What J.A. Brinkman characterised in 1983 as ‘a resurgence of interest among Assyriologists in the study of Babylonia after 350 b.c. … manifested … particularly in new text editions and treatments dealing with aspects of legal, religious, and socio-economic history’ (Journal of Cuneiform Studies 35, 229) was transformed by editions of the Late Babylonian texts called Astronomical Diaries (H. Hunger & A. Sachs, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia [1988–1996]) and the texts called Commodity Price Lists (A.L. Slotsky & R. Wallenfels, Tallies and Trends [2009]). This transformation attains new range and depth with the appearance of P.’s book and J. Monerie's L’économie de la Babylonie à l’époque hellénistique (2018).
The socio-economic history that Brinkman mentioned tended to be more social than economic. Tools and methods of economic analysis and social science were rarely within the Assyriologists’ grasp, and Assyriologists’ results were rarely productive in the hands of economic historians. Early approaches to Late Babylonian prices (W. Dubberstein, ‘Comparative Prices in Later Babylonia [600–400 b.c.]’, American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 56 [1939], 20–43) were forgotten as products of naïve positivism.
The Astronomical Diaries changed this, providing thousands of observations of the market equivalences of six basic commodities, exactly dated between the mid-seventh and mid-first centuries bc. The price series invite statistical analysis. The commodities – staple foods (barley and dates), condiments (sesame, cress, dodder), and wool – entail different suppositions about demand elasticity, so statistical results are susceptible to economic explanation. Books by Slotsky (The Bourse of Babylon [1997]) and P. Vargyas (A History of Babylonian Prices in the First Millennium b.c. [2001]) and critical responses to them changed the focus and aims of study.
A second change was the rise of New Institutional Economics as a mode of relating quantifiable economic phenomena to social institutions, displacing an ‘unhelpful dichotomy between primitivism/substantivism versus modernism/formalism’ (p. 10). A third change was the work of a ‘Vienna school’ overseen by M. Jursa, combing Babylonian administrative and legal texts to produce a compendious view of the economic history of Babylonia in the ‘long sixth century’ (626–484 bc) (M. Jursa et al., Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium bc [2010]), a fundamental reference work for the study of later centuries.
P.’s book is a terse, reflective work of economic history with the stated aim (p. 7) of examining the price series in their institutional and political frameworks to analyse the interplay of structure and performance.
The section on structure opens with a chapter on developments in Babylonia between the late seventh century and the Seleucid period. An obstacle is the distribution of legal and administrative documents from which institutions, circumstances and the behaviours of economic actors can be inferred – 20,000+ documents from the long sixth century, 2,000+ from the Achaemenid reigns after 484 bc, a few hundred from Seleucid reigns. The following chapter, on the distribution of land, labour and capital, mostly draws on c. 700 published documents of the Murašû Archive of Nippur, from c. 440–415 bc, with the proviso (p. 47) that fragments of contemporary archives confirm that conditions seen in the Murašû texts were prevalent in Babylonia as a whole down to the reign of Artaxerxes II, when the information in the Diaries becomes useful. Of comparable Seleucid documents, there are ‘hardly any’ (pp. 66, 105). In general, as the Diary data becomes richer, the contextual data becomes poorer. Still, the last chapter of the section correlates archival texts with Diary prices to confirm that inter-annual storage did little to cushion price volatility. The overall picture shows the transformations and positive feedback cycle (p. 29) of the sixth century slowed or reversed in the fifth and fourth, with economic power concentrated among fewer actors, more servile or dependent workers, less monetisation and access to silver money, more vulnerability to natural and political shocks – all structural features found to be consistent with the price series. After Alexander and the Successors, textual evidence for structural changes is tantalising but dramatically supplemented by numismatic evidence for money supply, and the implications of the price series become especially important.
The long first chapter on performance focuses on mean prices and deviations from them, trends and comparisons with the sixth century (p. 93), and correlations with political, military, natural and monetary events. The period 385–141 bc is subdivided into four intervals, each treated in detail with special reference to a salient issue. The Late Achaemenid period, from Artaxerxes II to Alexander, focuses on price volatility, fostered by the institutional conditions considered earlier. In the period between Alexander and the political consolidation of Seleucus I, the issue is monetisation, concluding (pp. 117, 122) that soaring prices arose not only from the effects of continuous warfare, but also from new minting activity. In the early Seleucid reigns, through Seleucus III, behind a long-term downward trend observed by others (p. 133), P. finds wide swings – the issue of outliers – explained by a weakening of market integration that amplified political and natural shocks (p. 135). For the later Seleucid period, from Antiochos III to the Parthian takeover, the issue is relative prices: all commodity prices were lower than in the early Seleucid reigns, but barley prices were stable, date prices continued to fall, prices of non-staple goods (cress and wool) rose in the last 30 years of the interval, and outlier prices are rare (p. 149); deflationary effects of Antiochos III's wars and the indemnities required by the treaty of Apameia are detected (p. 151), but the troubles preceding the Parthian takeover leave little mark (p. 149). A concluding section comments on the long-term trends, with a statistical demonstration that seasonal variation decreased between early and late Seleucid reigns, adding more weight to consideration of political, military and monetary circumstances.
The second chapter under the ‘performance’ rubric stands apart as the methodologically innovative part of the work (p. 8). It aims to substantiate ‘traditional impressionistic’ (p. 164) correlations of political events with supply, demand and availability of money using regression analyses of statistically significant correlations, in two aspects: first, considering classes of events (warfare outside Babylonia, warfare in Babylonia, rebellions in Babylonia); second, considering outstanding price drivers (military operations in Babylonia, army musters in Babylonia). Appendices display the regression sheets behind these discussions, and a glossary explains statistical terms that may be unfamiliar to general historians. As P. cautions, correlation is not causation (p. 195), and the historical record is lacunose (p. 135), so the benefit of this formal demonstration lies in corroborating an interpretative perspective, not any particular interpretation.
In a brief conclusion P. comments first on performance, judging that the Babylonian market was efficient by comparison to other contemporary economies, but vulnerable to exogenous shock, making the absence of price controls attested in the Greek world and in earlier Mesopotamian societies remarkable (a point observed by Dubberstein in 1939). Commenting on structure, he focuses on negative factors in the Babylonian economy, and especially the concentration of resources in a few entrepreneurial houses, represented by the Murašû house of the late fifth century, concluding that price history is a surface phenomenon over a deeper structural relationship between political and economic conditions. He reiterates the absence of pertinent sources on structure for the Seleucid period, but refrains from suggesting that the price history that he has traced and interpreted in such detail might provide a basis for hypotheses about Seleucid structural changes.
P.’s work fosters the revival of a general view, tacitly challenged in recent decades of Achaemenid studies, that the long-term effects of Achaemenid rule on Babylonia were negative, ameliorated under Seleucid rule. Yet the poverty of structural information from legal and administrative records highlights ‘the question of alternative forms of economic integration’ including Achaemenid labour forces supported by rations and Seleucid temple personnel by ‘salaries in kind’ (p. 215). This issue looms large as the scope and replication of Achaemenid modes of administering storage and labour, and their persistence in the empire of Alexander, become recognisable (W.F.M. Henkelman, ‘Imperial Signature and Imperial Paradigm: Achaemenid Administrative Structure and System across and beyond the Iranian Plateau’, in B. Jacobs et al. [edd.], Die Verwaltung im Achämenidenreich / Administration in the Achaemenid Empire [2017], pp. 45–256).
Careful, clear and consequential, P.’s book rewards repeated reading.
