Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T10:19:30.641Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Markets in the Ancient Near East: A Challenge to Silver's Argument and Use of Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Anne Mayhew ,
Walter C. Neale  and
David W. Tandy
Anne Mayhew
Affiliation:
Anne Mayhew and Walter C. Neale are Professors of Economics and David W. Tandy is Assistant Professor of Classics at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996. Neale was a student of Karl Polanyi's (1947–1951), and then a colleague in the Columbia University /Ford Foundation Interdisciplinary Project (1953–1958) that produced Trade and Market in the Early Empires (see footnote 3 for full citation). The authors wish to thank K. Benson, K. Brown, and E Friberg, and the editors of this JOURNAL for their advice.
Walter C. Neale
Affiliation:
Anne Mayhew and Walter C. Neale are Professors of Economics and David W. Tandy is Assistant Professor of Classics at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996. Neale was a student of Karl Polanyi's (1947–1951), and then a colleague in the Columbia University /Ford Foundation Interdisciplinary Project (1953–1958) that produced Trade and Market in the Early Empires (see footnote 3 for full citation). The authors wish to thank K. Benson, K. Brown, and E Friberg, and the editors of this JOURNAL for their advice.
David W. Tandy
Affiliation:
Anne Mayhew and Walter C. Neale are Professors of Economics and David W. Tandy is Assistant Professor of Classics at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996. Neale was a student of Karl Polanyi's (1947–1951), and then a colleague in the Columbia University /Ford Foundation Interdisciplinary Project (1953–1958) that produced Trade and Market in the Early Empires (see footnote 3 for full citation). The authors wish to thank K. Benson, K. Brown, and E Friberg, and the editors of this JOURNAL for their advice.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 1985 , pp. 127 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Silver, Morris,“Karl Polanyi and Markets in the Ancient Near East:The Challenge of the Evidence,” this JOURNAL, 43 (12 1983), pp. 795–829.Google Scholar

2 Polanyi, Karl, The Livelihood of Man, edited by Pearson, Harry W. (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

3 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944).Google Scholar The empirical basis of this position was adumbrated in chapters 3–5 of The Great Transformation, and his subsequent work was an effort to extend the evidential base. See especially Polanyi, Karl, Arensberg, Conrad M., Pearson, Harry W., eds., Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (Glencoe, Ill., 1957);Google Scholar but also along the same lines, both by Polanyi, , Dahomey and the Slave Trade (Seattle, 1964),Google Scholar and “On the Comparative Treatment of Economic Institutions in Antiquity, with Illustrations from Athens, Mycenae and Alalakh,” in Kraeling, Carl H. and Adams, Robert M., eds., City Invincible (Chicago, 1960), pp. 329–50Google Scholar (reprinted in Dalton, George, ed., Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi [Boston, 1968], pp. 306–34).Google Scholar

4 For instance, the complex exchanges between King Solomon and King Hiram that provided the cedar for the Temple were very important to Solomon, to the glory of God, and to the prestige of the Kingdom of Israel, but at no point did the livelihood of the Hebrews depend upon these arrangements. See I Kings, 4:1–7, 21–28, and chap. 5 (neither Kings nor Chronicles tell us about internal arrangements within the Kingdom of Tyre).Google Scholar

5 But see Karl Polanyi, “Marketless Trading in Hammurabi's Time,” chap. 2 in Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson, Trade and Market, pp. 12–26, p. 20: “The necessities of life were supposed to be subject to permanent equivalencies; actually they were subject to long-range changes by the same methods by which they had been established” (italics ours). Furthermore, it was at Polanyi's suggestion that Neale worked with Ronald Sweet (then—in the mid-1950s— writing a dissertation at The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) on possible statistical techniques to use in analyzing Mesopotamian price data (which showed widely varying prices so separated in time and place that the use of ordinary time series or correlation analyses would have been silly). Clearly Polanyi recognized that prices in the ancient Near East did change.Google Scholar

6 One is rather horribly reminded here of the efforts to determine “what Keynes really meant ”Probably only God—not even Keynes or Polanyi—knows “what Keynes really meant” or “what Polanyi really thought” Here and throughout we restrict ourselves to arguing what followers of Polanyi seem to understand, whatever may have been in Polanyi's mind at various times.Google Scholar

7 On English enclosures, see Polanyi, The Great Transformation, chap. 3; on the Poor Law, see chaps. 6–9; on cowries, see Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade, pp. 173–92.Google Scholar

8 Polanyi, Livelihood, pp. 14–17.Google Scholar

9 Finley, Moses I., The World of Odysseus (rev. ed. New York, 1978), p. 88.Google Scholar

10 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 46.Google Scholar

11 Silver implies that the movement of 80 tons of tin in 50 years was a great undertaking. Actually, Silver's own source, Larsen, Mogens Trolle (The Old Assyrian City-State and its Colonies [Copenhagen, 1976], p. 90),Google Scholar states that this “conservative” estimate would work out to about 21 donkey-loads annually by his own reckoning. According to Veenhof's evidence for the size of donkey-loads, the annual shipments work out to only 12 donkey-loads per year. (Veenhof, K. R., Aspects of Old Assyrian Trade and ifs Terminology [Leiden, 1982], pp. 3–4). Also see below, section “Inferences from Facts” in this article.Google Scholar

12 Silver cites exports of Babylonian textiles (pp. 810–11) as evidence for markets. He reasons that specialization, as well as size of undertaking, indicates the existence of markets. Again, he seems to be asking, “How else could they have done it, and why else would they have done it, if not in the (natural) way that we do it?”Google Scholar

13 Montet, Pierre, Everyday Life in Egypt in the Days of Rameses the Great, translated by Maxwell-Hyslop, A. R. and Drower, Margaret S. (London, 1958), pp. 75 and 267, commenting on the same passage, says that this was a period of complete breakdown in normal social and economic relations.Google Scholar

14 See footnote 5.Google Scholar

15 Silver, Morris,“Karl Polanyi and Markets in the Ancient Near East:The Challenge of the Evidence,” this JOURNAL, 43 (12 1983), pp. 795–829.Google Scholar

16 During sessions of the Columbia University/Ford Foundation Interdisciplinary Project (between 1953 and 1956) Leo Oppenheim (John A. Wilson Professor at The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) would not say that Polanyi's interpretation was correct, but he did say that nothing in Polanyi's model was inconsistent with the texts.Google Scholar

17 Oppenheim, A. Leo, Ancient Mesopotamia, rev. ed. completed by Reiner, Erica (Chicago, 1977), p. 385, n. 13.Google Scholar

18 Silver, Morris,“Karl Polanyi and Markets in the Ancient Near East:The Challenge of the Evidence,” this JOURNAL, 43 (12 1983), p. 303.Google Scholar

19 Silver, Morris,“Karl Polanyi and Markets in the Ancient Near East:The Challenge of the Evidence,” this JOURNAL, 43 (12 1983), p. 129.Google Scholar

20 Since tin would have traveled to Tilmun or to any other city in the entire area by boat on the Tigris, tin shipped by donkey could only have traveled westward, to the Levantine coastal cities or to Anatolia. We know that the Levantine coastal cities and the cities abutting southwestern Anatolia (such as Hazor and Aleppo) had their tin brought in from Man and that Assur was not part of the Mari route, which began in Eshnunna (Muhly, James David, Copper and Tin: The Distribution of Mineral Resources and the Nature of the Metals Trade in the Bronze Age [Hamden, Conn., 1973], p. 293).Google ScholarLarsen, Mogens Trolle, Old Assyrian Caravan Procedures (Leiden, 1967), p. 4,Google Scholarbelieves that the tin traveled to Anatolia, but there is reason to believe that Anatolia—rich in copper, but perhaps tinless (Muhly, pp. 199–208, 256–57)—had its tin needs met by mines in Phrygia (around Troy), or perhaps from across the Dardanelles in Europe, both production centers having easy access to the Euxine.Google Scholar

21 Rapp, George T. and Aschenbrenner, S. E., eds., Excavations at Nichoria in Southwest Greece: Site, Environs and Techniques (Minneapolis, 1978), p. 17.Google Scholar

22 Finley, M. I., The Ancient Economy (Berkeley, 1973), p. 31.Google Scholar

23 Sloan, Robert E. and Duncan, Mary Ann, “Zooarchaeology of Nichoria,” in Rapp and Aschenbrenner, Excavations, pp. 60–77, especially pp. 65 and 74.Google Scholar

24 For pollen evidence see Rapp and Aschenbrenner, Excavations, p. 17.Google Scholar For the storageevidence, see Smithson, Evelyn Lord, “The Tomb of a Rich Athenian Lady, Ca. 850 BC”, Hesperia, 37 (1968), pp. 92–97. Tandy is currently at work on a monograph that will treat food production, population pressure, and trade in ninth- and eighth-century Greece and their roles in the origins of literacy and social criticism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 McEvedy, Cohn and Jones, Richard, Atlas of World Population History (London, 1978), p. 149.Google Scholar

26 Pruessner, A. H., “Date Culture in Ancient Babylonia”, American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, 36 (1920), pp. 213–32, especially p. 230. Instead of ignoring it, Silver could have used this piece of evidence to argue that the alleged market for dates was a market for a staple—but, of course, he must still assume a market.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Silver, “Polanyi,” p. 811. Silver depends for his information on Pruessner, “Date Culture”, p. 214, who says that he “is well aware of the disadvantage… [of] not having any practical, personal experience in date culture as it is carried on today in those regions.”Google Scholar In fact, according to Spooner, Brian, “The Iranian Deserts”, in Spooner, Brian, ed., Population Growth: Anthropological Implications (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 259, date palms take five years to mature, a figure that would strengthen Silver's argument.Google Scholar

28 Spooner, “Iranian Deserts”, p. 259.Google Scholar

29 An Arab proverb cited by Pruessner, “Date Culture,” p. 214.Google Scholar

30 McEvedy and Jones, Atlas, p. 149. Spooner, “Iranian Deserts,” p. 259.Google Scholar

31 Pruessner “Date Culture,” p. 231, estimates 200 pounds per tree per year; Spooner (the eyewitness) estimates 400 pounds per tree per year for 75 years (“Iranian Deserts”, p. 259). There is a substantial difference here.Google Scholar