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THE ANCIENT ECONOMY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Figures....................................................................................................................ixList of Tables.....................................................................................................................xiList of Contributors...............................................................................................................xiii1. Introduction IAN MORRIS AND J. G. MANNING.....................................................................................1Part I: The Near East2. The Near East: The Bronze Age MARIO LIVERANI..................................................................................473. The Economy of the Near East in the First Millennium BC PETER R. BEDFORD......................................................584. Comment on Liverani and Bedford MARK GRANOVETTER..............................................................................84Part II: The Aegean5. Archaeology, Standards of Living, and Greek Economic History IAN MORRIS.......................................................916. Linear and Nonlinear Flow Models for Ancient Economies JOHN K. DAVIES.........................................................1277. Comment on Davies TAKESHI AMEMIYA.............................................................................................157Part III: Egypt8. The Relationship of Evidence to Models in the Ptolemaic Economy (332-30 BC) J. G. MANNING.....................................1639. Evidence and Models for the Economy of Roman Egypt ROGER S. BAGNALL...........................................................187Part IV: The Roman Mediterranean10. "The Advantages of Wealth and Luxury": The Case for Economic Growth in the Roman Empire R. BRUCE HITCHNER.....................20711. Framing the Debate Over Growth in the Ancient Economy RICHARD SALLER..........................................................22312. Comment on Hitchner and Saller AVNER GREIF....................................................................................239Bibliography.......................................................................................................................243Index..............................................................................................................................281

Chapter One

IAN MORRIS AND J. G. MANNING

Ancient historians conventionally draw a line through maps of the Mediterranean basin. On one side of it are the Greek and Roman worlds; on the other, Egypt and the Near East. Aeschylus and Herodotus already made a similar distinction twenty-five hundred years ago, but since the late eighteenth century AD the delineation has provided the basic structure for studying the ancient Mediterranean world. After 250 years of scholarly consensus about the reality and importance of this Greco-Roman/Egyptian-Near Eastern boundary, a major shift of opinions began in the late 1980s. Some specialists announced that there was just one East Mediterranean culture in antiquity, stretching from Mesopotamia to the Adriatic. Others asserted that while this had been true in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, the East Mediterranean koine had fragmented in the fifth century BC. Others still acknowledged the merits of the traditional view that classical Greco-Roman and Egyptian-Near Eastern cultures were fairly distinct but believed the former had strong Afroasiatic roots in the latter. Finally, some insisted that there was no point trying to make distinctions within the Mediterranean at all, since the entire basin had been tied together in a kaleidoscopic pattern of constantly shifting interactions. Throughout the 1990s the old dividing line was arguably the most prominent academic battlefield in ancient Mediterranean studies.

The fiercest clashes have been among students of ancient literature, art, and myth. But challenging the traditional divided-Mediterranean model also has profound implications for economic historians. If-as many philologists and art historians now claim-Greco-Roman culture was an offshoot of Egyptian and Near Eastern culture, why were the economic systems of these two broad regions of the Mediterranean as different as historians have traditionally believed? The debates over Mediterranean culture require economic historians to ask new questions; and the answers to these economic questions will necessarily feed back into the debates among cultural historians. In this volume, economic historians of various regions try to lay the foundation for a systematic comparative economic history of the ancient Mediterranean. They highlight key problems in the evidence, models, and intellectual traditions of the economic history of different regions of the Mediterranean in different periods of time. The book is merely a first step: Our main goal is to clear away some of the conceptual fog and empirical ignorance that currently bedevil comparative economic analysis.

This introductory chapter is a position paper. We define the central problem and explain the state of the debate as we understand it. We also make some recommendations for research in the next decade. It has become fashionable in the last few years to complain that ancient economic history has run its course, and that there is no hope of real progress. We disagree completely. Serious economic analysis of the ancient Mediterranean world has barely begun. A century of important work has created a large (but problematic) database, honed powerful (but somewhat narrow) methods, and identified fundamental (but unresolved) problems. Ancient historians should be proud of these achievements. But the field remains radically undertheorized and methodologically impoverished. Theory, method, and data are inseparable. Archaeologists and historians have made great advances in classifying and analyzing the primary sources but have not thought enough about how to build models or how to relate models to the empirical facts.

We see four particular limitations in the way research is currently organized:

1. In the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, ancient historians debated the purpose of their field-its function in the world and how it should be organized so as to perform that function. The divided-Mediterranean model is a legacy of these debates. Whether this division helps or hinders our understanding depends on the particular historian's notion of the purpose of ancient economic history.

2. No matter the region of study-Egypt, western Asia, Greece, or Rome-almost all ancient historians work within a broad, shared tradition. Ancient history is empiricist, positivist, inductive, and particularistic, driven mainly by philological agendas created in the nineteenth century. For most practitioners, economic history provides background information that will help scholars interpret more important cultural activities. There is little sense that ancient economic history contributes to any larger questions. The fields reward technical expertise in reading texts or recovering artifacts but put little emphasis on model building, methodology, or comparison. The result is economic history without economics.

3. Beneath the level of this shared tradition, there are deep...