation of temple lands (of Bēl) by Persian nobles and the integration into
the Persian system of military conscription of land farmed by temple personnel, as documented in the Murašû archive. Among the documents that shed particularly clear anecdotal light on the socio-economic climate of the fifth century, BM 75222+ stands out
(a new edition by J. Hackl is forthcoming): this is a contract establishing the life-long
self-indenture of one of its protagonists. The text implies a form of dependency unknown
in the sixth century (van Driel 2002: 203-218).
Random examples: YOS 7, 120, and 143, from the reign of Cambyses, refer to construction
work done by people of Uruk on the walls of Babylon; see Kleber 2008: 186-193 for this and
other building projects.
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factor markets in babylonia
185
who served under the terms of contracts drawn with the individual or tax unit
in whose name they were supposed to serve the authorities (Jursa and
Waerzeggers 2009). Nevertheless, we cannot assume the same level of activity
as under Nebuchadnezzar, when many hired workers were employed more or
less throughout the year on public building sites and had to live on their
­(comparatively high) money wages alone: in the cities, the labour market also
contracted.
3
Agricultural Land
While the evidence for a relatively free and efficient labour market in the sixth
century is convincing overall, this cannot be said with the same conviction for
the second important means of production, land. Sixth-century land tenure is
a well documented and well researched subject (Jursa 2010: 316-468).
Simplifying the evidence, we distinguish institutional (royal and temple) landholding from private farming and from estates granted to collectives by the
state in return for military service and taxes. These three categories of landholding differ in their respective methods of maximizing returns in the ecological and legal framework of Babylonian dual-crop agriculture. Institutional
landholding concentrated typically on extensive cereal farming, while date
culture was of lesser importance. Large tracts of medium- or low-quality land
were cultivated by plough teams of dependent farmers or rented out to free
sharecroppers. The agrarian regime of the temples, at least, was always undercapitalized and thus yielded substandard returns: the actual economic influence of the institutional households thus did not correspond fully to what
might be expected given their landed wealth. In an attempt to solve this
problem, contractors were brought in who undertook the management of
institutional estates against the payment of a predetermined rent. These men,
originally royal clients, aimed to make a profit and were apparently expected to
invest in the cultivation of the estates entrusted to them. The system added
to the burden of the cultivators but did not significantly improve the effectiveness of institutional arable farming. The Ebabbar temple, a small and probably
atypical temple household, followed another strategy, consciously investing in
labour-intensive horticulture with its higher returns, aiming to maximize its
cash-crop production, but even its returns were less than those of private agriculture. Simple arable farming, with its limited returns, was of minor interest
to most city-based private landowners, but the development of the datecultivating sector of the agrarian economy as practiced by this social group is
of crucial importance to the questions asked in this paper: depending on
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f­ amily labour and on free tenants, some of whom were social peers of the owners, private small-scale date cultivation on private estates was the most intensive and most productive form of agriculture in the sixth century and a
harbinger of agrarian change (Jursa 2010: 760). Under the Neo-Babylonian
kings the yield of temple lands was taxed (moderately) by the royal administration, but the harvest of private estates outside the reclamation districts of the
hanšû (lit. “fifties”, land reclaimed by the state for the benefit of urban clans)
was largely unencumbered by direct taxes; indirect taxation through harbour
taxes and the like was the main method by which the state directly tapped this
segment of private wealth. An important indirect method of taxation was the
extraction of labour and military service from urban households. These cumulative burdens were apparently tolerable and did not diminish the economic
and social attractiveness of the ownership of date groves, which continued to
be the major form of wealth accumulation and investment for the urban upper
classes, down to the final decades of the sixth century at least.
The legal and institutional framework in the sixth century was favourable
for agrarian development. Property rights were usually well defined and well
protected; institutional rights (i.e., rights of the state and religious institutions)
to land came into conflict with private property rights in only a few cases.
Areas that had been reclaimed by state intervention mostly in the late seventh
and the early sixth century and had been passed on to urban clans as hanšû
allotments were subject to certain types of taxation and labour service, and
temples could claim a tithe from private landowners in certain cases. In neither case, however, was there a restriction on the alienation of the land by its
private owners. In fact, only royal land grants to soldiers could not be sold—
although they could be pledged, rented, and inherited—otherwise there was
no absolute legal restriction on the buying and selling of land. In practice, royal
and temple land was rarely alienated and only in extraordinary conditions
(Bruschweiler 1989), but the change of ownership of privately owned agricultural land is extraordinarily well documented in the sixth century and
thereafter (e.g., Wunsch 2000).
The discussion can be advanced by an analysis of the price data. The evidence is rich, but generalization is difficult because of the influence on prices
of the varying quality of land, which is referred to inconsistently in the texts. It
is evident, however, that, whenever land changed hands, some market mechanisms came into play. The nature of the real estate was decisive for the price:
houses in good repair were much more expensive than simple plots of urban
land; unbuilt land in the city was more expensive than productive date groves,
the latter were more expensive than newly planted date groves, and these
in turn were more expensive than arable fields (e.g., Wunsch 2000: 39-43;
jesho 57 (2014) 173-202
187
factor markets in babylonia
800
garden prices (shekel/kurru)
polynomic regression line
700
R2 = 0,2126
600
500
400
300
200
100
‒580
‒570
Figure 3
‒560
‒550
‒540
‒530
‒520
‒510
‒500
0
‒490
Date grove prices in Borsippa and Babylon ( Jursa 2010: 460)
Jursa 2010: 457-462). Fortunately, the most coherent body of evidence is that
for date groves (Jursa 2010: 457-462), a crucial part of the agrarian economy.
The price movements of date groves in the later sixth century follow only
partially the movement of commodity prices. Commodity prices (e.g., slaves,
sheep, and dates) rise by at least 120% between 545 and 510 BCE, and barley
prices triple. This inflationary trend is noticeable also in the prices of date
groves, but only in a less pronounced way. Nominal prices rise by about sixty
percent in the same period, but, in fact, prices fall in relation to the theoretical
return on the investment, the monetary value of the date harvest: commodity
prices soared much higher than land prices.22 In contrast to the labour market,
the second (possible) factor market discussed here accords only partially with
the commodity markets. Two explanations, which are complementary rather
than mutually exclusive, can be advanced. The first, a social one, related to the
political economy of the period. The social setting—that of Babylonian urban
22
No explanation for the price development based primarily on changes in the supply side
of the equation can be suggested: agriculture was expanding around Babylon and
Borsippa in the late sixth century, but it was slow in comparison to that of the late seventh
and early sixth centuries BCE.
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landowners, many of whom were priests—of the texts from which this price
sample has been drawn is rather homogeneous. The latter group, especially,
tended to sell land only when in economic distress; the buyers in these cases
were normally members of the same social group. This is illustrated best by the
archives of Borsippean priests (Waerzeggers 2010): outsiders did not easily get
a foothold in the rural districts that were dominated by the Borsippean urban
clans. The relatively homogeneous distribution of income within the group of
socially acceptable buyers and the socially motivated exclusion of other potentially interested parties would have helped keep prices down. The second
explanation: in the Early Achaemenid period, especially under Darius, the
state-imposed burden on urban landowners increased considerably; labour
services and other forms of surplus extraction by the Persian rulers proliferated (Jursa and Waerzeggers 2009). This reduced the profitability of landownership, especially for the very group of landowners that is represented in the
sale contracts furnishing the price data. The moderate increase in land prices
must reflect also the changed political climate in the country and the more
pronounced exploitation of Babylonian resources for investments outside of
the province under Darius.23 It is no surprise that the Persian system of taxation and compulsory labour and service obligations pointedly targeted
Babylonian urban landowners: it was, as we have seen, probably they who generated most of the agrarian surplus of the province. It is no surprise that, in
what must have been a reaction to this development, it was the same group
that supported, and presumably also set in motion, the revolts of 484 BCE, and
certainly also suffered most in their aftermath.24 In general terms, we see here
an attempt by the state to use political power to extract a maximum surplus
from a particularly prosperous sector of the agrarian economy, thereby not
only harming the group that produced this surplus but also reducing the incentive to invest in groves and their improvement, thereby diminishing the profitability of this sector of agriculture. The implications for the development of
the agrarian economy in the fifth century will be discussed presently.
In conclusion, we are justified in speaking of a land market for the sixth
century, but its efficiency and “freedom” should not be overrated. The facts that
property rights were, in general, guaranteed by law, that there was normally no
23
24
His building work in Susa was strongly supported by Babylonian labour and resources.
The Persians even required Babylonians to construct a new waterway, the Nār-kabarri,
linking Babylonia and southwestern Iran (Tolini 2011).
These matters are being investigated further by C. Waerzeggers.
jesho 57 (2014) 173-202
factor markets in babylonia
189
legal restriction on the alienability of private land,25 and that the nature and
the quality of the land were decisive factors in pricing, speak in favour of the
existence of a land market. Nevertheless, the social embeddedness of this market determined the way in which it functioned: there was an inclination to
avoid the sale of land whenever one could, so that most sales occurred only
under duress. Furthermore, the largest body of more or less contemporaneous
land-sale documents available, the grove sales from Borsippa, demonstrate a
remarkable social coherence of the group of buyers and sellers. Social constraints and the general reluctance to sell land must have rendered it difficult
for outsiders to purchase productive land. Where it occurred, it must usually
imply a significant imbalance between the social power and the economic
resources of the “outside” buyer and the seller.
Leasing as a means of access to land was not as charged with legal and social
implications as was purchase, but here too social factors played an important
role (Jursa 2010: 182-192). Access to land for rent was regulated, in part, by interpersonal relationships, sometimes of long standing, that were similar to a
patron-client relationship, but there is enough evidence for short-term leases
and a rapid turnover of lessees to suggest that both tenants and landowners
were fairly flexible. The social standing of lessees of groves was frequently similar, even equal, to that of the lessors, while the same is not normally the case
for the lessees of fields, especially in the institutional sphere. Sharecroppers
working on arable land and lessees of groves—who generally received most or
all of the crops grown under the trees, in addition to a salary based on the size
of the grove—both had an incentive to do well in their work that was absent in
the case of those (often dependent or slave) cultivators of fields who had to pay
fixed rents. There was a wide range of possible relationships between tenants
and lessors, so we can observe an interplay of economic and social forces in the
“rental market.”26 The participants in this market were usually of unequal
power: landowners frequently had an advantage over lessees, but, in the case
of entrepreneurial landleasing, the relationship of power may often have been
different: by granting credit to producers or landowners, entrepreneurs could
25
26
Note that this is true also for land in areas that had been the subject of a royal landgrant
to urban families after large-scale, royally sponsored reclamation, as in the case of the
hanšû (“fifties”) estates found around all major Babylonian cities.
The pertinent Babylonian terminology—and, at least in part, the institutions behind the
terminology—survived into the Islamic period: the Babylonian sharecropper errēšu, a
free man, corresponds to the Talmudic and later ˀarīs, and the dependent farmer/tiller
ikkaru to the later hoker, ˀakkār. See van der Spek; Van Bavel, Campopiano and Dijkman in
this issue of JESHO: 269.
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jursa
gain effective control over the land, there being no indication that such
business was affected by social restrictions. In general, contractual law and
custom created a stable and predictable institutional framework, and, outside
the institutional sphere and its partial reliance on the labour of dependants,
there is little in the sources that suggests that landowners exercised constraint
and power.
For the sixth century, we would therefore argue for a land market characterized by few outright legal restrictions, governed by law, and based on a profound recognition—at least by the non-institutional sphere of economy and
society—of property rights vested in the individual and, secondarily, in his or
her family: collective ownership outside the extended family was, at best, a
marginal phenomenon. Layering of property rights27 occurred but was not the
rule. This land market was strongly affected by social constraints on property
transfers, but it was flexible when it came to renting, which was, for those who
had movable capital available for cultivation, a feasible means of access to
landed wealth.
The development of the agrarian economy in the fifth and fourth century is
known only in vague outlines. There is abundant information on the management of land grants established for soldier-settlers on (former) royal and/or
temple land and on the estates of Iranian nobles around Nippur, but agrarian
conditions in the mostly grain-farming Nippur region were not typical of the
rest of Babylonia (Stolper 1985; 2005, van Driel 1989; see Jursa 2010: 405-418 for
an attempt at a synthesis). Important additional information for northern
Babylonia comes especially from the Tattannu and Bābāya (or Kasr) archives
(Stolper 1995, 2005, 2007; Jursa 2010: 375-382). Evidence for the sale of land is
rare but does exist (Jursa and Stolper 2007: 245-52, YBC 11611; Stolper 2007: no.
2, BM 55055, BM 55090, YBC 11552). There is no indication that the legal framework differed significantly in the fifth century. Land granted to soldiers was
normally inalienable, but there were no other absolute restrictions on the buying and selling of agricultural land. Nevertheless, significant changes had
occurred in the fifth century, during the reigns of Xerxes and Artaxerxes. More
land was now in the hands of the king, Persian nobles, and Babylonian clients
of the Iranian ruling class—a real shift in the patterns of landownership rather
than a reflection of a changed focus in the sources (see already above: 182-184).
Tenancy patterns had changed, too. Multiple layers of leases could allow
numerous parties rights to the same piece of land and to the water on which it
depended (Stolper 2005). Typically, Iranian overlords and their bailiffs are in
27
E.g., a superposition of royal rights and individual rights on a piece of property.
jesho 57 (2014) 173-202
factor markets in babylonia
191
the background of complex constructions of leases and subleases that involved
Babylonians of different social status (landowners and managers/businessmen alike) as well as cultivators of various ethnic backgrounds, mostly
Babylonians and West Semites. While agricultural entrepreneurs of the sixth
century had relied most often on free agents who shared their social background and sometimes were family members (Hackl et al. 2011: 181-182; Jursa
2005a: 69-71), in the fifth century it was more often slaves who acted for their
owners—elite Babylonian landowners, Iranians, and rich Babylonian businessmen alike (Jursa 2010: 407). Overall returns of farming were no higher than
in the sixth century, so pressure on the cultivators necessarily increased, due to
the practice of multiple subleasing, even though this is difficult to prove in
detail. Coercion and the use of force certainly play a more important role in
the documentation of agriculture than in the sixth century (Stolper 1985: nos.
91, 102, 103, 104, BE 9, 57, PBS 2/1, 21). As argued above, the period saw an increase
in the importance of compulsory labour in agriculture and elsewhere at the
expense of contractual labour.
To some extent, all these changes occurred at the expense of the old
Babylonian urban elites and, by extension, the institutions on which their
socio-economic life was centred, that is, the temples and the city as a semiautonomous entity; in fact, these changes probably depended on the old elites’
decline in the aftermath of the rebellions against Xerxes. As seen best in the
case of Uruk, the reprisals against leading families from Babylon, Borsippa,
and elsewhere in the north, as well as against the northerners in Uruk and possibly also in Ur, entailed a major upheaval in landholding patterns: property
rights were violated on a grand scale. The appropriation of temple lands (of
Bēl) by Persian nobles (Stolper 1985: 42-44) and the integration into the Persian
system of military conscription and taxation (PBS 2/1, 94) of land farmed by
temple personnel, as attested in the Murašû archive, are additional examples
of this process.
While not all the details of the events after 484 BC and of the larger process
of which they were a part are clear, it is certain that much landed wealth that
had been under the control of the old urban elites of the Babylonian cities
changed hands through non-commercial transactions and that the overall
beneficiaries of the changes in the patterns of land tenure in the fifth (and
fourth?) centuries were the Persian elites and their Babylonian supporters.
Landownership for these classes was a corollary, or consequence, of holding
political power; it was not, for the most part, acquired commercially. How this
process affected the overall practice of buying and selling land cannot be
gauged from the available material. The period probably saw a reduction in the
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jursa
number of commercial transfers of landownership,28 some destabilization of
the market processes involved in those transfers, and the ever-increasing
effects of political power on all levels of agrarian production.
4
A Capital Market?
In the sixth century BCE, as in all other periods of Mesopotamian history,
access to money for consumption or investment could be gained by taking out
a loan (Wunsch 2002) or by entering into a partnership agreement (harrānu)
with one or more co-investors.29 While business partnerships were, by their
very definition, commercial ventures, the vast majority of attested loans were
consumption loans: the funds were not re-invested by the debtor for productive purposes.30 Straightforward money-lending with the aim of profiting
directly from the loan’s interest is infrequent as a major aspect of the types of
business pursued by individuals. Entrepreneurs rarely lent money unless the
transaction in question was related to their trading, tax farming, and property
management and acquisition (Jursa 2010: 206-214, 267-269).31 Perhaps surprisingly, the straightforward granting of loans of money at interest was more
often a business interest of priests and, generally, “rentiers” (including women)
with property to invest and no well-defined business interests of their own
(Jursa 2010: 240-245).
28
This was a result of the decline of the fortunes of the social group—the Babylonian urban
landowners—for which commercial transactions had been one of two principal means
of adding property to their inherited patrimony (the second being marriage and the
acquisition of dowries).
29 Sixth-century Babylonia seems not to have differed significantly in this respect from
Sasanian Iraq, if the pertinent observations of the Talmud are a reliable guide to Sasanianperiod practice (Rezakhani and Morony in this issue of JESHO: 245-247).
30 Credit for investment is largely an urban phenomenon; the preponderance of
consumption loans is greater in rural areas (Pirngruber 2012: 111-112).
31 A typical entrepreneurial activity consisted of lending soldier-tenants “fiefs” that were
encumbered with service and tax duties; the businessman’s ultimate aim in such lending
was to get hold of the tenants’ harvest, or, by taking fields as pledge, their land grants. Only
when they had obtained control over the land might they invest in its cultivation; the
loans were not an aim in themselves, and they were not used by the debtors for investment but only to cover their tax debts. This type of transaction is typical of the Murašû
business house of the fifth century, but it is attested, albeit on a smaller scale, also in the
sixth century (Jursa 2010: 198-203).
jesho 57 (2014) 173-202
factor markets in babylonia
193
In Babylonian, funds invested as interest-bearing loans were said to be ina
sūqi, “in the street,” or, rather, “on the market”; nevertheless, we cannot speak
of an impersonal capital market in the sixth century. Social aspects need to be
considered: much lending, also at interest, occurred among peers. Social proximity facilitated the access to lending capital but may also have constrained
both parties with respect to the details of the transaction.32 Even though negotiation with respect to interest rates was theoretically possible and there is
some evidence for borrowing at low interest followed by lending at high interest (Jursa 2006: 173-174), interest rates were customary and stable at twenty
percent per annum throughout much of the sixth century; there is also evidence of attempts by cities and, later, by the state to fix interest rates (Jursa
2010: 490-499). The high interest cannot generally have been conducive to
large-scale commercial borrowing.
The evidence for business partnerships formed by individuals, the second
means by which businessmen could secure funds for commercial purposes, fits
this general picture (Lanz 1976: 206-214; Jursa 2010: 267-269). Social aspects
were important: often there was a pre-existing social relationship between the
partners or the investor(s) and the agent(s) of the business companies. This
was generally the case for men who took part personally in running the company, either as agents or as (co-)investors. Silent partners—that is, investors
who did not work within the framework of the company and did not have
dependants acting as their agents and as representatives of their interests—
were usually men (sometimes women) without pronounced commercial interests and often having a priestly background; they were rentiers who chose to
invest some of their liquid funds in a commercial venture. The capital that was
invested in business companies could be substantial in comparison to other
investments made by private individuals or families, but it always fell well
below the levels of capital accumulation found in the archives of rich landowners or of institutions. No known company attracted more than six investors, and, for urban Babylonians, the investment in such ventures was, overall,
of minor importance as a means of accumulating wealth, compared with
landownership.
The importance of private capital investment in business ventures was
eclipsed by that of institutional property that was made available for
32
This is a matter that has not yet been thoroughly researched. See Jursa 1999: 119-125 for an
attempt to analyze, from this point of view, the debt notes found in the archive of the
priest Bēl-rēmanni. Forthcoming studies of the rich Borsippa archives by C. Waerzeggers
and B. Still, which employ the methodologies of social-network analysis, will allow more
detailed insights.
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jursa
c­ ommercial purposes. Especially land—but also manpower, movable capital,
and rights to dispose of various funds and taxes—could be contracted out as a
resource for all kinds of commercial dealings by individuals, both within the
institutional sphere and outside it (Jursa 2010: 252-256). Individual entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial families specialized in institutional property management in agriculture and livestock breeding, as well as in tax farming: the
institutions—temples and the royal household—used the service of such men
to facilitate the administration of their holdings. At the uppermost levels of
this kind of business, patronage and connections to the royal household were
decisive for entrepreneurial success (e.g., in the case of rent farmers managing
temple properties), and the commercial or generally economic aspects of the
transactions were frequently intertwined with, or even eclipsed by, considerations of a political nature. Nevertheless, there is also some evidence for a
“market” here in the sense that at least some entrepreneurs offered bids for
certain franchises with the intention to outdo their competitors.33 On the
lower rungs of the scale of the entrepreneurial engagement with institutional
business, businessmen certainly competed with each other, and access to institutional funds seems generally to have been granted based upon economic
considerations, but this does not exclude the importance of patronage and
social ties in these cases.34
The pertinent evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries is, in part, contradictory and does not yield itself easily to generalization. We do find “protobanking” at least by the early fourth century, indicating a demand for more
complex and objectified “financial services,” but the further expansion of
Babylonian banking had perhaps to wait until the Hellenistic period (Jursa
2006). On the other hand, interest rates were significantly higher in the late
period than in the long sixth century: the sixth century’s common rate of
twenty percent per annum continued to be charged, but higher rates were frequent, and forty percent per annum may have been a standard towards the end
of the fourth century. This change in interest rates could have various explanations. If it was based primarily on economic factors, the change would be an
argument for a contraction of the money supply in later Achaemenid
Babylonia. A gradual process of deflation, or at least a tendency of the monetary supply to shrink has, other things being equal, to be postulated a priori as
33
34
This can be shown for two pairs of rent farmers of Uruk: Bēl-gimlanni and Gimillu (TCL
13, 182), and Nergal-nāṣir and Kalbāya (TCL 12, 90).
This is clearest in the case of “herdsmen” who manage temple flocks (van Driel 1993: 222224; 1995: 228), but the Itti-Šamaš-balāṭu and Bēl-eṭēri-Šamaš archives also provide pertinent evidence (Beaulieu 2000; Jursa 2005).
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195
a long-term effect of the shift of the imperial centre away from Babylon to Iran
and the resulting withdrawal of specie from circulation in Babylonia;35 after
all, the fall in the value of silver that occurred in the sixth-century Babylonia
must have been caused by the spoils of empire that the Neo-Babylonian kings
brought into circulation through their heavy spending for construction and
the like (see above). The falling prices during parts of the fourth century would
seem to confirm this assumption, but little weight can be placed on their testimony because of their scarcity and the wide scattering of the data.36 The possibility that these high interest rates were customary, due perhaps to Persian
practice,37 cannot, however, be excluded. Even higher interest rates are attested
in the Aramaic papyri of Achaemenid Egypt.38 In any case, such rates rendered
access to capital by lending difficult and expensive.
Access to institutional capital (land, manpower, rents, taxes, liquid capital)
for commercial purposes continued to be conceded to businessmen. The best
example of entrepreneurial activity in this period is the Murašû archive (e.g.,
Stolper 1985): the Murašû, a family of Babylonian businessmen, specialized in
institutional property-management of fields and tax and income farming,
mainly by offering credit for tax purposes to holders of royal land grants. The
Murašû acquired an astonishing amount of immobile capital, in the form of
land granted to them as leases or taken as pledges, and of mobile capital, in the
form of dependent or indebted (quasi-indentured) agricultural labour. The
Murašû turned the produce of the land under their control into cash resources
by selling it to consumers in the city of Nippur (or elsewhere) or to the royal
authorities, thereby serving as middlemen between the agricultural producers
and tax-payers on one hand and the Persian overlords on the other, in consumption as well as in production and resource extraction. No Babylonian
entrepreneur or entrepreneurial family of the sixth century worked on a comparable scale and was in a similarly favourable position to profit from a similar
level of control over the several means of agricultural production: land, water,
35
36
37
38
This was due at least as much to a reduction in royal spending (compared to the sixth
century) as to a direct withdrawal of funds by taxation.
See Pirngruber 2012: 34-36 on the difficulty in interpreting these data. Pirngruber does not
see in these prices convincing evidence for a contraction of the money supply and rightly
points out that, throughout the fifth century, as far as we know, prices remained high,
while the fall in prices in the fourth century occurred in a short period, of forty to fifty
years. Our assumption is that some deflation is probable a priori but that the price development was influenced also by other short-term factors.
This would have been a much less deeply rooted tradition of money use than in
Babylonian law.
They are briefly discussed in Hackl and Pirngruber 2013: sect. 3c.
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jursa
credit, and, at least indirectly, labour. The Murašû were but one such business
acting at the intersection between the ruling elite (the state) and the socioeconomic substructure that supported it: other fifth-century archives from
northern Babylonia suggest that similar concentrations of the means of production in the hands of members of the political elite and the entrepreneurs
who worked with their backing were common.39 We suggest that this reflects
the tighter hold the ruling elite had over the rural economy that distinguished
the fifth from the sixth century, as was argued above: the effects of political
power were, in this case, channelled through the agency of the entrepreneurial
family of the Murašû. In fact, political domination served also as a constraint
on the entrepreneurial activities that were conducted in its service: the
Murašûs’s business was taken over and either terminated or entrusted by
the Achaemenid prince Aršam to other agents (Stolper 1985: 23-24; van Driel,
1989: 204). In other contexts, in the archives of the Tattannu and Bābāya families, one finds a strong reliance on slave agents rather than on free contractors,
for the management of large-scale business ventures situated at the ­intersection
between the institutional and private sectors of the economy. The Babylonian
entrepreneurial culture may indeed have changed between the sixth and the
late fifth century: few business-partnership contracts are preserved from this
period.40 The existing evidence would again be consistent with the assumption of a restriction of freely negotiated commercial, market-based activity and
a more important role for types of economic interaction that were shaped by
the political reality of oppressive Persian (i.e., foreign) imperial rule.
5
Summary and Conclusions
The institutional framework in the long sixth century was comparatively
favourable for the development and expansion of factor markets. Agents in the
expanding sector of the economy that was based on contractual relationships
enjoyed the benefits of a basically stable political situation (the Persian conquest 539 BCE notwithstanding) and of an equally stable legal system that protected property rights and business interests and promoted, to some extent, a
code of administrative efficiency and accountability on the part of the authorities. In fact, in more general terms, the interests of the political elites, particularly the king and the royal establishment, coincided largely with those of the
39
See, e.g., for the Tattannu archive, BM 120024, edited in Jursa and Stolper 2007, and van
Driel 1989: 204.
40E.g., BE 9, 61; JCS 53, 87-8 NBC 6148, NBC 6206 and NBC 6122; OECT 10, 209.
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factor markets in babylonia
197
Babylonian urban upper classes, who profited most from the increasing monetization, specialization, and commercialization of economic life. The agency
of the state41 thus furthered directly or indirectly these processes of economic
change. In addition to well integrated commodity markets, free hired labour
(and, at least in towns, also slave labour) was also available through market
mechanisms, wages being dependent on supply and demand, as well as on the
changes in the monetary base of the economy. There is no indication that
social restrictions limited significantly the availability of hired labour and the
functioning of the labour market, but the picture is different for landownership. While there were few, if any, absolute legal restrictions on the buying and
selling of the types of land that are well attested in the sources, social forces did
constrain outright changes of ownership: land was rarely sold except under
duress, and even then, there was a tendency to sell to social peers. Rental agreements were far more straightforward. Social forces were certainly active, but
frequent changes of tenants indicate that there was considerable flexibility
among both lessors and lessees. The evidence for a factor market for capital is
weaker than that for labour or land. Interest rates could be negotiated, but in
most cases the standard, traditional annual rate of twenty percent was charged,
a rate that made borrowing capital expensive. Institutional resources (especially land, but also moveable resources, such as flocks and, especially, manpower) were a major source of commercial venture capital. Access to these
resources on the highest level depended largely on patronage and social background, and the activities of entrepreneurs were strongly influenced by political concerns; but competitive bidding for franchises did occur, and minor tax
farmers and managers of institutional businesses seem to have acted mostly
on economic principles and were definitely in competition with each other.
The participants in these “factor markets,” if we may call them that, in the sixth
century were mostly members of the Babylonian upper class.
Notwithstanding the scarcity of evidence for the later fifth and the fourth
century, we would argue against the assumption that the socio-economic conditions of the long sixth century continued more or less unchanged—in other
words, we maintain that the differences apparent in the sources from the fifth
and fourth centuries are probably real, not just apparent—that is, they were
not merely the effect of a changed focus in the documentation. The Babylonian
rebellions against Persian rule in 484 BCE and their aftermath upset property
rights on a large scale. The Babylonian upper classes, who had been the principal actors in the “factor markets” discussed and the main beneficiaries of the
41
Particularly in the form of investments in the agrarian infrastructure and by spending
heavily in an urban context the tribute and spoils extracted from the imperial periphery.
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jursa
economic expansion of the sixth century, suffered from political, social, and
economic upheavals. Their economic interests were no longer served by state
politics as they had been under the Neo-Babylonian empire and, mostly by
institutional inertia, in the first decades of Persian rule. The well documented
expansion of large-scale landownership by Persian nobles and their Babylonian
supporters introduced into the Babylonian socio-economic system a class of
agents who depended for their prosperity on, and profited by, their use of political power rather than on commerce and agricultural business founded on a
stable legal system and exchange within the framework of the “factor markets”
discussed above. The new elite’s power to compel labour certainly exceeded
that of the Babylonian urban upper classes in the sixth century, and there may
have been a tendency to extract from the province as much of the available
resources as possible. Both the concentration of economic power apparent in
the business of the Murašû and their fall at the hands of Prince Aršam are
emblematic of the economic climate of the time. What data we have from the
later fifth and the fourth centuries are consistent with the hypothesis that the
“factor markets” discussed here underwent changes that further restricted
their range and overall economic importance.
“Whether we like it or not, the Neo-Babylonian–Achaemenid period seems
to have been an age of privatization, tempered perhaps, it should be conceded,
by tyranny” (van Driel 1989: 226). While this typically careful observation by
van Driel is as justified in light of our current knowledge as it was when it was
written, it needs chronological refinement. We do not wish to make a case for
the later Achaemenid period being merely a tyranny in contrast to a stable rule
of law with a free play of economic forces during the rule of the Neo-Babylonian
dynasty, but it does seem certain that the burden of foreign rule over Babylonia
grew considerably over time, certainly from the reign of Darius I onwards. By
the late fifth century, after the important juncture of 484 BCE, institutions and
practices were in place that allowed the new ruling elites maximum access to
the resources of the province. The economic expansion of the sixth century
had been created by a fortuitous combination of long-term economic and climatic conditions and much more short-lived political factors. The new political and socio-economic structures established under Persian rule may
eventually have undermined the very foundation of the prospering economy
whose fruits the conquerors intended to harvest; it is at least certain that these
structures aimed directly at exploiting the economic well-being of the main
agents of the economic expansion of the sixth century, the Babylonian urban
upper classes. In that sense, the fifth and fourth centuries may still have been
“an age of privatization,” but they also saw significant “tyranny.” In a wider perspective, we can deduce from the evidence a connection between institutional
jesho 57 (2014) 173-202
factor markets in babylonia
199
change in the economy and political structures: it was arguably the shift in
elite interests rather than the (relative) efficiency of Babylonian factor markets
as economic institutions as such that determined the factor markets’ expansion and contraction in our period.42
Abbreviations
BE
The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania
BMsiglum of cuneiform tablets in the British Museum’s Department of the
Ancient Near East
JCS
Journal of Cuneiform Studies
NBCsiglum of cuneiform tablets in the Nies Babylonian Collection (housed in
the Yale Babylonian Collection)
OECT
Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts, Oxford: Clarendon Press
PBS
Publications of the Babylonian Section, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, The University Museum
TCLTextes cunéiformes du Louvre, Paris: Musée du Louvre. Département des
antiquités orientales
YBC
siglum of cuneiform tablets in the Yale Babylonian collection
YOS
Yale Oriental Series, New Haven: Yale University Press.
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