Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (Conrad M. Arensberg, Harry W. Pearson, Polányi Károly)

Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory
Author	Conrad M. Arensberg, Harry W. Pearson, Polányi Károly
Publisher	Henry Regnery
First published	1957 Chicago
Type	Book
Libgen	http://library.lol/main/E33A6A627B5D9B3545243C297C3A5366

Preface

THE senior editors hope to be forgiven for a somewhat lengthy preface. Close cooperation in genuine freedom allowed the present book to take shape as work in progress. Manifold factors, each on its own level, influenced the interdisciplinary plan, structure and form. There were, in the first place, the initiators and their former students who together largely wrote the book, one of the latter, Professor Harry W. Pearson of Adelphi College, acting also as co-editor; the institu- tions, internal and external to the University, which supported over a decade the various ventures in their overlapping phases; the personal scholarly aims of the editors which they endeavored to bring to fruition on converging lines. The undersigned will therefore speak here in three voices: each for himself, and together for both.

In Spring 1947 Karl Polanyi was appointed Visiting Professor of Economics at Columbia University. Until his retirement in 1953 he taught General Economic History in the Graduate Faculty, redefining the subject in the yearly announcement as "the place occupied by economic life in society." In 1948, the Council for Research in the Social Sciences at Columbia University (C. R. S. Sc.) endowed a re- search project on the__<:>ri~t.l-~_Qf_~c:()n.Ql!l}C:j_Q._sJituti()~S, under his direc- tion. Having retired,at the age of sixty-seven, he was given the honorary appointment of Adjunct Professor of Economics. Jointly with Professor Conrad M. Arensberg he then applied to the Ford Foundation, Be- havioral Sciences Division, for a grant in support of an InterdisciplinaryProject on the economic aspects of institutional growth, to be ad- ministered by Columbia University. In accepting the gift, Columbia University pointed to the continuity of effort which linked the C. R. S. Sc. project with the new grant. But while the charter of the C. R. S. Sc. barred students engaged in project work from making use of results towards the attainment of an academic degree, no such restric- tions applied to the Interdisciplinary Project; rather it was intended as a center of research benefiting the study purposes both of the senior proponents and of their associates. Polanyi has been serving full- time since 1953 on the Interdisciplinary Project, which in 1956 was continued by the Ford Foundation for another two years. Harry W. Pearson was appointed Executive Secretary. A university Seminar, at faculty level, on the institutionalization of the economic process set up at Columbia University discussed the same general topic from 1953 to 1955.

One by one a number of his 1947 students had joined Polanyi in his inquiries. Theoretical stimulation came from Harry W. Pearson and Rosemary Arnold (Barnard), both also giving valuable literary help; empirical applications were contributed by Charles S. Silberman (Col- umbia University) and Walter C. Neale (Yale University); George Woodard (Goddard College) uncovered Old Testament data relevant to the Mesopotamian field; Daniel B. Fusfeld (Michigan State Univer- sity) provided a methodological link with economic anthropology; Roxane Eberlein created an invaluable card index for the total research effort; Laura P. Striker, Ph. D. (History), a guest student, volunteered assistance over several years with the German translations of cuneiform texts. Among later students Terence K. Hopkins (Columbia Univer- sity) brought to bear a much needed sociological approach to the con- cept of a substantive economy; Professor Murray C. Polakoff (Uni- versity of Texas) contributed in the same direction; Abe Rotstein (Sir George Williams College, Montreal) who assisted Polanyi's work in many ways, also wrote the Introductory Note to the present book.

By 1953 definite progress had been made. The distinction between trade and market institutions was proving a potent instrument in recti- fying serious misreadings of economic data in early societies. Building on the works of earlier scholars, we had largely solved the problem of money uses in primitive and archaic societies. In regard to prices, the existence of the complex institution of "equivalencies" was revealed. The consequences for our understanding of the manner in which the economic process was instituted in Mesopotamia and classical Greece began to take shape.

At this point Arensberg, whose parallel endeavors at an institutional approach to the problems of sociology and anthropology were laid down in publications reaching back over a period of years, joined forces with Polanyi. Professor A. L. Oppenheim of the Oriental Institute, Chicago agreed to act as consultant in Assyriology. The undersigned then initiated the study of anthropology, economic history, and Assyri- ology from which this book sprang.

In Arensberg's case, such joint study gave a welcome opportunity to show that anthropology could serve economic history as more than a storehouse of odd data. The approach by which he thinks anthropolo- gists in close collaboration with himself have reached some new under- standing¢ the regularities to be found both in ethnographic and sub- stantive economic data is an operational method recently referred to as "interaction theory."

A few paragraphs may well be devoted to this linking of social arrangements and culture traits on the one hand, institutions on the other. It consists of the systematic use of three operations upon the immediate observations and the generalization of the resultant records -in the form of answers to the question: Who did what to whom, in what order, how often, where? The operations are (1) the specification of the persons acting on one another, (2) the discrimination of the order of the action (initiative and response), (3) the comparison of the events so described in time, as frequencies or rates of recurrence. Eco- nomic institutions then take on the appearance of goods-handling and goods-receiving, while ethnographic data may be expected to reveal who passed on goods to whom, in what order, how often, with what response among those listed under "whom." This should, for instance,

·enable us to link ethnographical data with such a purely empirical classification of parts of the goods-handling and goods-receiving process as are indicated by the terms reciprocative, redistributive, and market- ing, as Polanyi has suggested.

The reciprocative sequence among fixed partners ABjBA or ABjBCjCA C indicated similar social arrangements and culture traits whether the institutions formed otherwise part of prestige, kinship, community, religious, or other activities of the peoples who live by reciprocative human action in similar sequence.

In a redistributive world we find only few, if any, simple or complex chains of action and their reversals, or circles of action back upon them- selves. Action is instead centripetal movement of many upon one central figure followed by an initiative of that central figure upon the same many. Formally, BAjCAjDAjEA/FA are followed by an event AjBCDEF in unison or repartition. Central authority or focus in human organization has been invented, and it is now a frequent form in which human action occurs. The economics of redistribution, again, has common elements with the other institutions of the epochs in which central authority, the elaboration of "set events," is developing. But the identity of A, the centralizing figure, is still a fixed feature. His identity is not reversible: Temple-god or high priest, or king, or emperor, or even, in republican cases, citizen office-holder in rotation of office still fixed for a day or a year, is a fixed point, round which the others are also bound, liege, and fixed.

We asked the same type of question of the market. Here we asked it, in detail, and again our questioning, which resulted in what we think to be common denominator social arrangements and culture traits, led us to a slightly different pattern of observations than those our econo- mists made. We asked, abstractly and analytically, what social action does the .free market entail, and also where in the ethnographic record, can we find such forms of social action prior to modern times.

The economists of our project had difficulty with our question. To them free or moving prices were the earmark of the free market; and production for sale at such prices, fluctuating in its turn against market supply and demand, was the earmark of a market economy. But to the anthropologist that is not enough, since he must connect the specific, developed details of a culture trait, particularly the out- ward and spectacular features which win it human recognition and acclaim, with the inner features, its social arrangements, its past history, and its functions for men, society, and the maintenance of other insti- tutions than itself. But they finally agreed with us upon the following tentative formulation: In the free market of supply and demand, a man can reverse roles, being supplier or demander as he can or wills. A man can go to this market or that as he sees his advantage; he is free of fixed and static obligation to one center or one partner, he moves at will and at random, or as prices beckon. He can offer to all and any comers, dole or divide among them, "corner the market" so that they all pay his price and so dance to his tune. At another turn of prices, or in a next transaction or market, formally, he is one of a similar "crowd" and dances in unison to the tune called by another who may in his tum have "cornered the market" from them all. Thus the action, judged by our operations, is random as to pers9ns, at the free initiative of any one, formally, and the position of central "authority" in the market goes now to this competitor or cornerer-, now to that. The personal identity of the center, unlike that in redistributions, is fluctuant, moving, reversible, and random, too, a function not of other institu- tions but of the market itself.

Nowhere in the ethnographic record should we find another such fluid randomizing, so different a pattern of social arrangements to com- pare with those of reciprocity and redistribution. Here was a pattern reckoned from the will of the actor, giving him only the role he should achieve, not that ascribed to him from outside, forming and reforming the positions of others about him as he himself changed behavior and motive. Now, formally, AIBCDEF took place no oftener than BIACDEF or FIABCDE, and somehow human beings had learned, presumably, to accept roles as the movement of the institution itself, the market, dictated, together with a freedom to try to bend the others to their advantage. In the Western world, where this institution had come to emerge and to blossom into extreme elaboration in a Man- chester-School England of the 19th century, was it historical accident alone that a "free enterprise," a free and equal democracy, an "open" class system, a free choice of religious and associational membership, and a free choice of mate in a small, ego-reckoned family structure, should all have historically coincided?

In our particular project we could not decide such large matters of history and sociology, but we could ask the second question already mentioned above, Where outside the recent Western world, in the ethnographic record, would we find anything resembling or parallel to this? If it did exist elsewhere, did any parallel connections unite eco- nomic behavior and social arrangements and institutions?

To get an answer to the second question we might have turned to several places, perhaps to Japan, Mexico, Melanesia or ancient Greece. For all of them some reporters have claimed free or near-free markets. But we turned instead to Barbary, where the Berber hill tribes have markets that may well be free and where mutatis mutandis other free, not to say anarchic, institutions mark a very ancient and interesting civilization of perhaps some common origins with our own but certainly outside it today. A chapter of this book records what seems to be another case of near-free markets there. Let the reader judge for him- self, as he will judge the joint efforts of institutional economist and anthropologist in the other treatments of problems in different or alternative economic behaviors, motives, and systems in this book, if we have rightly or wrongly discovered the connections between culture trait, economic institution, and common denominator social arrange- ment in this case as in the others.

The present work reflects research carried on by the undersigned collectively, in free cooperation, during the 1953-1955 period. The manuscript of a previous work of_Polanyi-summing up his 1948- 1952 results in a more personal vein-should, however, be mentioned here. It was prepared by him in collaboration with his students, Charles

S. Silberman and Rosemary Arnold, then research assistants on the staff of the C. R. S. Sc. project; his wife Mrs. Ilona Polanyi acted as editorial assistant. On leave during the Winter Term 1949-1950, aided by the C. R. S. Sc., Polanyi made studies on Dahomey in the British Museum. In chapters VIII and IX on this subject, by Rosemary Arnold, particular indebtedness to the C. R. S. Sc. has been acknowl- edged. Chapter VIII consists of passages assembled from previous texts for submission to the University Seminar in 1953; Chapter IX, as it stands, was written by her for the C. R. S. Sc. project. In her case, as in that of Charles S. Silberman, Polanyi welcomes the opportunity to acknowledge the vital contribution of his collaborators in his as yet un- published work.

We wish to acknowledge our debt to the institutions which made our work possible. We can single out, in grateful memory, the officers of the Behavioral Sciences Division of the Ford· Foundation, of the Columbia University Council for Research in the Social Sciences and those of the University administration and of our respective depart- ments of Economics and Anthropology, together with the administra- tion of the University Seminars, particularly Professors Frank Tannen- baum and Arthur R. Burns, all at Columbia University, who gave both material support for the complicated interdisciplinary work of our project and platforms for our many hours of discussion and conference.

Vital encouragement came from Professors Robert M. Maciver, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton of the Sociology Department; steadfast support from Professors John M. Clark, Joseph Dorfman, Carter Goodrich, David S. Landes, and William Vickrey o~ the Eco=" nomics Department, all at Columbia. Many others contributed ideas and ideals; moral, intellectual, and technical assistance, running the gamut from the dedicated fellow-scholar to the interested observer; from the authority in his field to the challenging student. Amongst these were Dr. M. I. Finley, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge; the Rev. Professor R. J. Williams, University of Toronto; Professor Julius Lewy, Union Hebrew Seminary, Cincinnati; Professor Gregory Vlastos, Princeton University; Professor John Murra, Vassar College; Pro- fessor Albrecht Gotze, Yale University; Professor Bert F. Hoselitz, University of Chicago, together with Rivkah Harris and R. F. G. Sweet of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago; Professor Peter F. Drucker, New York University; Professors Isaac Mendelsohn and Martin Ostwald of Columbia University; Professors Morton Fried and Margaret Mead, together with Sidney Greenfield, Thomas Hazard, Dr. Marshall Sahlins, Donna Chrablow Taylor and Dr. Andrew Peter Vayda, all of the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University; also Drs. Robert Hennion and Cohn-Haft, while at Columbia. Miss Lucy Lowe's able professional services in the way of technical editing also deserve acknowledgement.

Thanks are also due to the Carnegie Institution of Washington for permission to adapt the map from The Maya Chontai Indians ofAcaian-Tixchei: A Contribution to the History and Ethnography of the Yucatan Peninsula, by France V. Scholes and Ralph L. Roys. We are also indebted to Lee Hunt for his expert assistance in adapting this map and for his beautiful execution of the endpaper maps.

We owe a debt of another kind to Professor Talcott Parsons of Harvard University. If his work is the subject, in essence, of two of our chapters, it is because that work is important and will certainly live in future social science in much of its contribution to our knowl- edge of institutions and social process. It was possible here to discuss Economy and Society, forthcoming almost at the same time as our own book, only because he sent us the manuscript graciously and fore- bearingly.

Introductory Note

MOsT of us have been accustomed to think that the hallmark of the economy is the market-an institution quite familiar to us. Similarly~our inquiries into general economic history have usually been con- cerned with market activities or their antecedents.

What is to be done~ though~ when it appears that S~_!lle ec:g11omies have operated on altogether different principles~ showing a widespread use-of money~ and far-flung trading activities~ yet no evidence of mar- kets or gain made on buying and selling? It is then that we must re- examine our notions of the economy.

The conceptual problem arises in marketless economies where there is no "economizing," i.e.~ no institutional framework to compel the individual to "rational" and "efficient" economic activity~ or "opti- mum" allocation of his resources. Economizing action may be present in various aspects of behavior~ e.g.~ in regard to one's time, energy, or one's theoretical assumptions, but the economy need contain no insti- tutions of exchange to reflect these principles in the individual's daily life as they have done in our own day. In that case the economy would not be subject to economic analysis since this presumes economizing behavior with supporting institutional paraphernalia, e.g.~ price-making markets, all-purpose money and market trade.

Thus the main task of this book is conceptual: it argues that only a small number of alternative patterns for organizing man's livelihood exist and it provides us with tools for the examination of nonmarket economies. These tools are applied in a series of empirical researches, although the underlying theory transcends them.

The aim is not to reject economic analysis, but to set its historical and institutional limitations, namely, to the economies where price- making markets have sway, and to transcend these limitations in a general theory of economic organization.

It is particularly as economists and as economic historians that we may have to revise our traditional assumptions. Some will be inclined to reject as of no interest economies which do not "economize," i.e., have no institutions for economizing action. They may regard the empirical and conceptual work advanced here as presenting no more than unimportant and irrational shards on the fringes of history. Others may even maintain that nothing is advanced here that is not amenable to treatment by economic analysis or some variation of the maximiza- tion theorem.

However, many unfortunate consequences follow from an approach that restricts our view of the economy to market activity. It is an impoverished economic history that narrows its concern to markets or market antecedents, for these may be only fragmentary aspects of the economy. The economy would then falsely seem to be in unilineal evolution to our own day, whereas in fact other economies need not be miniatures or early specimens of our own, but may be sharply at· variance with it, both as to individual motives and organization.

. Technological progress is cumulative and unbounded, but economic organization is not. There are only a few general ways in which the economy may be organized. It is this limitation of the possible patterns of economic organization and their effective combinations which gives to the thoughts and data offered here some topicality. In the receding rule of the market in the modern world, shapes reminiscent of the economic organization of earlier times make their appearance. Of course we stand firmly committed to the progress and freedoms which are the promise of modern society. But a purposeful use of the past may help us to meet our present overconcern with economic matters and to achieve a level of human integration, that comprises the economy, without being absorbed in it.

It is this which makes economic history come alive and throw light on the changing roles of economies in history and society.

Birth of the Economy

The Secular Debate on Economic Primitivism

FOR MORE than sixty years a debate has been raging in the field of economic history. Many features have faded out, some were irrelevant from the start. Yet it contained-and still contains-the elements of one of the most significant divergencies in the human sciences. It would not be easy to find a more suitable introduction than this controversy to the interpretive problems involved in the study of archaic economic institutions.

The theorem about which the storm of discussion ultimately centered was first propounded by Rodbertus in the middle 1860's. The actual controversy started some thirty years later between Karl Bucher and Eduard Meyer; it was at its height about the turn of the century. Subsequently Max Weber and Michael Rostovtzeff took their stand.

1

be found than Friedrich Oertel's oft-quoted statement of the issues as he summed them up in 1925:

Are we to conceive of the economy of antiquity as having reached a high level of development, or, on the contrary, as essentially primitive? Should the 5th and 4th centuries B.c. be regarded as an age of national and inter- national business, a receding agriculture, an advancing industry, large scale manufacturing managed on capitalistic lines and growing in scope, with fac-

Several others made important contributions.

No more illuminating introduction to this conflict of views could tories working for export and competing with one another for sales in the world market?

Or should we assume, on the contrary, that the stage of the closed "household economy" had not yet passed; that economic activity had not attained a national, even less an international scale; that no organized com- merce involving long-distance trading was carried on and that, consequently, no large-scale industry producing for foreign markets existed? In brief, was the character of economic life still agrarian rather than industrial? Was commerce still restricted to a peddling of particular wares, the work of craftsmen producing without the aid of machinery and using the raw ma-

2

Oertel termed the first the positive, the latter the negative theory. Johannes Hasebroek, more appropriately, called the first the modern- izing, the latter the primitivist view. But careful examination of the terms employed by Oertel to describe the issues involved in the dispute as well as the various attempts to characterize the opposing positions serves well to indicate the lack of conceptual clarity which has dogged the controversy from the beginning. Debates such as this are resolved either by the appearance of new evidence or by the conceptual clarifica- tion of the problem so that the previously existing evidence falls into new perspective. In this case, the facts, on what we will call the opera- tional level, can no longer be in dispute. It is, rather, the interpretation of these facts at the institutional level which remains unsettled.

The "Oikos" Theorem: Karl Rodbertus

The origins of this controversy go back to Rodbertus' essay on Economic Life in Classical Antiquity, which appeared over the years 1864-1867. The second part of this essay dealt with the "History of

3

Roman Tributes from the Time of Augustus." Here Rodbertus con-

trasted sharply modern and ancient taxation systems. His approach was highly suggestive. Modern taxation, he wrote, differentiates between personal and property taxes; these latter are either taxes on landed property or taxes on capital; capital, again, is either industrial or com- mercial, and the latter is invested either in goods or in money (i.e., either in industry or in finance). All these types of property appear as distinct from one another; indeed they appertain to different social classes. Distinctions analogous to those regarding property are also made in regard to incomes. We distinguish purely personal incomes, such as wages or salaries, which are due to the use of labor power, from. income that derives from impersonal property, or title to ownership~ such as rent; this latter may be either rent from land or profit; profit, again, is split up into interest and entrepreneurial profit.

"This state of affairs,'' Rodbertus concluded, "resulted in a modem

4

expandingeconomy." Thevariousstagesofproductionareherelinked

with one another through the process of buying and selling. In this fashion varying claims to a share in the national dividend are created which take the form of money incomes.

This remarkably modern view of the social function of money has not been sufficiently appreciated. Rodbertus realized that the transition from a "natural economy" to a "money economy" was not simply a technical matter, which resulted from a substitution of money pur~ chase for barter. He insisted instead that a monetarized economy in~ volved a social structure entirely different from that which went with an economy in kind. It was this change in the social structure accom~ panying the use of money rather than the technical fact of its use which ought to be emphasized, he thought. Had this point been expanded to

include the varying social structures accompanying trading activity in the ancient world the controversy might have been resolved before it began.

Instead the "household" or "oikos" held the center of the stage.

With Rodbertus the oikos was no more than a logical construct, a kind

of anticipation of a Weberian "Ideal type." He invented the term, "lord

5

oftheoikos" todesignatetheownerofallthevarioustitlestoproperty

and the corresponding incomes listed above. All this was designed to illustrate how, instead of a multitude of differentiated taxes, the ancient Romans knew only one tax, the tributum paid by the lord of the oikos whose revenue was a compound Of all those various kinds of incomes which had been fragmented by the modem "money economy."

For Rodbertus the oikos was typified by the vast Roman slave- worked domain, but historical confusion is apparent in a tendency to speak of the oikos without reference to any definite period. The term oikos thus became merely a peg upon which to hang the concept of economy in kind under which money, markets, and exchange were at a discount, in spite of the existence of an elaborate organization of pro- duction.

The essential element in this speculative theory upon which contro- versy later hinged was Rodbertus' statement that in this oikos economy

Nowhere does buying and selling intervene, nowhere do goods change hands. Since the national dividend never changes hands, it nowhere splits up into various income categories as in modem times. . . . All this necessi- tated economy-in-kind. No money was needed to make the national divi- dend pass from one phase of production to the other, since no change of ownership was involved.

Karl Bücher and Eduard Meyer

Here the matter might have rested had it not been for Karl Bucher's path-breaking work, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, first pub- lished in 1893. The great achiev_ement of Biicher was to link the study of economic life in the ancient world with primitive economics. His aim was to establish a general theory of economic development from primitive to modern times. He did not equate classical antiquity with primitive society, but by emphasizing the relatively recent tribal origins of ancient Greek and Roman society, he suggested that ancient eco- nomic life might better be understood if viewed from the perspective of primitive rather than modem society.

Regarding our specific interest his thesis was that not before the emergence of the modern state do we find a Volkswirtschaft, i.e., a complex economic life on larger than a city scale. Up to the year 1000 A.D. the economy never passed beyond the stage of closed domestic economy (geschlossene Hauswirtschaft) where production was solely for one's own needs, involving no exchange between the household units. The economic life of the Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, he said, was typified by this oikos economy. (Here he referred to Rod- bertus.)7

Biicher later conceded that before the development of a large scale slave economy, there was a much larger amount of free wage labor, pro- fessional services, and exchange in general However he still maintained his thesis in the following form: Complex economic life of a territorial character on a large scale (Volkswirtschaft) is the result of a develop- ment covering a period of thousands of years, and is no older than the modern state. Prior to this, mankind existed over long stretches of time without any system of exchange of goods and services that deserves

8

the name of a complex economic life on a national scale.

By settling on the self-sufficient oikos as the central unit of ancient society and placing this construct in a speculative theory of economic development, Bucher forced himself into the position of having to

deny the significance of trade and money in ancient society. Thus the

unfortunate oikos theorem cast the die of the controversy which was to

ensue, and provided an easy target for Eduard Meyer who vigorously

9

later period of antiquity was in essence entirely modern."

challenged Bucher's position in 1895.

Meyer summed up his opposing thesis in the dictum that, "... the

10

of this he adduced evidence on a number of points which seemed de-

cisive: "The ancient world possessed an articulated economic life with

a highly developed system of transportation and an intensive exchange

of commodities."

11

"In the ancient Orient we meet from the earliest

recorded time with a highly developed manufacturing industry, a gen-

eral system of commerce, and the use of precious metals as the means

12

Here he went on to say that since 2500 B.C. Babylonia

of exchange."

produced numerous documents referring to private business transac- tions in regard to slaves, land and buildings, dividing of property at death, etc. There we find a developed system of accountancy in terms of gold and silver, which spread all over the civilized world and served as a basis for coinage. The central point which seemed to prove the eco- nomic modernity of the ancient world was that, "Trade and money were of fundamental importance in the economic life of the an- cients."13

Meyer's position is what Hasebroek has called the "modernizing" attitude, what Oertel described as the "positive" approach, while Sal- violi termed it the historians' view. A more precise designation for this position might be "the market-oriented" view. Our modern world is indeed characterized by an unprecedented development of productive power, an international trade network, and the use of money as a uni-

versal means of exchange. By suggesting that the ancient world had begun on the same line Meyer was, of course, adopting a "moderniz- ing" attitude. It was also "positive" in the sense that it attributed these elements to ancient civilization; and it did represent the nineteenth- century historians' traditional view. But these terms do not convey the central feature of Meyer's position. The pivotal institution of the mod- ern economy is the market. It is under its aegis that production, trade and money are integrated into a self-contained economic system. And the crucial point in regard to the position of Meyer and the "modern- ists" is that in asserting the existence of large scale manufacturing, trade and money, they also assumed their organization to follow the market pattern. But whether or not these elements of any specific economy are

so organized is a point for investigation at least equally as important as the fact of their existence. The fact that the debate turned so much upon the exclusive importance of the oikos obscured this point and thereby weakened the position of the "primitivists." The "evidence" clearly turned against them.

The long-distance carrying and exchange of goods and the use of money objects were indeed widely spread features of ancient economic life, and in 1932 Michael Rostovtzeff was able to state that the oikos

14

position was then held by almost no one.

tory for the market-oriented position. The oikos had been a spurious issue from the start. Once that thesis was thoroughly discredited the argument could move to the level on which it should have begun. On this level there is no disputing the "facts'' regarding the physical move- ments of slaves, grain, wine, oil, pottery; their changing hands between distant peoples, nor can one deny some local exchanges between city and countryside. There is likewise no question of the use of money ob- jects. The question is, how were these elements of economic life insti- tutionalized to produce the continuous goods and person movements essential to a stable economy?

Max Weber and Michael Rostovtzeff

It was the genius of Max Weber which eventually permitted the debate to reach this level. Accepting neither the "primitive" nor the "modem" approach to the problem, Weber admitted that there were some similarities between the economy of the European ancient world at the height of its development and that of the later medieval period, but he emphasized the unique characteristics of ancient culture which

15

special direction, according to Weber, was the general military-politi- cal orientation of ancient culture. War in ancient times was the hunt for men and economic advantages were won through the ceaseless wars and, in peace, by political means. Even the cities, although super- ficially like those of the Middle Ages in economic outline, were essen- tially different in total outlook and organization.

Taken in its entirety . . . the city democracy of antiquity is a political guild. Tribute, booty, the payments of confederate cities, were merely distributed among the citizens.... The monopoly of the political guild included cleruchy, the distribution of conquered land among the citizens, and the distribution of the spoils of war; and at the last the city paid out of the proceeds of its political activity theater admissions, allotments of grain, and payments for jury service and for participation in religious rites.16

Weber thus opened the way to a new interpretation of the "facts," over which there was now little dispute. No victim of a preconceived stage theory of economic development, his approach showed the pos- sibility of a relatively high level of economic organization existing in a societal framework basically different from that of the modem market system.

It can hardly be said, however, that Weber resolved the issues in this secular debate, for while he sketched in the outlines of a new approach, he did not provide the conceptual tools with which to answer specific questions regarding trade organization, money uses, and methods of exchange. And although Johannes Hasebroek's detailed and masterful

7

elaboration of Weber's thesis in 193Jl secured an important victory

for the so-called "primitivist" side, Michael Rostovtzeff's questioning opposition proved that all the issues had not thereby been resolved.

Rostovtzeff conceded that the class warfare and revolutions which created the democracy of the Greek city states were of a different char- acter than those which established capitalism in the modem western world, and that the ideals of the new society retained the color of the

18

modern world is only quantitative, not qualitative."

Rostovtzeff declared, would be to deny that the ancient world had achieved any economic development over four thousand years.

Like Oertel, Rostovtzeff maintained that the controversy was made up of this dilemma: did the ancient world in its long existence gothrough a development similar to that of the modern world or was the whole ancient world based upon a primitive stage of economic life? He labeled the closed household theorem an ideal construction which never existed, above all not in Greece where there was an active trade with the highly developed Oriental empires. And did the Ionian Greeks gain nothing from the cities of the Near East where they settled?

20

troversy appeared in 1932, and thus represented the culmination of nearly forty years of debate since the publication of Bucher's book in 1893. Yet it is remarkable how little clarification of the issues had been achieved; opposing sides still clashed in a conceptual twilight.

The source of the confusion now appears obvious. Both sides, with the partial exception of Weber, were unable to conceive of an elabo- rate economy with trade, money, and market places being organized in any manner other than that of the market system. The "primitivists," who insisted that the ancient world was different from the modern, sought their support in the oikos, which to them represented an earlier stage in the development of the self-same market system. The "mod- ernists" saw Greece and Rome resting on a foundation four thousand years in the building, which included the high economic and cultural life of the ancient Near East. Meyer emphasized the high economic development of this area and Rostovtzeff the contact between it and Greek and Roman culture. To them it was inconceivable that such a long period, full of cultural achievement, would not produce an economy at least up to the level of the later medieval period. As Rostovtzeff declared, "Something must have happened!"

But what if those four thousand years of development had moved along different lines than those of the modern world? Then the per- spective from which Greece and Rome should be viewed would have to be shifted. Not capitalism, then, but a different organization of eco- nomic life would be the model from which to judge the high period of ancient economy. Bucher's primitivist perspective and Weber's mili- tary-political approach had suggested this view of the question. But neither Bucher nor Weber had provided adequate conceptual tools for recognizing what had happened, i.e., the institutional foundations of this different sort of economic development.

The following chapters of this work are devoted to this task. Ex- ploring anew the position of trade, money, and market in the Mediter- ranean empires, a radically new perspective is gained from which to view the economic life of the people of the Old World. This perspec-

"Surely something must have happened!"

This statement of Rostovtzeff's view of the issues in the oikos con-

tive gives a much broader range to the issues of the oikos debate. For now the elements of.markets and commercial trade which appear in the Greek classical and Hellenistic periods are seen not as the heritage of over four thousand years of Mesopotamian development, but as por- tentous new inventions seeking a place in Greek culture.

Marketless Trading in Hammurabi's Time

AT one stage or another in the history of almost any field of study, the condition may obtain that the more ample the facts that come to our cognizance the less do they appear to fit into a pattern. In regard to the Babylonian economy, Max Weber showed himself conscious of deep-seated difficulties as early as 1909, but never returned to the issue. Among the Assyriologists themselves symptoms of malaise were notice- able only comparatively late, but then all the more significantly. Paul Koschaker, who time and again warned against some of the assump- tions made by the earlier pioneers, eventually complained that his own efforts had reached a dead end. His study on economic administration in the Old Babylonian state (1942) closed, in his own words, "on a discordant and sceptical note." It had not been found possible, he intimated, satisfactorily to apply transactional terms to the process of governmental trading as it was recorded in the documents of Larsa; we might, he added, for the time being have to resign ourselves to the in- adequacy of rational concepts to cope with the administrative irra- tionalities of what he arraigned as hyperbureaucratic trading methods. In this particular phrasing, a policy bias may be deemed to have inter- fered with that great scholar's clarity of vision. However such a view would bypass the heart of the matter. The anything but anti-socialist V. Gordon Childe also failed to disperse the obscurities surrounding the early form of economic life in that area. His theory of an "urban revolution," reflecting the results of the spectacular advance of the archaeology of prehistory, nevertheless, offers no answer to the question how production and trade were organized. It should be assumed, there- fore, that the obstacles to a deeper insight transcended any preferences of historical philosophy or economic policy. Indeed, there may be strong reasons to believe that the frustration with which the inquiring mind has met in the field of the Babylonian economy is only the latest phase of that secular perplexity which for almost a century went under the name of oikos controversy, as presented in the previous chapter. The issue was roughly, whether at the highest point of its development the society of classical Greece and Rome in its economic aspects was essentially modem or primitive.

Pseudo-Economy and Inverted Perspective

In retrospect it is not too difficult to see why, even where there was broad agreement on the facts, interpretation remained elusive. Actu- ally, the question at issue was the extent to which the economy, in its various spheres, was organized through markets. Evidence of function- ing markets is not so readily available as might be supposed. Even under modern conditions it is often a delicate matter to ascertain whether at a definite time and place a supply-demand-price mechanism for a definite good or service is in operation or not. For the distant past direct evidence may not be at hand. We are then forced back to rely- ing on such indirect evidence as those culture traits that commonly denote the presence of markets and market activities in a society. But this type of evidence is deceptive. Traits superficially recalling a busi- ness men's culture may occur independently of markets and even of the economy altogether. Famous instances of pseudo-economies, such as the potlatch or the Kula trade, details of which sometimes are al- most a mimicry of stock-jobbers' activities, abound with the Manus of the Great Admiralty Islands, the Tolowa-Tututni of California or the Kwakiutl of the North West Coast. Habits not intrinsically economic, such as the urge of gambling, competition in auctioneering, rigid ac- countancy, the lure of risk, pride in a public turnover, which occur in modem business life, also play a vital part in the social fabric of primi- tive communities. Obviously, the presence of such pseudo-economic traits is not proof of functioning markets. Moreover-yet another am-

biguity-some genuine economic institutions that in their elaborate form we justly regard as having arisen only in modern times are found to have occurred under archaic conditions as well. However, while as to its structure the institution may be similar, its function may be very different. In its early, premarket form it acted as a substitute for mar- kets; in its market form it is, on the contrary, supplementary to the existing market. Examples: In recent centuries business life produced complex credit structures and clearing systems, elaborate forms of brokerage, and special purpose moneys. All of these must be regarded as new. Yet, in much less complex forms similar institutions had existed before, in early societies. The explanation is simple. Where barter is widespread, credit, brokerage, clearing or money used as a standard help to carry on barter and thus make up for the absence of exchange- money and markets.

To use modern terms, it may be said that in these cases the lack of functioning markets calls for a substitute for markets. In the absence of money employed as a means of exchange there is often a large-scale public storage of staples with the concomitant practice of carrying debt accounts of individuals, and accompanying clearing practices. Though money is not used as a means of exchange, it may well be employed as a standard as well as a means of payment, different goods being -used for the different purposes. Brokerage and auction are then the usual de- vices of arranging for exchange. With the development of markets such practices, of course, become superfluous and tend to disappear, until much later they reappear again, only this time in a sophisticated form and in the new role of assisting the functioning of highly developed markets. Typical of such a recurrence of institutional traits and opera- tional devices which made their reappearance in our days, is the field which we call banking. Historically the appearance of money-changers, these earliest bankers, preceded the general use of coined money. Even branch banking reached a high development in Ptolemaic Egypt, where it served as a means of running an advanced planned economy in kind, without markets or money as a means of exchange. Actually, the clear- ing of obligations between traders' accounts appears to have been gen- eral fifteen hundred years prior to Ptolemaic Egypt, in the "early As- syrian" trade, in the absence not only of price-making markets, but even of coined money.

To sum up: The elusive element in the oikos controversy was the role of the market on which in reality the issues centered even though with no sufficient awareness of this circumstance on the part of the disputants. Translated into these terms, Rodbertus stressed that in the absence of a market system taxation in the Late Roman Empire would naturally be based on a general property tax put on the practically self- sufficient households of the big slave-owning landowners. Bucher, again in these terms, recognized that modern economies were inte- grated through national markets, themselves largely creations of the state, a development that had never occurred before. Finally, Weber's position on capitalism in antiquity as well as that of Rostovtzeff boiled down to the factual question to what extent, large or small, was the economic process in ancient Rome at other times and in its other

aspects instituted through markets. But in asserting the presence of markets we must carefully avoid a dangerous pitfall. Economic acitivi- ties under advanced market conditions may resemble similar activities under premarket conditions while their function is quite different. The distinction between pre- and postmarket should help to avoid that "inverted perspective," as it might be called, which sometimes induced historians to see strikingly "modern" phenomena in antiquity where in fact they were faced by typically primitive or archaic ones.

Problems of the Babylonian Economy

Paul Koschaker in 1942 was indeed much less confident of our grasp of the Babylonian economy than Eduard Meyer had been in 1895. The underlying reasons will now become apparent.

Shortly after Bucher's and Meyer's clash of views, the find was made of the obsidian stele on which the Code of Hammurabi was dis- played. To all intents and purposes it contained a commercial code of law which was (at the time) dated about twenty-five centuries before our era.* The significance of the sheaves of clay tablets relating to busi- ness matters that had been previously unearthed now stood revealed. Civilization, so much seemed evident, had been born from man's com- mercial instincts; and the cradle of our own world, that of a business- men's culture, had been uncovered in Babylonia; to argue the primi- tive character of the economic life of antiquity in the face of these facts was no more than a fad. A series of scholars whose critical faculties have been rarely surpassed in any field of learning testified to the col~ lective findings. There was no lack of differences between them on de~ tail, nor of the recognition of important lacunae-but as to the general character of the economy, the ethos of the participants, the attitudes and value scales on which they oriented their behavior, no doubt could prevail. We had here before us the very essence of a capitalistically minded business community, in which king and god alike engaged in profiteering, making the best of their chances in lending money at usury and imbuing a whole civilization with the spirit of money~making over millennia. It is against this climate of opinion that the doubts here voiced in regard to the actual organization of the economic life of the ancient Near East should be viewed.

In terms of our interpretation of the oikos controversy the impasse can be succinctly formulated. Babylonian economic life had necessarily appeared as a complex of activities ultimately depending on the func- tioning of an underlying market system. Markets were the rock bottom on which rested with axiomatic assurance the determination of forms of trade, money uses, prices, commercial transactions, profit and loss accounts, insolvency, partnership, in short, the essentials of business life. It follows that in the absence of such markets these explanations of the economic institutions and their way of functioning must fall to the ground.

We submit that this precisely is the case. Babylonia, as a matter of fact, possessed neither market places nor a functioning market system of any description.

This recognition, which supplies the main thesis of this chapter arises out of a number of mutually supporting groups of facts:

(1) Herodotus, who visited Babylon some time between 470 and 460 B.c., asserted with the greatest possible emphasis that "the Persians do not frequent market places and in effect, do not possess in their country a single market place." (Her. I, 153.) This passage was con~ sistently ignored by economic historians of Mesopotamia. .

(2) Even a superficial survey of the legal character of economic transactions from the Old Babylonian period down to Persian times showed the soundness of the accepted view that in spite of the inter~ vening "Dark Ages" no striking change in the nature and character of these transactions had ever occurred.

(3) It appeared as a matter of common sense that market places, had they been present to any extent in Hammurabi's time, would hardly have disappeared so thoroughly as to be beyond reviving during that upsurge of business activities which took place a thousand yeats later, and in the wake of which Herodotus was visiting Babylon.

(4) According to reliable archaeological evidence the walled towns ; of Palestine (with the single exception of Hellenistic Jerusalem) pos-

sessed right down to their destruction no open spaces whatsoever.

(5) The chief market place of Babylon would offer a landmark not easily overlooked. Yet contemporary literary records of the names, sites and layout of temples and avenues of that city which were discovered in the library of Ashur-banipal indicated no open space of this kind. (6) Somehalfdozendifferentwordsoccurringinvariouscuneiform documents and translated in different contexts as "market" turned out on closer inquiry either not to mean "market place" at all or at least to

be doubtful.

(7) Eventually, partial confirmation was received in February,

1953, from A. L. Oppenheim, in these terms: "As to your specific questions: Archaeological evidence speaks against the existence of •market places' within the cities of the Ancient Near East."*

An Early Assyrian Trading Post

A rough outline of accounts of an early Assyrian trading post that existed over a century in the period of Hammurabi in the center of Asia Minor shall provide us with a generalized version of how Assyri- ologists only a few decades ago conceived of the organization of trade in this admittedly specific case. Such a broad survey shall throw into relief the problems that must arise if the traditional view-based on the assumption of markets is to be replaced by another resting on the same data yet barring that assumption. It will hardly be possible to avoid some repetitiousness, when contrasting the composite scene as it emerges from our sources-the two main publications, that of Landsberger in 1925, and Eisser-J. Lewy in 1935-with the tentative picture we here suggest as an alternative. The first publication was ad- mittedly conjectural-unavoidably so, in view of the gaps in the evi- dence; also it justly claimed the right to a free rendering of the selected illustrative material, so as to round off the original texts where meticu- lous precision could have produced but inarticulate fragments. The second publication, a decade later, comprised the bulk of the then transliterated tablets, and was roughly in accordance with the first, from which it differed, apart from detail, mainly in literal accuracy and legal elaboration. Landsberger had offered a brilliant sequence of life- like scenes, suggestive of the drama of business; Eisser-J. Lewy supplied philological comment and juridical systematization. We will keep this brief and inevitably elliptic sketch of their presentations to three points: personnel and incentives; the nature of the goods; the character

of the activities.

Near Kanish, on the river Halys, we have a settlement of Assyrian

merchants, members of the so-called karum, businessmen who make profit on buying and selling, _partnership, loaning and investing. The records are ample; they cover some three generations and end abruptly. The merchants act as middlemen between the distant city of Assur, to which they themselves belong by race, religion and language, and be- tween the subjects of a native prince (or princes) of central Anatolia. Whatever its origin, the rationale of the trading post as actually or- ganized is the procurement of copper for the City. Profit is made on the sale-purchase of goods, on loans-short or long-on participations and as between the members of the firm, on a share in the profit. The firm is a family affair, though not exclusively so. Frequently a journey- man or junior partner, in reward for his services as a traveler, is accorded an interest-free loan, in money or goods, which he is permitted to use for trading on his own account (be'uJatum). The main driving force in business is the big man in Ashshur (ummeanum), who provides the goods, lends the money, invests sums over a long term against interest or participation or both. However, some of the more successful gild merchants in Kanish may be doing likewise. Transportation is organ- ized through a special group of carriers, on a commercial basis. Besides these, the anonymous figure of the tamkarum is in evidence, whose function, interests and activities are not clear, but evidently important. The goods are, primarily, copper, as we said, which is handled as a monopoly by the karum as such. Second, consignment ware such as lead (tin?) and fine cloths from the capital. From Kanish, native cloth and other goods are exported. Silver bars move both ways. Third, "free" goods are mentioned, which are neither subject to "monopoly" nor to consignment. The main activity is sale-purchase, mostly in regard to goods on consignment, on which the merchant can claim a commis- sion. For the rest, his job is to find a customer for the goods and to make the best of the chances of the market. Prices and interest rates

fluctuate almost in the stock-exchange manner, so he must keep an eye on them. Dealings amongst the merchants give rise to disputes, often brought to a head by arbitration. In other cases, severe penalties, moral as well as physical, seem to threaten the defaulter at the hand of the authorities. All this would accord well with a system of market trading before coined money was invented and executive organs were set up capable of enforcing court decisions.

Other points appeared to fit in less well with these assumptions. Landsberger did not fail to remark that profits are hardly ever ex-plicitly mentioned, losses practically never, prices are not the center of interest, and dealings amongst merchants are not secured by surety or pledge, as usual in archaic trade. Also the data implied that there was a prohibition on other than cash transactions, at least in regard to con- signed goods. Moreover, it was noted that rules were sometimes en- forceable under the threat of the death penalty.

So far, the bare outline of the traditional presentation.

Risk-Free Trading

It is unavoidable, then, that we take another look at the Assyrian trade settlement and suggest methods of trading suitable in the general circumstances as we see them. Yet in the main we will be merely re- interpreting the above data.

Nonmarket trade-this is the crucial point-is in all essentials dif- ferent from market trade. This applies to personnel, goods, prices, but perhaps most emphatically to the nature of the trading activity itself.

The traders of the karum of Kanish were not merchants in the sense of persons making a living out of the profit derived from buying and selling, i.e., price differentials in regard to the transaction in hand. They were traders by status, as a rule by virtue of descent or early apprentice- ship, in other cases maybe, by appointment. Unless the appointment was accompanied by a substantial land grant-as we may assume in the case of the tamkarum, but not in that of the members of the gild- their revenue derived from the turnover of goods on which a commis- sion was earned. This was the original source of all "profit," i.e., that pool of goods, including silver, in which eventually the internal members of the firm as well as the external ones, i.e., creditors and partners shared.

The goods were trade goods-storable, interchangeable and stand- ardized, or, as Roman law has it, quae numero, pondere ac mensura consistunt. Apart from standard cloths, the chief staples were metals -probably silver, copper, lead and tin, all goods reckoned according to their silver equivalent. Silver, besides functioning as standard, was also, up to a point, a means of payment. The role of gold was much more restricted in both these uses.

"Prices" took the form of equivalencies established by authority of custom, statute or proclamation.* The necessaries 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. This need not have affected the trader's revenue, which did not depend on price differentials. In principle there was always a "price," i.e., the equivalency at which the trader both bought and sold. But rules regarding the application of equivalencies were hardly the

same for monopoly goods, consignment ware and "free" goods. The numerous qualifying adjectives which accompany the term equiva- lency refer to the various rules and their effects. The equivalency for copper, "a monopoly," was fixed by treaty over a long term. Copper mining, as organized by the natives, would involve assurances by· their chiefs that at least a part of the equivalencies, presumably in goods coveted by the people, would be forthcoming in definite amounts. As to consignment ware, mainly fine cloths manufactured in Assur and imported lead (or tin?), "prices" were similarly fixed and the goods bought and sold at that "price." "Prices" for free goods are espe- cially important, for eventual departures towards market trading were likely to originate from here; in other words, the present mean- ing of "price" might have developed from equivalencies for "free" goods. The many different adjectives attaching to equivalencies in the Sumerian formulary (also found in Ugarit) as well as the peculiar termi- nology of Larsa documents indicate that the handling of "equivalen- cies" must have been subject to administrative rules of an intricate kind. In the twentieth century A.D., this should surprise no one.

However, the chief difference between administrative or treaty trade on the one hand and market trade on the other lies in the trader's ac- tivities themselves. In contrast to market trade, those activities are here both in regard to price expectation and debtor's insolvency. Price risk is excluded by the absence of price-making markets with fluctuating prices, and the general organization of trade which not depend for profit on price differentials, but rather on turnover. that relative lack of concern with prices; absence of the mention profits on the business in hand; and even more important, mention losses. In effect, participation in business is participation in profits.

has far-reaching consequences for the forms of trade partnership~ cannot be understood at all unless the discounting of loss on as a general rule, is kept in mind.

There is no risk of debtor's insolvency, and consequently hardly any mention of losses on bad debts. This fact is as incisive in regard to the organization of trade as the absence of risk on prices.

In contrast with modern society, the archaic state makes obligations towards the public hand stricti juris, while obligations toward the pri- vate need not always be so. He to whom public goods are entrusted must unfailingly be able to produce either the goods themselves or their equivalent. This fits in well with the practice of in rem transactions (Zug urn Zug, didontes kai labontes) and the exclusion of credit. Several known features of Karum-trading follow: (1) No sale except for cash. (2) The Kanish trader receives his consignment of goods against security to the value of the goods. (3) Obligations against third parties must be registered with the competent authority, City, Karum or Palace (in the case of natives); hence, in principle, all obligations are guaranteed by the public hand. Under treaty trade this rule is widely attested. (4) The public hand assumes here no risks, since it would refuse to guarantee obligations beyond the security in hand.

In case of fraud or the infringement of the rules of law, the severest penalties are applied.

Taken together all this explains why apparently no default on debt occurs; why arbitration awards are self-executing; how it comes about that the account-keeping authority can simply charge the defaulter's account with the amount awarded to the other party; why membership of the Karum and a good standing with the City is a precondition of trading; why no pledges to ensure payment are met with; why the in- terest-free loan employed by the journeyman for trading on his own account, the be'ulatum, is never lost; why business knows only profit,. not loss.

Under such circumstances of no-risk business along administrative lines, the term "transaction" hardly applies; we will therefore desig- nate this type of activity as "dispositional."

The traders' activities were manifold: copper procurement desig- volved a mining of the ore; its collection and transportation; refine- ment; storage and payment. The trader's job was to stimulate native mining activity through advances and, perhaps, long-term investments, up to several years duration; to ensure delivery and deposit the copper with the gild office in Kanish. But his main job was to make pay- ment for the copper or whatever else he had bought. Some may have been paid for in refining the copper, some in silver, tin or imported high-grade cloth. The rest of the copper and native cloth were ex- ported, the latter maybe, after having been finished on the spot. All that which was bought with consignment goods went to Assur.

Although the principles of "fixed price," "cash delivery," "legal surety," and "commission on turnover" obtained throughout, the trader's job was far from simple: to make the right contacts among the natives; correctly to judge their requirement of goods; make his finan- cial arrangements in time; conform strictly to rule and regulation; dis- pose with precision the goods entrusted to him; see to the quality of the wares, either way; procure funds with which to make advances to prospective suppliers, and for deposit with the government; as well as many other matters. Mistakes or omissions meant delay; difficulty in raising loans; small procurement; unnecessary expense; domestic un- pleasantness; loss of authority in the family firm; trouble with col- leagues and authorities; a reduced turnover. Yet, in this marketless trade there was no loss on prices, no speculation, no failure of debtors. It was exciting as an occupation, but risk-free as a business.

Transactions and Dispositions

This dispositional mode of dealing was the main characteristic of early Assyrian trade. The essential element in the trader's behavior was not a two-sided act resulting in a negotiated contract but a sequence of one-sided declarations of will, to which definite effects were at- tached under rules of law which governed the administrative organiza- · tion of the treaty trade he was engaged in. It is easy to deduce from this the criteria of dispositional trading.

(1) Acquisition of goods from a distance-the criterion of all au-trade-was the constitutive element. The procurement of use- objects ran in a peaceful way, goods going in both directions. There a large professional personnel employed in the acquisitional ac- tivities and the actual physical carrying of the wares. The traders de- rived a revenue from their activities, in which they had a direct finan-

cial interest.

(2) Although acting within the frame of a governmental organiza-

tion and a network of official and semi-official institutions, the trader remained an independent agent. He was in no one's employ, under the orders of no superior, free to expand and contract his business at will, or to discontinue it altogether. If unskilled, lazy or unwise, his earn- ings would drop. But he need not fear the summons of any employer or higher authority-as long as he kept within the law. The principle of rule of law was paramount.

(3) Nevertheless,noteveninprinciplecouldtransactionsorprivate deals be banned. The rationale of "rule of law" therefore was the in- stitutional separation of the trader's dispositions relating to public business from his private transactions. The trader needed capital to be provided in the form of short or long term loans, or of partnerships; associates, as members of the firm; employees to travel for him and do the neighborhood carrying; he was free to buy and sell non-consigned ware; to loan money to firms and to participate in their profits. Yet at no time was there to be any doubt about the "public" as distinguished from the "private" character of the deal-whether the trader had acted in his public capacity in the course of the copper procurement involv- ing consignments of government ware or apart from this public bu~i­ ness, that is, privately. In the former sphere, his steps were formalized and his acts were phrased as dispositions; in the latter sphere, they were informal and could be described as transactions. But of what kind the institutions were, which in the various fields of economic activity permitted such a separation to become effective, is still largely hidden from our view. Did the separation run on the lines of the different kinds of goods in question, the quantities involved, or rather according to the origin of the funds employed, or maybe combinations of these cri- teria? We do not yet know.

(4) Documents were recorded by public scribes, made out under the supervision of public officials, a copy of the document presumably filed in the official archives, under readily identifiable headings. The state of affairs in regard to any item of business could then at all times be ascertained at headquarters. The documents themselves were set out with a brevity and precision which enabled the public trustee- the tamkarum-to take action at all times if enjoined by an interested party in legitimate possession of a copy of the relevant document.

The Tamkarum

The key to the functions of the tamkarum lies in the methods and organization of trading. And vice versa: the key to the understanding of those methods lies in the office of the tamkarum. His figure and function are sui generis. His primary duties are those of a public trustee; he takes action under the law as soon as an authorized person produces (or rather has read out to him) the appropriate clay tablet, probably leaving a copy; according to the case and the situation, his duty is to advance fares or other small expenses; to accept pledges, as, e.g., of a slave that may have been handed to the gild merchant on the default of his native debtor; to be instrumental in having goods from the City purchased by the gild merchant and (although this does not clearly appear) to deliver on the trader's behalf goods to the City; to facilitate tr;msportation by accepting responsibility for money and goods en- trusted to carriers, and also for the safety of the goods bought in, the City for the account of the gild trader (in these latter cases a document was made out, addressed to the tamkarum, which the creditor could transfer to another gild merchant if he happened to be in need of cash); t9 have goods auctioned at the trader's request, crediting him with the sum thus recovered, whether it happened to be "more or less" than the equivalency. Other minor services were in the nature of legal advice and legal intervention with the karum especially if differences with the natives arose. Also, in case of sudden death of an important gild trader the sequestration of goods and monies as well as liquidation of the firm was done through his immediate intervention. The tam- karum derived no revenue from the business in hand, although he may have charged small service fees to the traders according to some fixed scale. His living was ensured through the landed property with which he was invested at his appointment.

If the figure of the tamkarum can be outlined only conjecturally, that of the ummeanum must frankly be described as obscure. The sug- gestion made here is no more than a tentative construction that might fit the pattern of risk-free marketless trading, organized in the public primarily on behalf of governmental war material procure- The financing of such imports would be a public service. While trade aspects of the matter may be left to the karum and the tam- ..~1ruu1, respectively, who between them would take care of its efficient nerfo,rrntance, the financial side would be seen to by the ummeanum.is, first, the handling of the accounts of the gild traders, includ- ing transfers from debtor's to creditor's accounts; secondly, direct in- vestments into this branch of foreign trade so as to increase supply and make it more regular. The ummeanum-that much should be taken for granted-was a public figure similar to the tamkarum. His investments and partnerships are what we might call treasury advances; these are usually made in round sums of gold ounces (employing units of two ounces) which may indicate the prestige character of the transaction, since gold was treasure. Whether the "big men" of the land were given a chance to invest into this privileged business and thus benefit from the manufactures of dependent labor (particularly female) we cannot be sure. Much speaks for such an extension of palace business to the favored few. Cleomenes of Naukratis compensated the big landholders of Egypt for his introducing of the corn export monopoly by allowing them a profitable share in the governmental syndicate. The King of Dahomey treated his environment with a similar liberality in matters of the royal slave trade, of which he remained, of course, the chief

beneficiary:*

When all is said, this type of organization of trade and business

was probably unique in history. To what extent it may have served as a model for the port of trade** of late Ugarit, and eventually Sidon, Tyre and Carthage can as yet only be conjectured. So much already appears certain: contrary to traditional notions, Babylonian trade and business activities were not originally market activities.

The next chapter offers a bird's-eye view of Mesopotamian eco- nomic history which in more than one regard brings unexpected simpli- fications. The absence of marketplaces from this picture provided by an expert may be taken as supporting at a vital point the tentative assumptions that underlie our presentation. Admittedly, in no detail does the new prospectus support the many conjectures that were drawn upon in this chapter to give life and plausibility to the views presented here.

If our interpretation is borne out by the facts, the question arises, How, when and where did market trade, fluctuating prices, profit and loss accounts, commercial methods of business, commercial classes and all the paraphernalia of a market organized economy originate? The history of market trade may be found to have shifted by a thousand years downwards and several degrees of longitude westwards, to the Ionia and Greece of the first millenium B.c.

A Bird's-Eye View of Mesopotamian Economic History

brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio; sectantem Ievia nervi deficiunt animique; professus grandia turget Ars Poetica, 25-27

IF ample documentary evidence alone sufficed to serve as a basis for the writing of the economic history of a dead and distant civiliza- tion, the very number of cuneiform texts dealing with all aspects of the economic life of Mesopotamia should certainly enable the historian to accomplish this task. Few if any periods of history prior to the flowering of the European Middle Ages are as well documented with regard to private business activities and the dealings of the administra- tive offices of temples and palaces as certain eras of the history of Baby- lonia and Assyria. Nowhere else-China and India perhaps excepted- can the rise and development of economic institutions be observed for far more than two millennia.

The number of clay tablets dealing with these matters increases by the thousands every year, and the number of published and unpub- lished documents approaches the hundred thousand mark with no end in sight. The practically imperishable nature of the writing material combines with the custom of recording administrative as well as pri- vate transactions in writing to yield as bountiful a harvest as any eco- nomic historian might hope for. What, then, are the reasons for the failure of Assyriologists and economic historians alike to make the ut- most of this source of information?

There is, for one, the very number of texts available, with which only a few scholars are willing and able to deal adequately. More im- portant an obstacle, however, is the conceptual barrier which hampers full understanding of both the real nature of a recorded transaction and its many-sided institutional background. Steeped in the economic theories of the nineteenth century, which affect even the Assyriologist most naive in matters of economic theory, we are bound to locate every economic situation within the traditional coordinates of money, mar- ket, price, etc., as these have been defined and have found acceptance within the last hundred years of our civilization. We constantly apply this frame of reference without even realizing that we distort the Mesopotamian picture in its most essential aspects, by basing our analysis on a set of assumptions which we take for granted are uni- versally applicable.

But this barrier is by no means insuperable. The few students of the legal institutions and of the religion of Mesopotamia came to realize some time ago-even if they have not always been able to achieve this goal-that any attempt at understanding the complex and basically alien phenomena in an archaic civilization must be oriented along the lines in which this civilization itself conceived of them. In dealing with a literate civilization, the most efficient means of reaching this under- standing is to study the semantics of selected key terms rather than to use modem categories of organization as the avenues of approach. This is admittedly extremely difficult when one has to handle a dead lan- guage whose full utilization by the historian is restricted by the nature of the accidentally preserved text material.

The reaction against the thought patterns evolved in the nineteenth century in the fields of history of religion, linguistics, sociology, etc., have taught us to respect alien civilizations and sharpened our facul- ties for self-observation in those areas; but this, unfortunately, is not the case with regard to economics. There, epistemological discussions, traditional or otherwise, have created an atmosphere in which there is no understanding of any economic pattern beyond that which has grown out of the spectacular economic development of Western Europe since the eighteenth century. The resulting attitude of the eco- nomic historians, be their background that of historic materialism or of traditional liberalism, is characterized by a markedly inadequate of the economies of so-called primitive peoples as well as by mplete disregard for the essentials of the economics of the ancient

civilizations.

A new approach to this problem has been opened up by the Inter-

. Project at Columbia University, and has been tested in areas with considerable success.

The basic advantage of this approach is that it provides us with a set of concepts which can be used to describe large sections of complex and varied array of data which the Assyriologist culls from economic texts. These concepts serve primarily descriptive pur- and succeed in revealing certain structurally relevant features of Mesopotamian economics. They provide adequate categories in which to organize and present a number of important observations which would otherwise remain meaningless; the most important of these con- cepts is that of "redistribution." This is not meant to imply that any given period or area attested in cuneiform documents can be fully or

·even adequately characterized by this term; in fact, the entire develop ment of Mesopotamian economy is marked by continuous shifts in emphasis which bring now one and now another form of economic integration to the foreground without the others completely disappear- ing at any time. The investigation of the exact relationship between the concept of "redistribution" and others, such as "reciprocity," conse- quently becomes the primary task of research, which has to extend, moreover, into the realm of social history, since such forms of economic integration are deeply imbedded in the social fabric of the country.

Of course the new approach will multiply the problems rather than offer easy solutions, but under its impact the line of investigation is bound to shift to new points of attack, and may even compel the As- syriologist to abandon the convenient excuse that lack of evidence hampers his chances to solve the problems. Under these circumstances the necessity of a re-evaluation and re-examination of the entire evi- dence bearing on matters economic becomes imperative. This process~ moreover, should not only be applied to all text material directly con- cerned with the problem but also to historical, religious and literary documents. Obviously such a project is too far-reaching to be dealt with adequately by one individual, and too novel and difficult to promise easy success. For this reason the following pages represent solely an attempt to point out the possibilities of the new interpretation and are meant to illustrate the approach rather than to demonstrate its effec- tiveness.

Three main factors will be singled out here as having contributed towards the shaping of the unique socio-economic basis of Mesopo- tamian civilization as it emerges into the limelight of the literary period. Each of them recurs severally or in different combinations in other civilizations of the ancient Near East, but nowhere else appears the specific constellation which arose in Southern Babylonia.

There is, first, cereal agriculture based on irrigation, able to produce reliable harvests independent of rain and capable of extension in space to support an ever-increasing population. The advantages of this type of agriculture-a crop that can easily be stored and exactly divided for distribution, yielding the greatest amount in return for the effort re- quired under the given climatic and technological conditions-coincide with the second factor: a unique settlement pattern. Thus a situation is created which differs unmistakably from Egypt, where under apparently similar circumstances the relatively primitive type of integration that characterizes a storage-economy can be observed. The decisive differ- ence seems to lie in the nature of the urbanization which materialized in Mesopotamia quite early, producing a city concept sui generis. In

· these cities, however small they be, a communal bond had so com- pletely replaced all loyalties of the inhabitants beyond those toward the immediate family that not even their traces can be found. This re- lationship between individuals finds expression in the way in which the city administers itself and acts towards its own citizens, other cities, and central authority. The essential and unique feature of urbanization in Southern Mesopotamia is the fact that a city could grow there into a center of cultural activity without the stimulus or the presence of social conditions inherent in political power.

The internal economic organization of these cities is still quite obscure, but it seems admissible to posit that it did not differ essen- tially from that of the village communities which we find all over the ancient Near East including those regions where agriculture relied on rain. Within a compass of fields in a commons near the city where the harvest ripened for the farmers and the few essential craftsmen, such villages could offer their populations an adequate living, necessitating but few contacts with other cities and only marginal money uses. It is essential to note that each .of these towns consisted of the town proper (u r u), the suburb (u r u . b a r . r a) and the port (k a r). The absence market place is exactly as revealing of the internal economic of the city as is the presence of a special extramural called the port for intercity economic relations. Here enters the ibird and most decisive factor: in a number of cities of this type there 'GCisted a second and separate economic system centered in a sanctuary, ;or later-due to a secondary development-in the palace of a king. · factor clearly represents a redistributive system of varied com-

plexity and magnitude.

· Into that center were channelled for storage or conversion into

manufactured objects the products of the labors of a complex hierarchy >Of personnel working for and within the organization. The center used 'the stored wealth as a source of social and economic power, for prestige purposes as well as-by means of special channels of redistribution-

. for the support of a second hierarchy of personnel, from priests and scribes to warriors and merchants. Thus deriving income in agricul- tural products and labor from its own land and using it for the mainte-

.··nance of a plethora of officials, as well as for such mainly social purposes as the decoration of sanctuaries and palaces, such an organization was bound to grow in size and power and to extend its holdings. The two

·interwoven production and distribution cycles were administered from the center by a bureaucratic staff using highly complex systems of book- keeping and accounting which have left us many documents still to be fully evaluated. Their number has created the impression that this organization represented the entire economic set-up of the city-states. However, the continuous existence of an urban tradition which had grown out of Sumerian folk society and maintained its vigor up to the Seleucid period, demonstrates that coexistence of the two systems marks the entire course of Mesopotamian social, and hence economic, history. Due to lack of information, the relationship between the city, on the one hand, and temple or palace on the other cannot yet be described, but there are indications that it varied greatly from city to city because of special conditions or accidental developments which may remain unknown forever.

The symbiosis between a city organized, at least originally, along the lines of a village community, and the temple or palace, in point of social structure and economic potentialities, so different, provided a satisfactory and fruitful arrangement. It fostered the accumulation of staples in the royal or divine household, compelling it to evolve bureau- cratic methods to deal with those accumulations by stock-taking, budgeting, and assigning income and expenditures on a large scale. An elaborate system of equivalences was developed to manage in an effi- cient way the array of different foodstuffs, materials for manufacturing, payments in kind to the personnel, etc. These techniques-especially the use of equivalences-influenced all contacts of the redistributive system with the outside world and developed into an important means of exercising the political power which is inherent in such an economic situation. In the control of the prices of staples, of the rate of interest and of weighing standards, exercised or at least attempted by temple or palace, an essential aspect of the mentioned symbiosis is revealed. More difficult to understand is the readiness of the city to acquiesce in such a symbiosis and at the same time to keep a communal spirit alive through all the vicissitudes of recurrent wars and invasions and even, in the course of the development, to exercise considerable political in- fluence on both palace and sanctuary. At times, this spirit blossomed into a conscious civic pride that is unparalleled in other urban societies of the ancient Near East and created spurts of commercial activity based primarily on individual initiative which likewise have few analo- gies. Above all, it assured the longevity of the cities, which maintained themselves over periods of foreign domination and the steady decline of the importance of the temples. Many of these cities eventually became no more than empty shells in which a handfull of inhabitants kept a

millennia} tradition alive, though others still continued as prosperous centers famed throughout the world.

Within the symbiosis, however, the balance of power was far from stable, shifting from king to city and back in reflection of political changes, which affected the entire region, or of the relative efficiency of the individual rulers. In spite of these changes, an atmosphere of social peace characterizes Mesopotamian history (and literature) in contrast with that of Egypt.

The region's lack of suitable timber and stones for building pur- poses and for ornamentation, as well as of metals, served as a stimulusfor an economic activity transcending the scope of the redistributive system. Palaces and temples sought those materials for prestige reasons, and this led to trade with foreign countries which was restricted to luxury goods and carried on exclusively on an official level by royal emissaries. The need to produce goods for export purposes, goods which could be easily transported and were likely to find a ready market in countries which produced or trafficked in the coveted metals, stones, created industrial activities utilizing the abundant staples stored the palaces and temples. The implications of this aspect of Meso- J ........·..,,.. economics are still far from clear; the king's trade was either on some kind of reciprocity between rulers or on treaties fixing nature of the goods, their price, etc. Equally undefined remains the of the persons manipulating the exchange of goods, when and what circumstances private citizens could or did replace royal

and many related problems.

The interaction between the two independent variables, palace and

.

city, determined the entire course of the economic-and political- history of Babylonia. The palace enlarged its basis of operation through various intermediate stages, changing from tax income to tribute. The ensuing increase in economic power influenced the preferred behavior pattern of the ruling group and resulted in a change of inter-city re- lations. The original city-state concept gave way to that of a territorial state composed of numerous village communities and new settlements, protected by royal fortresses, all feeding staples into the redistributive organization of the palace. Conflicts for hegemony between rulers caused new cities to become capitals decorated with imposing palaces and temples, and resulted in a political structure based upon a feudal- ism imposed from above. The preservation of a territorial state under these circumstances required a sustained military effort in the form of a standing army made up of a segment of the population taken out of their economic and social context. Since the palace organization was by function and political aspiration beyond the orbit of the community which formed the city, it was easily open to outside influence and liable to look for its personnel among people of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds. These in turn were likely to seize power and to make use of their warlike compatriots to maintain themselves at the center of the redistributive system. Repeated foreign invasions caused feudalistic fragmentation which tended to replace any central govern- ment, and the inevitable antagonism between the old cities and their cultural and civic traditions and the new rulers led to the creation of new capitals that were in the nature of military camps.

The development just outlined as typical by no means materialized in all its stages in any of the states which vied with each other in Southern Mesopotamia ever since the rise of the empire of Sargon of Akkad. A number of atypical developments caused by the signal suc- cesses of individual rulers or as a consequence of foreign invasion con-tributed to blur the pattern without, however, succeeding in destroy-

ing an impressive array of recurring sequences of historical events which underly the reconstruction offered above.

The emergence of some of the larger cities of Babylonia with re- newed vigor and economic strength towards the first half of the first millennium B.c., after a prolonged period during wh-ich royal power had declined, presents the most tantalizing mystery in Babylonian economic history. The few centuries separating the short-lived post- Kassite dynasties from the conquest by the Persians, who found Baby- lonia to be their richest satrapy, must have witnessed an economic upsurge which, in view of the economic conditions and possibilities of the entire region, could only be the direct consequence of interna- tional trade, manipulated in this instance either by the cities acting through some form of commercial organization or-less likely-by in- dividuals or the palace itself. The fact that trading with the East be- gins at about this period after a pause of nearly half a millennium sup- ports this explanation. One should not contest such an interpretation on the ground of total lack of any pertinent documentary evidence. Although texts recording private business transactions and the affairs of the few large sanctuaries are quite frequent in this period, one has

to assume that it was not customary in the Neo-Babylonian time to use written records to any large extent in the realm of foreign trade. Ap- parently we will have to differentiate two practices in the large-scale commercial activity of the ancient Near East. One, such as that of the Assyrian trade settlements in Asia Minor and the copper importers from overseas into Old-Babylonian Ur, was patently under the influ- ence of the bureaucratic techniques of the Sumerian temple adminis- trations, with their complex bookkeeping and multilateral accounting. The other seems to have preferred oral agreements supplemented by a variety of operational devices, upon which Near Eastern merchants, from the Phoenicians on to the Nabataeans, primarily relied. To the second practice must have adhered those inhabitants of Babylon to whom Esarhaddon granted, as a demonstration of their return to power, the right to trade with all the regions of the world, after his father Sennacherib had destroyed their city and sold them into slavery.

This reveals, accidentally, two rather important bits of information: the inhabitants of Babylon were engaged in long-distance trading which had become the source of their riches and their power, and the Assyrian kings normally tolerated such activity and, most likely, profited Their interest in this type of carrying trade is furthermore u•~"L"''"' in a passage of a historical inscription of Sargon II (grand- of the mentioned Esarhaddon). In this recently published text a is made which reflects with remarkable clarity the essential trade occupied in the finances of the Assyrian empire. Sargon lists his military achievements the fact that he was the first king to compelled Egypt-which he apparently attacked during his Pales- campaign-to establish trade relations with Assyria. That the frontier is here characterized as being "sealed" illustrates the different attitudes of the two adversaries towards trade. autarchy of the Egyptian monolithic storage economy clashed the Mesopotamian interest in international trade which was the expression of the unique fusion between the two economic sys-

which we observed in Babylonia.

This leads us to an important problem in Assyriology: the under-

:ani:IJ·mg and evaluation of the nature of the Assyrian form of Meso- JUuuuJ<au civilization.

In the wide arc of territory which surrounds Southern Mesopo- to the north and west, agriculture had to rely exclusively on rain- fall. This assured, as a rule, the livelihood of smaller communities as they were scattered through the piedmont regions and the valleys of the ·Zagros and throughout Upper Mesopotamia, including the coastal re- gions o.f the Mediterranean Sea, etc. Cities in this arc required a special stimulus to grow, such as a sanctuary, a seat of royal power, or trade ·routes, which were quite rare. The villages contained a number of families which supported themselves by cultivating adjacent fields and gardens, paying taxes collectively either to a ruler residing in a fortified palace or to an absentee owner connected by birth or feudal status with some sort of central power. The village units themselves, or the income derived from them, were negotiable within certain restrictions which varied according to time and region. They thus served as the economic basis of a feudal organization attached to ephemeral carriers of political power. By its contribution in taxes, the entire set-up readily supported superimposed power groups which, as a rule, showed little stability, extended rapidly under the leadership of an individual, were taken over smoothly by invading foreign groups, and collapsed easily when- ever the faculty of the central organization to collect taxes vanished. The village community remained remarkably stable, and the obligation .to pay taxes collectively counteracted individual defections, although craftsmen often seem to have been attracted to the Icing's court thus

helping towards the type of industrialization for which all kings of that region strove in order to strengthen their economic basis.

From Assur, a city which seems to represent the northernmost ex- ponent of the Babylonian type of city organization, native as well as foreign dynasties built up a series of short-lived empires of the socio- economic structure just described, but they were supplied in ever- increasing measure from the spoils gathered in apparently institutional- ized annual war expeditions and the income from ventures of internal colonization and international long-distance trade. The projects of internal colonization sprang from the royal initiative; Assyrian kings constantly founded new cities and peopled them with prisoners of war. These were ruled by royal officials and paid taxes to the king. All this and a road system built for policing. as well as for the collecting of taxes and tributes, served to support the king's household and his army.

It should be pointed out in this context that Assyrian political power was based essentially on a policy of forced urbanization imposed upon those regions which were outside the relatively small area of genuine and spontaneous urbanization in the South which forms the "heart-land" of Babylonian civilization. A certain amount of forced urbanization was also applied by some of the more energetic and mili- tarily successful figures among the Babylonian kings, but a conscious and ruthless execution of the political concept of forced urbanization can be said to have created the Assyrian empire. And the very same policy was later on applied by all the conquerors who laid their hands on the same regions of the Near East from the Persians to the Sas- sanians.

Assyrian internal politics seem to have been extremely complex. The old and charter-protected cities thrived due to exemption from taxation and military levy; they may well have had their share in com- mercial activity, but this cannot be documented for the later period. Different interests dictated the activities of the redistribution system centered in the palace, which needed the booty and the human raw material coming from the endless campaigns to support and to extend the royal household, while the feudal organization, with its secondary and tertiary redistribution systems spread its influence from manors and village communities to the officials of the court. All these powers vied for political influence to increase their strength, and this makes As- I syrian history a difficult, while most fascinating field of investigation.

By singling out certain basic patterns of economic integration we in this somewhat reckless oversimplification of nearly three mil- of economic history by no means intended to discount the in- and ubiquitous ideological influences at work nor the fact local and ephemeral conditions constantly exercised pressure to these patterns. Still, there is a definite tendency within the of the social and economic institutions of Mesopotamia to to a relatively small number of typical configurations of politi- and economic situations, whatever disturbing factors may have across the historical scene. This strange faculty to reverse the of development accounts to a large extent for some of the unique of the picture outlined in this "bird's-eye view" of Mesopo-

economic history.

'No Man's Coast': Ports of Trade in The Eastern Mediterranean

IN the ancient Near East, particularly in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, we have before us two separate territorial entities inhabited by different peoples: coast and continent. The narrowness of the c~astal strip makes their co-existence almost paradoxical. Yet a mere handful of Greeks were able to establish themselves in what proved to be some of the most strategic and economically important areas of the Mediter- ranean and the Black Sea. They proceeded to enjoy an independent existence spanning hundreds of years, despite the presence of great empires in their backyards. Indeed, ever since the middle of the third millennium trading cities were established peacefully on the Syrian coast. They flourished and remained unmolested by the military powers of the hinterland over many centuries.*

The reasons for these coastal settlements remaining relatively un- disturbed are complex. In certain areas, they were military, in others economic. Apart from fortified spots, especially walled off peninsulas or rocky islands, the coast was an indefensible and eminently unsafe area. Thus the military dangers of a coastal location may have pro- duced the "no man's coast" that invited the Greek colonizations, while ainly economic factors, as we will see, accounted for the spectacular : intdepe:nd1enc~e of the Phoenician cities.

Significantly, we hardly ever hear of inland states offering any sus- tained resistance to coastal settlements. The Greeks are not the only instance. In southern Palestine the Philistines, participators in an un- successful invasion of Egypt, subsequently made good their settlement on the coast within the very confines of the Egyptian empire. Nor did the Israelites make any attempt to disestablish the Philistines when under David and Solomon they gained considerable military power .over the hinterland.

Higher up on the coast, Sidon and Tyre present a similarly undis- turbed development of even longer duration, with AI Mina and Ugarit as their predecessors further north. That they remained safe from their continental neighbors cannot in this case be attributed solely to military considerations. These wealthy cities happened to fit into an economic context fundamental to the international organization of trade, com- prising that of the continental powers themselves; hence their relative safety.

If this state of affairs is to us astonishing, it is because it violates our accustomed notion of the behavior of empires. Illustrations of their rapacity on land and sea form the very links of modern history: witness the rivalry between England, Spain and Holland to control the Chan- nel; the Russian drive for warm water ports from Peter the Great's fumbling campaigns against Sweden for dominance of the Baltic shore to Nicholas Il's excursion into Manchuria. Modern history reflects a constant awareness on the part of the powers that without a strong navy and the possession of strategic coastal areas full status as a nation

cannot be achieved.

It would seem that in defiance of this allegedly universal law an

opposite principle was at work in the ancient world. Indeed, well into the first millennium B.c. it seems to have lived under a law of its own, 'namely, a continentalizing attitude on the part of the inland powers ranging from an outright avoidance of the coast, which was the rule, to a cautious co-existence and, in some cases, remote control.*

To refrain from occupying coastal areas appears to have been the policy followed by the Mesopotamian empires and Egypt, as well as by the Hittite (or Ratti) empire of Asia Minor. We will first discuss Mesopotamia and Egypt; supplementing this by some new evidence on Ratti. There follows a survey of the Phoenician coast, drawing upon

our more recent knowledge of AI Mina and Ugarit. Finally, an attempt will be made to show how shunning of the coast gives way, about the second quarter of the first millennium B.c., to a symbiosis between the empires and the trading cities of the coast.

Mesopotamia and Egypt

The broad fact which in itself should establish a prima facie case of a kind of archaic thalassophobia was the persistency with which the city state areas of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni, etc., refused to shift their centers of gravity towards the coast. The same applies to

Egypt. The location of the majority of these areas was riverain, yet none seemed to make any effort to gain access to the sea. The vicissi- tudes of history brought about a variety of power configurations in the area between the Lakes Van and Urmia in the north, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea in the south, the Mediterranean in the west; never- theless at no time was a sustained effort made that would serve as proof of a seaward tendency on the part of the continental powers. This is the immutable framework of Mesopotamian history against which the shifting events should be judged which sometimes seem to point in the opposite direction.

Several inscriptions are extant which record ambitious far-western

conquests of Mesopotamian rulers. There is the inscription about

Sargon I of Akkad which speaks of Yarmuti and Ibla having been

subdued. Similar, but more authentic data refer to almost identical

expeditions by his successor, Naram-Sin. In different contexts Gudea of

Lagash and later Dungi of the third dynasty of Ur mention their West-

em exploits; and an inscription of Shamshi-Adad II of Assyria runs:

"My great names and my stele I set up in the land of Laban on the

1

Island and Melukha in the South.

What broadly was the nature of these claims to the coast? And do

they justify a belief that the third and second millennium Mesopotam- ian empires intended to acquire, hold, and keep these coastal areas? Did they institute military garrisons, appoint governors or others officers, set up a religious hierarchy, administer foreign trade, or exact regular tribute payments? As far as our records go there is but little 7

evidence for either.

TheinscriptionsofGudeaofLagash helpustospelloutthenature

of some of his coastal adventures:

From Amanus the mountain of cedar trees whose length was 60 cubits, cedar trees whose length was 50 cubits, ukarinu trees whose length was 25 cubits, he made into logs and brought down from the mountain. . . . Gold dust from Mount Kahkhu he brought down. . . . Gold dust from the mountain of Melukha he brought down. . . . With living ewes he brought living lambs; their shepherds he made to serve.

The details point to expeditionary procurements, often indistinguish- able from raids, to secure material for temple building, such as huge stones or logs of rare timber, or to pan gold in mountain streams. It is a highly ambiguous form of trading. The goods that may be carried to gain the goodwill of the local inhabitants, need not be the ultima ratio of these armed caravans. The organization would rather be that of forays to obtain booty or slaves, maybe to exact ransom payments from weak settlements, but mainly to facilitate expeditionary trade. A raid is made on a herd of cattle or sheep if they happen to be about. Mule

7

drivers are taken along with their mules, the ewes with their lambS and 7

the shepherds to tend the flocks. Occasionally, a town is destroyed if its people offer resistance to this kind of indiscriminate quarrying, cutting of timber and general procurement. It is a mixed undertaking.

There seems to be here nothing that would force us to conclude that other ventures emanating from Mesopotamia and Assyria were essentially different from such expeditionary raids and forays of supply. Such evidence as Shamshi-Adad l's statement of setting up a stele holds nothing to indicate that he ruled rather than visited, administered rather than intimidated. Tukulti-Urta mentions places widely separated from the heartland of Assyria. To incorporate them in his empire, he would have had to be the ruler of Babylon and also of the Sea-Lands. There has not been found any evidence pointing in that direction.

It would appear then, that the early Mesopotamian empires never established permanent control of the coast nor intended to do so. Hardly any of the conditions listed above and indicating control were

7

to our knowledge, fulfilled.

Three regions enter into Egyptian coastal policy: the Delta of the

Nile; the Phoenician and Philistine cities; the Red Sea and the Mediter- ranean, as the scenes of the maritime activities of the Egyptians.

Since the time Egypt was first unified, she comprised the Delta of

the Nile. However, a sharp distinction should be made between the

inland Delta and the coastal strip, which alone is relevant to the argu-

ment. H. R. Hall has noted that in early times the people of the coastal

Delta were regarded as foreigners. Its marshes had always been a place

4

marshlands. Even outside of the Delta the foreigners have taken root."

During Egypt's decline, reflected in the Wen-Amon story, the Delta

6

would tend to be governed by independent princes. The Libyans at

several occasions infiltrated it and Libyan chiefs eventually established

7

themselves there. The marginal character of the fens was still in evi-

dence as late as the seventh century B.c., at the time of Psamtik's

8

it seems unlikely that the splitting off of the coastal delta would so often have been successful. That area must have been somewhat of an unclaimed land, repeatedly harboring fugitives or foreigners,_ and in general, at a discount with the Egyptians.

After the expulsion of the Hyksos, Egypt marched into Asia, organ- izing in the wake of her armies the coastal Phoenician cities as satellites. These cities had to accept military garrisons and were put under native rulers friendly to Egypt.

Yet Egyptian interest in these maritime sites remained limited. They were not incorporated, but retained their sovereignty. The Egyp-

9

apart from Egypt proper. The invading Hyksos were able to con- solidate their power in the Delta, set up their capital Avaris and, making use of the fens, strike out for the south. Ipower, the Egyptian prophet, wailed: "Behold it (the Delta) is in the hands(?) of those who knew it not like those who know it. The Asiatics are skilled in the arts of the

5

alliance with the "bronze men" of Ionia.

If Lower Egypt had had a strong intent to hold this area securely,

tians, we are told, paid well for the favors of the native rulers,

military garrisons were frequently composed of non-Egyptian mercen- aries.10 It can then be inferred that the interest of the Egyptians in these cities was primarily to furnish their growing empire with military supply depots and to have their flanks protected when marching into the interior.H The hinterland, and not the coast, set unswervingly the direction for their military efforts.

The Red Sea and the Mediterranean, it was stated, were the scenes of Egyptian maritime trade activity. It comprised such notable achieve- ments as the expedition to Punt; the Nile-to-Red Sea Canal as well as continuous trading in the eastern Mediterranean.

Despite their seafaring exploits, the Egyptians managed to by-pass the coast. No permanent Egyptian settlement or port on the Red Sea or the Mediterranean is on record. Regular trade would have been greatly facilitated by the establishment of coastal ports or settlements; that none was made, suggests that Egyptian trade was of an adventi- tious, occasional, expeditionary nature. As in the case of the Mesopo- tamian raids to the West, these expeditions were aimed at procuring specific materials, e.g., aromatic woods and exotic animals as in the Hatshepsutut expedition to Punt.

This is all the more surprising since Egypt was situated on two seas, both having a considerable amount of trade. However, this was largely passive trade, carried in foreign bottoms. Her position in regard to seaborne trade was broadly the same as that-with the possible excep- tion of Ur-of the Mesopotamian, the Hittite or, later, the Persian empires.

In summary: the comparatively weak hold on the Delta, the vacuum of power on the coastal strip, the continental line of Egyptian military expansion in Asia, the relative independence of the Philistine and Phoenician cities even in times of Egyptian ascendency, the absence of Egyptian coastal settlements in the north and east, the expeditionary nature of trade-all this argues for a shunning of coastal possessions during most of the 2600 years of pre-Hellenistic Egyptian antiquity.

The Hittites

Both politically and culturally, the Hittite empire was the ruling force in the Asia Minor of the second millennium. At the height of its expansion, it bordered on Egypt in the south, the Mesopotamian em- pires in the east. Its constitutional ideas, its codes of law, and the level of its political thought in general make it the immediate predecessor of the Greek and Persian empires, together with which it bridged the gap between the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Crete and Egypt, on the one hand, Rome on the other.

The heartland of Hatti was Anatolia, the central part of Asia Minor. Situated in the middle of a large peninsula, its boundaries related in three directions to the coast. Landlocked towards the East and North- east by high mountain ranges, its only line of expansion, except towards the coast, was to the Southeast, being led by the Upper Euphrates even further into the heart of the Asiatic continent. As a matter of fact, this precisely was the line Hittite expansion followed. It provides, in effect, an extreme case of the relation between coast and continent in an- tiquity.

Aware of their peninsular situation, the Hittites appear to have consciously settled on a continentalizing bent. Endowed with the fac- ulty of conceiving comprehensive political ideas and of relating these to moral and juridical norms, they reveal in their documents a clear reflection of that national policy.

Our interpretation of the evidence must, admittedly, often remain

doubtful as long as it is merely grounded on translations, without first-

hand knowledge of the originals. However, even at this stage of the

inquiry an attempt at collating some of the available instances may be

permissible.

12

Relegating an Enemy to the Coast

One of the most important of these documents, the Telepinush

13

Text

defeated enemy towards the coast. Telepinush, among the latest of the early set of rulers, ascribes, in his Annals, this policy to the three found- ing kings-Labarnash, Hattushilish and Murshilish. This is probably done in order to lend the authority of historical precedent to his own policy.

Telepinush Text14

1 Thus speaks the Tabama Telepinush, the great king

2 At one time Labarnash was Great King. . . .

5 And the land was small; but wherever he went to war

6 he ruled the enemy country with a (strong) hand (?).

7 And again and again he harassed their country and devas-

tated (??) it.

8 And he made them to border on the sea* [machte sie zu

Grenz (nachbarn) des Meeres]. But when he came home

from the campaign, 9 wherever each of his sons went, to 10 Hupish, Tuwanuwa, Menashsha, Landa, Zanlar ... they ad- ministered the land 12 and the big towns were given over

into their hands.

13 After him reigned (?) Hattushilish . . . he went to war, he,

too, 16 held the enemy country down with a (strong) hand(?).

17 And again and again he harassed their country and devas- tated (??) it. 24 When Murshilish ruled in Hattushash. . . .

1. 27  And he harassed the country and made them to border on the sea.
2. 28  And he marched to Halpa (Aleppo) and razed Halpa. . . . After this he marched on Babylon and razed Babylon, he also 30 attacked the Harrites (Hurrites)....

The need for expansion was given because "the land was small." 5

Cattle and horses require suitable pastures. Raids and harassment are followed by devastation. "And again and again he harassed their country

16

and devastated it."

" pressure of the Hittites, only to find themselves pursued by their

.enemies and driven off the plateau and towards the coasts. "And he

17

·<Old Testament, Hellenic and Far Eastern sources, was the massacre of the population (sometimes of adult males only), their subjugation on the spot; selling them into slavery abroad. Expelling vanquished peo- ples from their towns and driving them in the direction of the coast appears to have been the early Hittites' alternative means. Towns were not razed, but taken over intact; pastureland was enlarged; the peoples were not destroyed; the borderlands were not left empty; international relations with the defeated were continued, and empire building pro- ceeded. In the light of Hittite practice these implications may well have been obvious. At any rate, the verbatim repetition of the principles of policy allegedly followed by the empire builders is singularly impressive.

Pejorative References to the Coast

8

TheMadduwattashTextl givesusanappraisal,ontheofficiallevel,

of the relative values of coastal lowland and continental highland loca- tions.

Madduwattash was the chief of a people who were defeated by the Ahhiyawa and were fleeing from their conquerors towards the high- lands. He was rescued by Shupiluliumash, Great King of Hatti, whose official title was The Sun. Madduwattash was permitted by Shupiluliu-mash to enter the hill country of Zippashta, thus escaping with his people both from his enemy and from deadly famine.

There is but little doubt that the Ahhiyawa were the Achaians of Homer; their ruler Attarshshiyash is being identified with the Atreus, who may have been the father of Agamemnon.

In return for being rescued Madduwattash swore an oath of fealty to the Hittite king. But later in the reign of his son, Arnuwandash IV, he united with Arzawa and the Ahhiyawa to seize Cyprus. In the text the Hittite king expresses his displeasure of Madduwattash's ingrati- tude and accuses him of treason:

Art. 1. Front

Art. 1. Front

Art. 2. Front

Art. 3. Front

Art. 4. Front

1

2

3

4

6

8

10 11

The accusations against Madduwattash

Attarshshiyash the Ahhiyawa has chased jyouj, Maddu- wattash, from your country

After that he pursued you and hounded you and wished for your, Madduwattash's /dire/ death

and /would/ have killed you. But you, Madduwattash took refuge with the Father /of the Sun/; and the Father of the Sun

rescued you from death and kept Attarshshiyash away from you.

As the Father of the Sun 7 ... took you ... together with your wives, your children, your troops- (and) your chariot fighters, and he gave you chariots . . . grain (and) seeds to overflow,

and he gave you also ale (and) wine ... (and) malted loaves ... and cheese to overflow. And you ... 9 kept alive by the Father of the Sun in your hunger.

And the Father of the Sun rescued you ...

.... But for him the dogs would have devoured you in all your hunger.

12 Had you escaped from Attarshshiyas with your bare lives, you would have starved to death.

13 Thereupon the Father of the Sun came (and) took you ... into an oath, and defended jyouj and made an oath

. . . "Behold, I, the Father of the Sun, have rescued /you/, Madduwattash /from the sword/ of Attarshshi- yash.

14

15

16

"Therefore you shall (belong) to the Father of the Sun and the country of Hatti. And behold: I have given jyouj the hill country of Zippashta jto rule/.

"/and/ you, Madduwattash, together with your jpeo- 17 19 20

pie/ shall live in the hill country of Zippashta; and so have in the hill country of Zippashta

"your mainstay (??) ."

. . . "behold I have given you the hill country of Zippashta. . . .

"But do not then on your own further occupy any other vassal's (land), nor any other's land (at all) and be the Hill country of Zippashta your boundary.

"Thus be you my servant; also be your troops my troops."

Art. 4. Front 21

Art. 5. Front 22 . . . "/you; have given /me/, my /lordj, the hill

country of Zippashta to live in.

1. 23  "Thus /I/ am /in these countries/ an outpost and a gujard. And who /so even speaks to/ my face a word of enmity.
2. 24  "(and) from whatever country I hear a word of enmity, I shall /not hide/ from you such man and such country
3. 25  "but rather write you of them."

For the Hittites, the lowland towards the coast was a wasteland: "Had you escaped from Attarshshiyash with your bare lives you would have starved to death." To be forced to sojourn there included the probability of death from starvation, enslavement by coastal raiders, and eventually becoming carrion for wild dogs-these were the alterna- tives awaiting him. Although neither the word "coast" nor lowlands is mentioned, it may be permissible to infer, in view of the Teiepinush Text that what is meant are the desert lands lying towards the west. The area must have been a notoriously arid one since the possibility of starvation is mentioned three times. The few fertile valleys would have been occupied by their conquerors. The reference to the wild dogs which devour corpses is also to be found in Homer, where the area

in question is the coastal strip lying opposite Troy. The hill country is contrasted to the lowland as a land of bounty and Zippashta isreferred to as a "mainstay."

The dating of the two documents-Telepinush ca. 1650 and Mad- duwattash ca. 1350-shows that a similar attitude towards the coast prevailed for at least three centuries. However, the ascribing of such a policy to much earlier rulers and its obvious survival to the end of the empire extends its ascendency to rather double that stretch of time.

Banishment to the Coast

Further confi1mation of the ma1ginality of the coast is to be found

in the Hattushilish Text,1

9

the autobiogmphy of a Hittite king. Hattu-shilish raised himself to the throne at the expense of the legitimate sovereign, his brother, whom he desposed. Having defeated his rival he "sends him off to the side of the sea." A chief supporter of the exiled king is allowed "to cross the border and escape," as the context would indicate, presumably also to the coast (which incidentally can be identified as the north or Black Sea coast). In another case banishment is to the south coast or an island off that coast. The disaffected persons

"are sent to Alashiyash," lying opposite Cilicia.

20

which is commonly thought to be Cyprus,

This important episode appears to indicate that any person exiled (or self-exiled) to the coast would have been thereby rendered harmless to the Hittite realm-whether for lack of resources or on account of the political weakness of the peoples among whom he would have to live.

Coastal Buffer State Policy of the Hittites

The economic needs of the Hittite empire made, of course, a com- plete insulation from the coast impracticable. As we have seen in the . case of Cyprus, some contact was unavoidable, particularly in order to ensure the flow of copper from the island. As a solution, the tlittites appeared to have favored leaving the coast in weak, semi-independent hands. Such a policy was apt to mitigate both the military disadvantages of coastal possessions and the economic drawbacks that would have

resulted had they occupied the area themselves.

The political status of such a coastal area is documented in The

21

strategically vital area of Eastern Cilicia,

shortest route from Cyprus and the southern coast to Boghazkoy via the Cilician gates. Situated on the coast opposite Cyprus, it was the

23

which concerns the relations between Kizzu-

Shunashshura Treaty,

watna and the two great neighboring powers, the Hurrites to the east, the Hittites to the north. Convincingly located by A. Goetze in the

22

chief natural point of entry for copper to the Anatolian plateau. Under modern conditions the political independence of such a commercially and militarily strategic area under the shadow of a vastly superior great power, would be a practical impossibility, or to say the least, it would be most precarious. Hence its relatively independent status, securing immunity from military attack, more than 3000 years becomes most significant, especially since it was grounded on concluded treaties, and supported by experience.

Shunashshura Treaty opens with a statement which comes near the principle of what, in modern terms, woud be called the

self-d,etermtmtn"<m of small countries. It begins:

5. Previously in the days of my grandfather, the country Kizzuwatna 6. had become (part) of the Hatti country. But afterward ...

7. seceded ... and shifted (allegiance) to the Hurri country.

We are then told how the shift in allegiance of such a strategic was possible in terms of international usage. Three generations oefore, a neighboring people, the Ishuwa, had sought asylum from the Hittites and had fled to the neighboring land of the Hurrites. When

Hittites objected to this and said:

12. to the Hurrian: "Extradite my subjects!" ... the Hurrian sent word back

13. to the Sun as follows: "No."

17. . .. the cattle 18 have chosen their stable, they definitely 19. havecometomycountry.

The Hittite king then asked the question

26. . . . I f some country 27 would secede from you (and) would shift ... to the Hatti country

28. How would such a thing be? The Hurrian 29 sent word to me ... as follows: "Exactly the same."

It was therefore on the basis of international usage, reciprocity and , precedent, that Shunashshura, king of Kizzu~Ettna, arranged the trans- , fer of allegiance of his state from the neighboring Hurrites to their

enemies, the Hittites.

The treaty reflects a careful delimitation of boundaries. Access to

the sea was to be guaranteed to the continental great power at one point of entry, Lamiya. The Hittites agreed, in turn, that Lamiya would not be fortified.

40. Toward the sea Lamiya belongs to the Sun.... 42. The Sun will not fortify Lamiya

In this delimitation of boundaries by the two kings, all areas are measured out cooperatively and then halved.

49. . . . the mountain of Zabarashna 50 belongs to Shunashshura, they will measure out the territory together 51 (and) divide (it) 59. The river Shamri (is) his boundary. The great king will not cross the river Shamri.

As regards other non-maritime fortifications in general the Hittites- the Great Power-explicitly limit themselves to the places they may fortify. No such restrictions are made on Kizzuwatna, the much smaller and weaker state.

45. TheSunmustnotfortifyArona. 51. TheSunmayfortifyAnawushta.

These elaborate diplomatic methods seem to have served the pur- pose of enabling the Hittites to avoid coastal occupation by keeping a small friendly state on their coastal flank, permitting them access to the sea while the weaker state acted as a buffer zone between sea and hinterland.

Early Migration and Line of Expansion

The Hittites, an Indo-Germanic people, probably entered Anatolia via the Black Sea coast. The cultic seats of the oldest gods in their pantheon are found to the north in Kashka territory, which probably included the southern coast of the Black Sea. In the historical· period we find the Hittites in Central Anatolia: in other words, their national movement must have been initially inland, starting from somewhere on the northern coast. It should be stressed, that no monument has been yet found in the neighborhood of the west coast which can un-

24

In the Teiepinush Text we learn that the first efforts made by the Hittites are towards consolidation in the interior of the Anatolian plateau. Later they moved into northern Mesopotamia, attacking the ancient cities of Aleppo and Carchemish and actually raiding south- eastward as far as Babylon. The Black Sea region became for them a back door, permanently closed to new entrants. The Kashka peoples,

25

conglomerate of "barbaric" tribes, were left in occupation of the area. They were tolerated despite their harassing of the Hittite Empire, to

26

Significantly, there is no evidence that the Hittites ever retaliated against them in force.

Cultural Frontier Between East and West

According to Albrecht Goetze there was over some two millennia a permanent cultural and political boundary line in Asia Minor west of the River Halys separating Anatolia proper on the east from the

27

29

serted its presence right up to late Achemenid times.

factory explanation has ever been offered for the persistence of this nonpolitical frontier.

Yet such a borderline would be a logical outgrowth of the policy of ·keeping away from the coast and orienting oneself inland which we posited with the Hittites. Not only does it lend additional support to the idea that the Hittite Empire of the second millennium held policies of this kind, but it suggests that a similar principle held sway over a much longer period of time, and for many more peoples. The remarkable cultural frontier running behind and along the coast which Goetze found in Western Asia Minor was, in effect, general-if to a lesser extent-along the whole Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The relative safety of coastal cities which we instanced for the Philistine and Phoenician ports, bears this out. All along the Syrian coast a padding of smaller and weaker states separated the port cities proper from the continental powers. This suggests that deeper causes were here in play than the military and cultural drawbacks of such possessions for the inland powers. They were, as we mentioned to

begin with, of an economic order.

Port of Trade Policies

The port of trade belonged to an organization of trading funda- mentally different from that of the nineteenth century. Trading did not depend primarily upon markets but had a history and logic of its own, stemming from the principle of a politically neutral meeting place. In "silent trade"-mainly for reasons of safety-agreement was reached without either party communicating directly with its opposite number. This form of primitive trade may have lingered on in the Eastern Mediterranean into pre-historic times as the archaeological remains of some walled coastal sites indicate. Such enclosures, right on the coast, and yet outside of the towns proper, have been unearthed. They were provided with an altar to ensure the safety of men and goods.

Neither a place for silent trade, nor a neutral sanctuary provides of itself the authority required for transacting trade in any other than a haphazard and ephemeral manner. Permanent guarantees of safety and more elaborate facilities are needed to make trade possible under archaic conditions.

The complex instrument which fulfilled these conditions was the port of trade. Seen from inland, the port of trade was an "epineion" as Lehmann-Hartleben called "the coastal approach of a definite region,

be it that of a tribe, a countryside or a city."

such a place, though not necessarily on the coast, but quite often on a great river or where desert and mountain meet. There goods could be exchanged under the non-military protection of shrine, monastery or a weak political authority. Its inner organization would vary greatly ac- cording to the social context in which the administration of trade was embedded. ·

Its main function was to guarantee neutrality. Continuity of the supply of goods was essential, since it could not be expected that traders -under the difficult conditions of archaic long distance travel-would come to an outlying place unless they knew for certain that a safe ex-

change of goods was possible. The presence of a strong military power on the spot would unfailingly frighten them away. Political neu- trality, guarantee of supplies, protection of the lives and property of strangers had to be assured before trade could start. A prior understand- ing between the corporate parties was therefore needed, usually based on regular treaties. Such an understanding, no doubt, would include facilities for disembarking, lading, portage, storage, grading of goods and the fixing of equivalencies backed by the coastal authority. With- out this mechanism of the port of trade, there could be no regular trading.

Here, in our view, lies the key to the lasting independence of the coastal towns of antiquity. It is too early to say how far the mainly agricultural settlements of the Greek colonists, e.g., on the north Black Sea coast performed such a function for the corn trade. Anyway the Eastern Mediterranean ports of trade had distinguishing marks which set them aside from the common run of such outlets for regional produce. There is evidence of the existence of two outstanding ports of trade in Syria that antedate the Hittite empire by many centuries. Recent excavations have unearthed AI Mina, north of the mouth of the Orontes, and Ugarit, less than a hundred miles south of it. The first has been given currency by Sir Leonard Woolley in his booklet on the Kingdom of Alalakh, the second, by the writings of Claude Schaeffer,

head of the French expedition at Ras Shamra.

When Woolley excavated AI Mina, he found a city with a large

group of warehouses and only a very few residences or burial sites. The city, as far as we are able to ascertain, was devoted exclusively to trade between the Aegean and the Syrian hinterland, with evidence available that Aegean traders did settle there. But the actual habitations were situated off the marshy coast on a hillside, at some distance.

This high degree of specialization was sometimes part of an even more complex setup which comprised a small neighboring state acting as middleman between the distant empires and the port of trade proper. This seems to have been true of the relations between the kingdom of Alalakh and AI Mina.at

In excavating AI Mina's parent city, Alalakh, Woolley noted that the Hittites had occupied and administered that town. However, he offers no evidence of the Hittites ever having seized AI Mina. More conclusive evidence for the neutrality of AI Mina is the fact that this city neither suffered siege nor occupation in the second millennium in which the Egyptian and Hittite Empires clashed in its immediate neighborhood.

If we turn to Ugarit-operating in the Egyptian sphere of influence, as did AI Mina in the Hittite-the same singular phenomenon is manifest.

Ugarit was an independent kingdom which probably combined the function of a port of trade with that of the neutral state to which it belonged. It has been found to be one of the richest sites in the ancient world. The royal palace had three times the area of the one at the Hittite capital of Boghazkoy. Yet Ugarit had no territory to speak of. We must infer that its wealth came to it from the trade in which it specialized. Evidence of a scribe-school teaching four different Ian-guages;

32

texts and inscriptions; a multilingual dictionary using three

languages; groups of foreign residents, and the administration of an

equivalency system based on the shekel, show beyond the shadow of a

doubt that this area was designed to perform the functions of a port of

33

during the imperial rivalries. It was seized between the eighteenth and sixteenth centuries contemporaneously with the Hyksos period in Egypt. Schaeffer offers evidence that this conquest was by a nonliterate, military, "barbaric" people. This would confirm the view that the politically more sophisticated powers followed a "hands-off" policy in

4

eminently important trading centers must force us to the conclusion that during centuries of the second millennium Hittites and Egyptians were tacitly agreed to respect the neutrality and inviolability of each other's epineion. Further confirmation of the neutrality of such ports of trade comes from the traditional pattern of Hittite avoidance of the coast, of which we have already spoken. Their main route into Syria ran past the Gulf of Adana, yet the Hittites are not known ever to have touched upon the coast. That this pattern did not merely refl~ct mili- tary considerations is confirmed by a letter of the king of Babylon to Hattushilish III in which he complains of the loss of a caravan am- bushed on the way from Babylon to Ugarit. Hattushilish, asked to

trade.

And, again: Ugarit was neither besieged nor suffered occupation

regard to ports of trade.s

The geographic proximity and exposed strategic location of these

The

Protection for trade was deemed a concern of the highest order, as we can see from the fact that the king of Babylon would correspond with the king of the Hittites in the interest of trade. According to Schaeffer other correspondence and treaties from Ugarit confirmed

36

manslaughter. s7

Up to the turn of the first quarter of the first millennium ports of functioned in this manner. About that time there are signs of a in the neutrality of the ports of trade, and the principle of

off" the coast weakens.

Important changes were taking place in the Near East.

Symbiosis

The great expansion of trade in the second quarter of the first urn had an incisive effect upon the relationship between coast continent. The Powers of the hinterland could no longer afford to

in their continental bias of ignoring the coast whenever pos~ . They were now reluctantly moving towards a new balance which to have far-reaching consequences for the course of history in the

Mediterranean.

Tyre, the leading port of trade of the period, now operates on a

· scale; the administration of trade brings in distant political as her agents in the exchange of goods. Ionia, the Persian Gulf, Black Sea, Arabia and the Atlantic coast of Spain are now all part a network which may have extended as far as India and Central This is the picture drawn in Ezekiel 27, on the trade activities

Tyre in the early part of the sixth century:

12.

13.

14.

15.

22.

25.

Tarshish was thy merchant ... with silver, iron, tin and lead they traded in thy fairs.

Javan, Tubal, and Meshech ... they traded the persons of men and vessels of brass in thy market.

They of the house of Togarmah traded in thy fairs with horses and horsemen and mules.

The men of Dedan were thy merchants; many isles were the mer~ chandise of thine hand; they brought thee for a present horns of ivory and ebony.

The merchants of Sheba and Raamah they were thy merchants; they occupied in thy fairs with chief of all spices, and with all precious stones, and gold.

The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market: and thou wast replenished, and made very glorious in the midst of the seas.

Phoenician manufacture appears to have been universally in d~ mand and to have been bartered for diverse goods-slaves, livestock, metals, prestige goods, and so on. The increasing volume and variety of the turnover no doubt went with extended treaty relations. While 'fyrian ships themselves carried a large amount of cargo, other th~ s as well as land caravans, were coming into Tyre all the time. shiP ' ure a supply of merchandise for such far-flung trade, to arrange 'fo s~cdisposal of goods and for the safety of ships and caravans must for t ~equired a diplomatic activity spanning almost the whole in- haV~t d world, as far as then known.

hab~us,along with the growth of trade, the ports of trade were bound

b come political factors. Part of the reason for this, again, may lie

~0 ; strategic importance of iron, the flow of which they controlled.

1n t :sno direct evidence is available to us. There is ample proof, how- 1

Of t f the increasing importance of navies as a military factor. Com- e~er,donaval-land operations were on record since the Peoples of the blne nd continued to grow in the first millennium. In the seventh Sea ary we find the Ionian amphibious troops hired by Psamtik acting cen~ucatalyst in the overthrow of the power of Assyria in Egypt. Allied

as. thethe Lydians, the Phoenician cities also engaged in similar politico- wit .

'}'tary intngues.

rni ~us one of the vital attributes of the ports of trade-their neu-

l'ty-tended to disappear, not as if they had lost their independence tratlhe hinterland powers; rather, they themselves had become powers

to d 'th b reckone Wl .

to ;is change of role was reflected in the attitude of the inland

ers. Warily and reluctantly, they saw themselves compelled to move

P0~ st the ports of trade. Straight conquest and subjugation was out

a r ; e question. This would have altogether done away with their value

0

channel of entry for foreign goods. Other responses had to be as a

Sl~lsof Smyrna were torn down. In a milder form, the Lydian policy "';making annual raids against the coastal cities had the same purport. ;ese moves appear to have been as nondestructive as possible, while

evertheless rendering those cities militarily helpless on land.

n }\basiC change of role was taking place which combined a more tive policy of the empires towards the coast with maintenance of acuch of the traditional continental bias. Often this manifested itself

~ shoW of force, even in transitory control, followed by a withdrawal. uu•·w~....wu this led to a symbiotic relationship (as Rostovtzeff called it) into a closer cooperation between coast and continent than before. Again, we are forced to ignore the important differences subsisted between the simple emporia of a local range, and the organizations of foreign trade we called ports of trade. The

~titutat:I,on, in somewhat greater detail, was this:

In the northern Black Sea area, Scythia and the Greek colonies

>H.;IH'-''"'u a firm symbiosis, avoiding overt military pressure. Rostovtzeff how the Scythians exchanged their surplus goods for products

Greece and Ionia:

... the Scythians favoured the Greek colonies, left them unmolested, into personal relations with them, and probably contented them~

levying a nominal tribute as a sign of sovereignty. Neither from

nor from other 6th or 5th century sources do we hear of any between the Greek colonies and the Scythians.ss

In Lydia, Gyges moved against Miletus (ca. 663), Colophon, and

39

.•uuF,••wu•~ ad Siplum.

and an assertion of nominal suzerainty is apparent, since Gyges did not seem to aim at capturing citadels. He raided only the fields of Miletus and did not attack the two nearest coastal cities, Cyme and Ephesus. Eventually, his military activities against the coastal cities came to a halt. In a significant move, Lydia permitted Miletus to colonize Abydos on the Hellespont, on plainly Lydian soil. Gyges, him~ self, in the latter part of his reign, turned openly philhellene. The

That this was merely a military demonstration

.,..,v.......1.cities and Lydia later cooperated in the face of the Cimmerian invasion.

Gyges' successors, too, followed a policy of mild pressure, essentially ·aiming at a symbiosis. Alyattes devastated the Milesian fields every year, but left farmsteads unmolested. He destroyed the walls of Smyrna in an evident attempt at demilitarizing the city, yet did not occupy it. He concluded a treaty favorable to Miletus and, in the second half of his reign, a mutually advantageous relationship was fostered by the strong cultural affinity that was springing up between Lydia and Ionia.

Herodotus declared there was but little difference between them. Croesus, following in the traditions of Alyattes, had the hill forts of Ephesus destroyed. The other cities were left unmolested after they allowed peaceful entry to his troops. While they had to pledge annual

.. payments, and military aid in extraordinary cases, they were not gar~ risoned, nor were their domestic affairs interfered with. Croesus was out and out friendly towards the Greek ports of trade. Last of the Lydian monarchs, he was the most thoroughly hellenized of them all. So far, in talking about the symbiosis of empire and port of trade, we had in mind the region of the northern Black Sea and Western Asia Minor, directing our attention to the Scythian and the Lydian empires respectively. In either instance the Greek ports of trade such

as Miletus, Ephesus, or Theodosia were in the center of interest.

In turning south toward the Syrian coast where history started more than a thousand years earlier, two periods compete. AI Mina and Ugarit, the first ports of trade, had been faced by the inland empires of

Assyria, Babylon, the Hittites, and Egypt. Their successors, Sidon and Tyre, had to deal with the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Chaldean Babylonia, and the Persians. In following up the changes that occurred in the first millennium in the policies of these latter continental powers we will have to substitute for Kanaanite AI Mina and Ugarit, their much later successors, the Phoenician cities of Sidon and Tyre.

At first sight there is a striking change in Assyrian policy. The western military escapades of the Mesopotamian rulers of the third and second millennium now turn into regular warfare, which seems to aim at the permanent conquest of the West with a Mediterranean coast as its ultimate object. In this move Assyria, with its almost yearly cam- paigns, has the lead. The inhuman cruelties committed against their prisoners reveal a deliberate policy of intimidation.

Delving deeper it seems doubtful whether in regard to the coast the change is really as big as it appears on the surface. Up to about 782, though Assyria collected tribute from the coastal cities, her interference was tentative in character. Shamshi-Adad V visited the Mediterranean region only twice during his reign. These visits were booty raids and military demonstrations rather than campaigns of conquest. Adad-

Nirari also assured himself of the tribute of Tyre, Sidon, Israel and Philistia, but did not repeat his visit to the coast. Shalmaneser III and Tiglath-pileser III both exacted annual tribute while otherwise leaving the Phoenician cities alone except for Philistia, which was raided though not then incorporated. A policy of fierce aggression starts with Sennacherib who occupied Phoenicia in 701, with the sole exception of Tyre. Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal following in his footsteps de- stroyed Sidon and exacted heavy tribute from Tyre. No doubt, the end of the eighth century saw a new Assyrian policy, much more reminis-of the nineteenth century A.D. than of the nineteenth century B.c. pressure against the coastal cities was now constant.

Nevertheless, it would be easy to exaggerate the "modernness" of neo-Assyrian drive toward the coast. Tyre was made to pay tribute some attempt was made to subject her foreign policy. Yet her •uv·u~,,.· with Assyria was for the most part one of cooperation. ns had right of entry into Tyrian territories, but Tyrian traders

40

Later, Nebuchadnezzar kept Phoenicia under subjection, tried to take Tyre, but was defeated. Neo-Assyrian and neo-Baby- policies broadly amounted to an economic activation of the through the ports of trade, which, however, were not incorpor-

pressure being mostly exerted by methods of remote control.

Persia represented entirely new principles of empire building. To a minimum of coercion was among its tenets. Herodotus credited rulers with professing a remarkable principle of empire government, according to which their interest in peoples diminished in proportion

41

· harshly-obligation of military service, payment of tribute and native rulers chosen by the Persians were imposed. To call these tulers tyrants is essentially misleading. Over the whole of the Hellenic world the fashionable monarchy of the nontraditional type went under the name of tyrannis. But the sinister overtones that the term later acquired are thoroughly anachronistic. Seventh and sixth century tyrannies were anything but unpopular; the typical self-made ruler arose

· from the ranks of the aristocracy with the help of the populace to rid them of oppression from oligarchic class rule. In metropolitan Greece, by the middle of the fifth century the new monarchy had been generally superseded by free forms of popular rule and the tyrannis was now

·.· under a cloud. Yet the ambiguity is still apparent in Herodotus. The ·· Ionian tyrants of his grandfathers' time often owed their positions to the Persians who preferred to deal with monarchs rather than with assemblies, and to that extent the Ionian "tyrants" were justly dubbed Persian puppets. Herodotus mentioned that the Ionian kings during the Scythian wars did not cut the bridge on the Danube which Darius l

had entrusted to their care because they felt they would only be in power as long as the Persians were present. Persian tyrannis was then often merely a method by which popular but sympathetic satellite gov- ernments were established. In preparation for the second invasion of Greece the Persians, who nourished no ideological preferences, replaced the tyrannis in all Ionian cities by democratic regimes. When the wars were over, a return to the old policy of almost complete political inde- pendence occurred, yet with a closer approximation to a symbiotic relatiOnship between coast and continent.

The Phoenician cities did not go through the same sharp fluctua- tions of Persian policies as those of Ionia. They retained their native kings, free to join or refuse to join Persian expeditions. There was a break in the mutual good-will when Xerxes beheaded some Phoenician officers for poor conduct. The Phoenicians thereupon withdrew their fleet from Persian service for approximately fifteen years. The bitter revolt of 352 in which many Sidonians immolated themselves in their city was not severely punished: the city was rebuilt and Phoenicia con- tinued to enjoy a fair measure of independence and prosperity under Persia, which seemed to be tolerant of all but open rebellion. Co-opera-

tion was based on a smoothly functioning trade organization of the coast which the Persians implemented by contributing a metallic stand- ard, an efficient road system, and a secure hinterland.

When in the last third of the first millennium, Macedonia cut across Europe, Asia, and Africa to create a world empire, the demise of the port of trade seemed imminent. Both the strategic and the cultural perils of the coast had lost substance and actuality. The coastlines, now lying for the first time within the boundaries of the all-inclusive empire, were left without political and military significance, and the helleniza-

tion of the oecumene was the order of the day. Symbolic of the change was the defeat of Tyre at the hands of Alexander the Great. The mali who embodied the novel idea of a universal Civilization, had possessed himself of the impregnable rock which harbored Ezekiel's admired and hated Mistress of the Seas, and which had braved the might of Assur and Babylon. A vast expansion of peaceful trade was on, fusing the hitherto separated continents and transforming the Eastern Mediter- ranean into an Hellenic lake.

It is all the more remarkable to find instead a revival of the early port of trade almost in its classic form. For a long time to come, the of trade with its neutral administration of transactions between

foreign peoples proved indispensable. To channel the commerce

Orient which would flow through the Indian Ocean and the

Sea, Cleomenes of Naucratis was commissioned by Alexander the

to plan a city at the point of entry to the west. The outcome was

port of trade par exceiience, Alexandria. Neutrality was its raison

42

to wield power in it. It was built outside the administrative boun-

of the Egyptian chora and its autonomy was to prove indestruc-

lts neutrality was guaranteed by settling there Jews and Egyptians

large numbers, so as to reduce the preponderance of the Greeks

The security of trade under the municipal authority was

by business transactions being sworn to before the altar of

43

of the guardian god.

Alexandria was the model to which, in Hellenistic times, many

other ports of trade conformed, whether on the Phoenician coast, in Greece, or in Asia Minor. Ports of trade now had an informal status of their own. Tyre, Byblus, Sidon enjoyed the same independence as did

Greek cities of the coast; but the same independence was not

44

the port of trade; rather strengthened and renewed it. But the shun- ning of the coast that the ancient world had known was now overcome. .And the time was near when, in the Western Mediterranean an utterly ,novel constellation of power in relation to coast and continent would

· to revolve around the Roman axis.

Aristotle Discovers The Economy

IN perusing the preceding chapters the reader may have sensed that some significant conclusion was pending. The oikos debate and our discussion of the Assyrian trading methods together with that of the ports of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean seemed to suggest that the study of the Old World, out of which civilization broke forth into the radiance of Greece, had a surprise in store. Such an expectation

would not have been quite unjustified in view of the weighty.implica- tions that the recognition of the absence of markets from Hammurabi's Babylonia obviously holds for the appraisal of Greek economic history.

The familiar picture of classical Athens will have to absorb what might appear as a criss-cross of contradictions. The dominant con- clusion must be that Attica was not, as we firmly believed, heir to com- mercial techniques that were supposed to have developed in the East; rather, she may herself have been a pioneer of the novel method of market trading. For if Babylon and Tyre were not, as it now appears, the ancient homes of the price-making market, then the elements of that seminal institution must have come from the Hellenic sphere,

some time in the first millennium B.C. Sixth and fifth century Greece was, therefore, in essential respects, economically more naive than even the extreme "primitivist" would have it, while in the fourth century these very Greeks initiated the gainful business practices that in much later days developed into the dynamo of market competition.

This brings into focus an aspect of the oikos controversy which only now becomes apparent. The "primitivists" asserted no more than up to the time of the Persian Wars, Attica was not a mercantile 1uu.uu.•u. . They did not deny that by the fourth century the Phoe- had been ousted from their former maritime preeminence by Hellenic seafarers, whose enterprising spirit backed by sea-loans them the lead over their erstwhile masters. For the rest, it was for granted that the Lydians had passed on to their Hellenic the arts of gainful trading which they themselves had acquired

their Mesopotamian neighbors of the East.

All this falls to the ground if, as seems beyond dispute, Sumeria,

and Assyria as well as their Hittite and Tyrian successors aclJ.ct;;u trade primarily through the dispositional actions of status But whence then did the He11enes, or for that matter the derive their arts of individual business initiative, risky and which they hence certainly began to apply to some extent in proceedings? And if, as it appears almost impossible not to con- they drew mainly upon themselves for the new attitudes, what v11 "c••<:r: does the Greek literary record offer of the inevitable crisis of

which must have resulted?

To dramatize the cultural event of Greece at the climactic point of

awakening from a heroic to a semi-commercial economy, would be our capacity, even if the attempt were not barred by the scope this work. Yet it appears appropriate, indeed, it is imperative to up in the light of our newly gained knowledge the peripety in social thinking of that encyclopaedic mind in the Greek orbit, when he first encountered the phenomenon we have become

to cal1ing the "economy."

The contempt into which Aristotle's "Economics" has fallen in

day is a portent. Very few thinkers have been listened to on a

'"-'·~~~·~· diversity of subjects over so many centuries as he. Yet on a

matter to which he devoted a signal effort and which happens also to

~bereckoned among the issues vital to our own generation, the economy,

his teachings are judged inadequate by the leading spirits of the time

1

Aquinas was as great as later that of Adam Smith and David de'\.ll:aiLtu on nineteenth century world economy. Naturally, one might with the actual establishment of the market system and the subse- nse of the classical schools, Aristotle's doctrines on the subject into eclipse. But the matter does not rest here. The more out-spoken among modern economists seem to feel as though almost everything he had written on questions of man's livelihood suffered from some baneful weakness. Of his two broad topics-the nature of the economy and the issues of commercial trade and just price-neither had been carried to any clear conclusion. Man, like any other animal, was presented by him as naturally self-sufficient. The human economy did not, therefore, stem from the boundlessness of man's wants and needs, or, as it is phrased today, from the fact of scarcity. As to those two policy issues, commercial trade sprang according to Aristotle from the unnatural urge of money-making, which was of course unlimited, while prices should conform to the rules of justice (the actual formula remaining quite obscure). There were also his illuminating, if not altogether consistent remarks on money and that puzzling outburst against the taking of interest. This meager and fragmentary outcome was mostly attributed to an unscientific bias-the preference for that which ought to be over that which is. That prices, for instance, should depend upon the relative standing in the community of partners in

the exchange seemed indeed an almost absurd view to take.

This sharply circumscribed breaking away from the body of thought inherited from classical Greece deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. The stature of the thinker and the dignity of the subject should make us hesitate to accept as final the erasing of Aris-

totle's teaching on the economy.

A very different appreciation of his position will be sustained here. He will be seen as attacking the problem of man's livelihood with a radicalism of which no later writer on the subject was capable-none has ever penetrated deeper into the material organization of man's life. In effect, he posed, in all its breadth, the question of the place occupied by the economy in society.

We will have to reach far back to explain why Aristotle thought as he did of what we call "the economy," or what impelled him to regard money-making in trade and the just price as the chief policy questions. Also we agree that economic theory cannot expect to benefit from Book I of Politics and Book V of the Nichomachian Ethics. Economic analysis, in the last resort, aims at elucidating the functions of the market mechanism, an institution that was still unknown to Aristotle.

To go to the root of our approach, classical antiquity was altogether wrongly placed by economic historians along the time scale which led up to market trade. In spite of intensive trading activities and fairly

,.."""'',f'f-'" money uses, Greek business life as a whole was still in the first beginnings of market trade in Aristotle's time. His occasional va~~c::ness and obscurities, not to speak of his alleged philosopher's re- motentess from life, should be put down to difficulties of expression regard to what actually were recent developments, rather than to supposed insufficient penetration by him of practices allegedly in contemporary Greece and nourished by a millennia! tradition

the civilizations of the East.

This leaves classical Greece, however definitely some of her eastern

were already advancing towards the market habit, still consider- below the level of commercial trading with which she was later crf:dlt:ed. Thus the Greeks may not have been, as was so confidently _.,u........, simply latecomers picking up the commercial practices de- veJ,opc::d by the Oriental empires. Rather, they were latecomers in a Civilized marketless world, and compelled by circumstances to become pioneers in the development of the novel trading methods which

were at most on the point of turning towards market trade.

All this, far from diminishing, as might superficially appear, the significance of Aristotle's thought on economic questions must, on contrary, very greatly enhance their importance. For if our "non- market" reading of the Mesopotamian scene is true to fact, which we have no more cause to doubt, we have every reason to believe that in Aristotle's writings we possess an eye witness account of some of the pristine features of incipient market trading at its very first appearance

in the history of civilization.

The Anonymity of the Economy in Early Society

Aristotle was trying to master theoretically the elements of a new complex social phenomenon in statu nascendi.

The economy, when it first attracted the conscious awareness of the philosopher in the shape of commercial trading and price differ- . entials, was already destined to run its variegated course toward its fulfilment some twenty centuries later. Aristotle divined the full-

2

lessness to a separate existence we submit, is the distinction between the embedded and the disembedded condition of the economy in re- lation to society. The disembedded economy of the nineteenth century stood apart from the rest of society, more especially from the political and governmental system. In a market economy the production and distribution of material goods in principle is carried on through a self- regulating system of price-making markets. It is governed by laws of its own, the so-called laws of supply and demand, and motivated by fear of hunger and hope of gain. Not blood-tie, legal compulsion, religious obligation, fealty or magic creates the sociological situations which make individuals partake in economic life but specifically economic institutions such as private enterprise and the wage system.

With such a state of affairs we are of course fairly conversant. Un- der a market system men's livelihood is secured by way of institutions, that are activated by economic motives, and governed by laws which are specifically economic. The vast comprehensive mechanism of the economy can be conceived of working without the conscious interven- tion of human authority, state or government; no other motiv~s than dread of destitution and desire for legitimate profit need be invoked; no other juridical requirement is set than that of the protection of property and the enforcement of contract; given the distribution of resources, of purchasing power as well as of the individual scales of preference the result will be an optimum of want satisfaction for all.

This, then, is the nineteenth century version of an independent economic sphere in society. It is motivationally distinct, for it receives its impulse from the urge of monetary gain. It is institutionally sepa- rated from the political and governmental center. It attains to an autonomy that invests it with laws of its own. In it we possess that extreme case of a disembedded economy which takes its start from the widespread use of money as a means of exchange.

In the nature of things the development from embedded to dis- embedded economies is a matter of degree. Nevertheless the distinc- tion is fundamental to the understanding of modern society. Its socio- logical background was first mooted by Hegel in the 1820's and de- veloped by Karl Marx in the 1840's. Its empirical discovery in terms of history was made by Sir Henry Sumner Maine in the Roman law cate- gories of status and contractus, in the 1860's; finally, in the more com- prehensive terms of economic anthropology, the position was restated by Bronislaw Malinowski in the 1920's.

Sir Henry Sumner Maine undertook to prove that modern society was built on contractus, while ancient society rested on status. Status is set by birth-a man's position in the family-and determines the rights and duties of a person. It derives from kinship and adoption; it persists under feudalism and, with some qualifications, right up to the age of equal citizenship as established in the nineteenth century. But already under Roman law status was gradually replaced by contractus, i.e., by rights and duties derived from bilateral arrangements. Later, Maine revealed the universality of status organization in the case of the village communities of India.

In Germany, Maine found a disciple in Ferdinand Toennies. His conception was epitomised in the title of his work Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Geseiischaft), 1888. "Community'' cor- responded to "status," "society" to "contractus." Max Weber fre- quently employed "Geseiischaft" in the sense of contract-type group, and "Gemeinschaft" in that of status-type group. Thus his own analysis of the place of the economy in society, though at times influenced by

Mises, was molded by the thought of Marx, Maine and Toennies. The emotional connotation, however, given to status and con- tractus as well as to the corresponding "community" and "society," was widely different with Maine and Toennies. To Maine the pre- contractus condition of mankind stood merely for the dark ages of tribalism. The introduction of contract, so he felt, had emancipated the individual from the bondage of status. Toennies' sympathies were for the intimacy of the community as against the impersonalness of or- ganized society. "Community" was idealized by him as a condition where the lives of men were embedded in a tissue of common experi- ence, while "society" was never to him far removed from the cash nexus, as Thomas Carlyle called the relationship of persons connected by market ties alone. Toennies' policy ideal was the restoration of community, not, however, by returning to the pre-society stage of authority and paternalism, but by advancing to a higher form of com- munity of a postsociety stage, which would follow upon our present civilization. He envisaged this community as a co-operative phase of l

human existence, which would retain the advantages of technological progress and individual freedom while restoring the wholeness of life. l

Hegel's and Marx's, Maine's and Toennies' treatment of the evo- lution of human civilization was accepted by many continental scholars as an epitome of the history of society. For a long time no advance was made on the trails they blazed. Maine had dealt with the subject chiefly as pertaining to the history of law, including its corporate forms as in rural India; Toennies' sociology revived the outlines of medieval civilization. Not before Malinowski's fundamental stand on the nature of primitive society was that antithesis applied to the economy. It is now possible to say that status or gemeinschaft dominate where the

economy is embedded in- noneconomic institutions; contractus or gese11schaft is characteristic of the existence of a motivationally distinct economy in society.

In terms of integration we can easily see the reason for this. Con- tracfils is the legal aspect of exchange. It is not surprising, therefore, that a society based on contractus should possess an institutionally separate and motivationally distinct economic sphere of exchange, namely, that of the market. Status, on the other hand, corresponds to an earlier condition which roughly goes with reciprocity and redistri- bution. As long as these latter forms of integration prevail, no concept of an economy need arise. The elements of the economy are here em- bedded in noneconomic institutions, the economic process itself being instituted through kinship, marriage, age-groups, secret societies, to-

temic associations, and public solemnities. The term "economic life" would here have no obvious meaning.

This state of affairs, so puzzling to the modern mind, is often strikingly exhibited in primitive communities. It is often almost im- possible for the observer to collect the fragments of the economic process and piece them together. To the individual his emotions fail to convey any experience that he could identify as "economic." He is simply not aware of any pervading interest in regard to his livelihood which he could recognize as such. Yet the lack of such a concept does not appear to hamper him in the performance of his everyday tasks.

Rather, it is doubtful whether awareness of an economic sphere would not tend to reduce his capacity of spontaneous response to the needs of livelihood, organized as they are mainly through other than eco- nomic channels.

All this is an outcome of the manner in which the economy is here The individual's motives, named and articulated, spring as a from situations set by facts of a noneconomic-familial, political religious-order; the site of the small family's economy is hardly than a point of intersection between lines of activities carried on larger kinship groups in various localities; land is either used in as pasture or its various uses may be appropriated to members ifferent groups; labor is a mere abstraction from the "solicited" offered by different teams of helpers, at definite occasions; a result, the process itself runs in the grooves of different structures. Accordingly, before modern times the forms of man's livelihood much less of his conscious attention than did most other of his organized existence. In contrast to kinship, magic or eti- with their powerful keywords, the economy as such remained There existed, as a rule, no term to designate the concept of ""''m''" Accordingly, as far as one can judge, this concept was absent.

and totem, sex and age-group, the power of the mind and the ,._...v "..••,... practices, custom and ritual were instituted through highly systems of symbols, while the economy was not designated any one word conveying the significance of food supply for man's survival. It can not be merely a matter of chance that until very times no name to sum up the organization of the material con- of life existed in the languages even of civilized peoples. Only hundred years ago did an esoteric sect of French thinkers coin ""',,-,;;...,•- term and call themselves economistes. Their claim was to have dis-

""'''PT"F•n the economy.

The prime reason for the absence of any concept of the economy is

l!h'!j&;,""'J'" difficulty of identifying the economic process under conditions ,;;:,UJ•n.,.,,p it is embedded in noneconomic institutions.

Only the concept of the economy, not the economy itself, is in ! fltbeyance, of course. Nature and society abound in locational and ap- , ;propriational movements that form the body of man's livelihood. The

:Jeascms bring around harvest time with its strain and its relaxation; JOrte:-custan<~e trade has its rhythm of preparation and foregathering the concluding solemnity of the return of the venturers; and all , , " . . . . . . R • . , of artifacts, whether canoes or fine ornaments are produced, and used by various groups of persons; every day of the week is prepared at the family hearth. Each single event contains neces- :;$1nly a bundle of economic items. Yet for all that, the unity and co-herence of those facts is not reflected in men's consciousness. For the

series of interactions between men and their natural surroundings will, as a rule, carry various significances, of which economic depend. ence is only one. Other dependences, more vivid, more dramatic, or more emotionalized may be at work, which prevent the economic movements of forming a meaningful whole. Where these other forces are embodied in permanent institutions the concept of the economic would be more confusing than clarifying to the individual. Anthro- pology offers many examples:

1. Where the physical site of a man's life is not identifiable with any ostensible part of the economy, his habitat-the household with its tangible environment-has but little economic relevance. This will be so, as a rule, when movements belonging to different economic proc- esses intersect in one site, while the movements forming part of one and the same process are distributed over a number of disconnected sites.

Margaret Mead described how a Papuan-speaking Arapesh of New Guinea would envisage his physical surroundings:

A typical Arapesh man, therefore is living for at least part of the time (for each man lives in two or more hamlets, as well as in the garden huts, huts near the hunting bush, and huts near his sago palm) on land which does not belong to him. Around the house are pigs which his wife is feeding, but which belong either to one of her relatives or to one of his. Beside the house are coconut and betel palms which belong to still other people, and the fruit of which he will never touch without the permission of the owner, or someone who has been accorded the disposal of the fruit by the owner. He hunts on the bushland belonging to a brother-in-law or a cousin at least part of his hunting time, and the rest of the time he is joined by others on his bush, if he has some. He works his sago in others' sago clumps as well as in his own. Of the personal property in his house that which is of any permanent value, like large pots, well carved plates, good spears, has already been assigned to his sons, even though they are only toddling children. His own pig or pigs are far away in other hamlets: his palm trees are scattered three miles in one direction, two in another: his sago palms are still further scattered, and his garden patches lie here and there, mostly on the lands of others. If there is meat on his smoking rack over the fire, it is either meat which was killed by another, a brother, a brother-in-law, a sister's son, etc.- and has been given to him, in which case he and his family may eat it, or it is meat which he himself killed and which he is smoking to give away to someone else, for to eat one's own kill, even though it be only a small bird, is a crime to which only the morally, which usually means with the Arapesh mentally, deficient would stoop. If the house in which he is, is nominally will have been constructed in part at least from the posts and planks people's houses, which have been dismantled or temporarily and from which he has borrowed timber. He will not cut his

to fit his house, if they are too long, because they may be needed for someone else's house which is of a different shape or size. . . .

3

complexity of the social relations that account for these every- is staggering. Yet it is only at the hand of such relations, to him, articulated and meaningfully deployed in the course of wn personal experience, that the Arapesh is able to find his bear- in an economic situation, the elements of which are jigsawed into

of different social relationships of a non-economic character. much for the locational aspect of the economic process where

prevails .

. Another broad reason for the absence in primitive society of an

~tt"mg effect of the economy is its lack of quantitativity. He who ten dollars does not, as a rule, call each by a separate name, conceives of them rather as interchangeable units that can be sub- one for another, added up or subtracted. Short of such an facility on which terms like fund or balance of profit and depend for a meaning, the notion of an economy would mostly be of any practical purpose. It would fail to discipline behavior, to and sustain effort. Yet the economic process does not natu- offer such a facility; that matters of livelihood are subject to ~kon:"mg is merely a result of the manner in which they are instituted. Trobriand economy, for instance, is organized as a continuous give-

yet there is no possibility of setting up a balance, or of em- the concept of a fund. Reciprocity demands adequacy of not mathematical equality. Consequently, transactions and cannot be grouped with any precision from the economic of view, i.e., according to the manner in which they affect rna- want satisfaction. Figures, if any, do not correspond to facts. the economic significance of an act may be great, there is no

of assessing its relative importance.

Malinowski listed the different kinds of give-and-take, from free

at the one extreme, to plain commercial barter at the other. His · of "gifts, payments, and transactions" came under seven """uu•~=:,:., which he correlated with the sociological relationships with-in which each occurred. These numbered eight. The results of his analysis were revealing:

(a) The category of "free gifts" was exceptional, since charity was neither needed nor encouraged, and the notion of gift was always as- sociated with the idea of adequate counter-gift (but not, of course, of equivalency). Even actual "free gifts" were construed as counter-gifts, given in return for some fictitious service rendered to the giver. Mali- nowski found that "the natives would undoubtedly not think of free gifts as being all of the same nature." Where the notion of "dead loss" is lacking, the operation of balancing a fund is not feasible.

(b) In the group of transaction, where the gift is expected to be returned in an economi~lly equivalent manner, we meet another con- fusing fact. This is the category which according to our notions ought to be practically indistinguishable from trade. Far from it. Occasionally the identically same object is exchanged back and forth between the partners, thus depriving the transaction of any conceivable economic purpose or meaning! By the simple device of handing back, though in

a roundabout way, the pig to its donor, the exchange of equivalencies instead of being a step in the direction of economic rationality proves a safeguard against the intrusion of utilitarian considerations. The sole purpose of the exchange is to draw relationships closer by strengthen- ing the ties of reciprocity.

(c) Utilitarian barter is distinct from any other type of mutual gift giving. While in ceremonial exchange of fish for yam there is, in principle, adequacy between the two sides, a poor haul or a failure of crops, e.g., reducing the amount offered, in barter exchange of fish and yam there is at least a pretence of higgling and haggling. It is further characterized by an absence of special partnerships, and, if artifacts enter, by a restriction to newly manufactured goods-second-hand ones might have a personal value attached to them.

(d) Within the sociologically defined relationships-of which there are many-the exchange is usually unequal, as befits the relationship. Appropriational movements of goods and services are thus often insti- tuted in a manner that renders some transactions irreversible and many goods noninterchangeable.

Thus quantitativity can hardly be expected to operate in that wide domain of livelihood which comes under the heading of "gifts, pay-ments and transactions."

3. Another familiar concept that is inapplicable in primitive con-is that of property as a right of disposing of definite objects. , no straight inventory of possessions is practicable. We here a variety of rights of different persons in regard to the same By this fragmentation, the unity of the object under its prop- aspect is destroyed. The appropriational movement does not as a have the complete object, for instance a piece of land, as its refer· but only its discrete uses, thus depriving the concept of property

effectiveness in regard to objects.

4. Economic transactions proper hardly crop up in kinship-organ-

communities. Transactions in early times are public acts performed to the status of persons and other self-propelling things: the the wife, the son, the slave, the ox, the boat. With settled pea- changes in the status of a plot of land, too, were publicly attested. Such status transactions would naturally carry important economic Ltp].ications. Wooing, betrothal and marriage, adoption and emanci- are accompanied by movements of goods, some of them im- some to follow in the long run. Great as the economic sig- ........~..~-~ of such transactions was, it ranked second to their importance establishing the position of the persons in the social context. How, did transactions in regard to goods eventually separate off from

typical kinship transactions in regard to persons?

As long as only a few status goods, such as land, cattle, slaves were ac;uduJ<'-' there was no need for separate economic transactions since the of such goods accompanied the change in status, while a trans- of the goods without such a change would not have been approved by the collectivity. Incidentally, no economic valuation could easily to goods the fate of which was inseparably linked with that of

;_their owners.

Separate transactions in regard to goods were in early times re-

stricted to the two most important ones, namely, land and labor. Thus precisely the "goods," which were the last to become freely alienable were the first to become objects of limited transactions. Limited, since land and labor for a long time to come remained part of the social

'tissue and could not be arbitrarily mobilized without destroying it. \Neither land nor freemen could be sold outright. Their transfer was \tonditional and temporary. Alienation stopped short of an unrestricted \~nsference of ownership. Amongst the economic transactions in four- jeenth century tribal-feudal Arrapha on the Tigris, those which refer ')() land and labor illustrate the point. Property, both in land and per-sons, belonged with the Nuzi to collectivities-clans, families, villages. Use alone was transferred. How exceptional in tribal times the transfer of property in land was, may be seen from the dramatic scenario of the episode of Abraham purchasing a family vault from the Hittite.

It is a peculiar fact that the transfer of "use alone" is rather more "economic" than would be the transfer of ownership. In the exchange of ownership, considerations of prestige and emotional factors may weigh heavily; in the alienation of use the utilitarian element prevails. In modern terms: interest, which is the price of use over time, may be said to have been one of the earliest economic quantities to be insti- tuted.

Eventually, the thin economic layer may "peel off" from the status transaction, the referent of which is a person. The economic element may then change hands alone, the transaction being camouflaged as a status transaction which, however, is to be fictitious. Sale of land to non-clan members being prohibited, the residual rights of the clan to reclaim the land from the purchaser may be voided by legal devices. One of these was the fictitious adoption of the buyer or, alternatively, the fictitious consent of clan members to the sale.

· · :

. ·

,

~;

!

"

I

J ·

Another line of development toward separate economic transac- tions led, as we saw, through the transference of "use only," thus ex-pressly maintaining the residual property rights of the clan -or family. The same purpose was served by a mutual exchange of "uses" of dif.. • ferent objects, while pledging the return of the objects themselves.

The classical Athenian form of mortgage (prasis epi Iysei) was prob- ably such a transference of "use alone," but (exceptionally) leaving the debtor in situ while pledging to the creditor by way of interest a part of the crop. The creditor was safeguarded by the setting up of a boun- dary stone inscribed with his name and the amount of the debt, neither the date of repayment not interest being mentioned, however. If this interpretation of the Attican horos holds good, the plot of land was, in a friendly way, mortgaged for an indefinite period against some par- ticipation in the crop. Default with a subsequent distraint would occur only quite rarely, namely, on a confiscation of the debtor's lands or the ruin of his entire family.

Almost in every case the separate transference of "use" serves the purpose of strengthening the bonds of family and clan with its social, religious and political ties. Economic exploitation of the "use" is thus made compatible with the friendly mutuality of those ties. It main·control of the collectivity over the arrangements made by members. As yet the economic factor hardly registers

in the transactions.

Services, not goods make up wealth in many archaic societies. are performed by slaves, servants, and retainers. But to make

beings disposed to serve as an outcome of their status is an aim (as against economic) power. With the increase of the rna- against the nonmaterial ingredients of wealth, the political of control recedes and gives way to so-called economic con- the peasant was talking thrift and farming centuries before ouu,........... philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, knew of any other tliscipline than politics. Two millennia later, in Western Europe, middle class produced a wealth of commodities and argued · against their feudal masters, and another century later class of an industrial age inherited from them that cate- san instrument of their own emancipation. The aristocracy con- to monopolize government and to look down on commodity . Hence, as long as dependent labor predominates as an

in wealth, the economy has only a shadowy existence.

In the philosophy of Aristotle the three prizes of fortune were: and prestige; security of life and limb; wealth. The first stands and homage, rank and precedence; the second ensures from open and secret enemies, treason and rebellion, the revolt slave, the overbearing of the strong, and even protection from arm of the law; the third, wealth, is the bliss of proprietorship, of heirloom or famed treasure. True, utilitarian goods, food and accrue as a ruie to the possessor of honor and security, but glory outshines the goods. Poverty, on the other hand, goes with status; it involves working for one's living, often at the bid- of others. The less restricted the bidding, the more abject the Not so much manual labor-as the farmer's ever respected shows-but dependence upon another man's personal whim command causes the serving man to be despised. Again, the bare

· fact of a lower income is screened from view.

7. The agatha are the highest prizes of life, that which is most de- and also rarest. This is indeed a surprising context in which to fl'mtnt.~r that feature of goods which modern theory has come to as the criterion of the "economic," namely, scarcity. For the · mind when considering those prizes of life must be struck by the utterly different source of their "scarcity" from that which the·.. economist would make us expect. With him scarcity reflects either the.· niggardliness of nature or the burden of the labor that production en- . tails. But the highest honors and the rarest distinctions are few for neither of these two reasons. They are scarce for the obvious reason . that there is no standing room at the top of the pyramid. The fewness of the agatha is inherent in rank, immunity and treasure: they would not be what they are if they were attainable to many. Hence the ab-. sence in early society of the "economic connotation" of scarcity,~ whether or not utilitarian goods sometimes also happen to be scarce. j For the rarest prizes are not of this order. Scarcity derives here from the • noneconomic order of things.

8. The self-sufficiency of a body of humans, that postulate of bare life, is ensured when a supply of the "necessaries" is physically avail-. able. The things that are here meant are those that sustain life and are · storable, that is, which keep. Corn, wine and oil are chremata, but so . are wool and certain metals. The citizenry and the members of the family must be able to depend upon them in famine or war. The1 amount that the family or the city "needs" is an objective requirement. I The household is the smallest, the polis is the largest unit of consump- ' tion: in either case that which is "necessary" is set by the standards of • the community. Hence the notion of the intrinsically limited amount of the necessaries. This meaning is very near to that of "rations." Since equivalencies, whether by custom or law, were set only for such sub- sistence goods which actually served as units of pay, or of wages, the notion of the "necessary amount" was associated with the commonly stored staples. For operational reasons a boundlessness of human wants and needs-the logical correlate of "scarcity"-was a notion quite for- eign to this approach.

These are some of the major reasons that so long stood in the way of the birth of a distinctively economic field of interest. Even to the professional thinker the fact that man must eat did not appear worthy of elaboration.

Aristotle's Probings

It may seem paradoxical to expect that the last word on the nature of economic life should have been spoken by a thinker who hardly saw :>eg:mnmg:s. Yet Aristotle, living, as he did, on the borderline of ages, was in a favored position to grasp the merits of the

is may explain incidentally why in our own day, in the face of in the place of the economy in society comparable in scope that which in his time heralded the oncoming of market trade, s insights into the connections of economy and society can be

in their stark realism.

We have therefore every reason to seek in his works for far more

and significant formulations on economic matters than Aris- has been credited with in the past. In fact, the disfecta membra

the Ethics and Politics convey a monumental unity of thought.

Whenever Aristotle touched on a question of the economy he

at developing its relationship to society as a whole. The frame

ference was the community as such which exists at different levels

· all functioning human groups. In terms, then, of our modern

Aristotle's approach to human affairs was sociological. In map-

out a field of study he would relate all questions of institutional

and function to the totality of society. Community, self-suffi-

and justice were the focal concepts. The group as a going con-

forms a community (koinonia) the members of which are linked

the bond of good will (phiiia). Whether oikos or polis, or else, there

a kind of philia, specific to that koinonia, apart from which the group

not remain. Philia expresses itself in a behavior of reciprocity

4

that is, readiness to take on burdens in turn and mutually. Anything that is needed to continue and maintain the ~.~......u ...L,, including its self-sufficiency (autarkeia) is "natural" and right. Autarchy may be said to be the capacity to subsist dependence on resources from outside. Justice (contrary to own view) implies that the members of the community possess un- standing. That which ensures justice, whether in regard to the of the prizes of life or the adjudication of conflicts, or the of mutual services is good since it is required for the con- ""''ua'''""' of the group. Normativity, then, is inseparable from actuality. These rough indications of his total system should permit us to Aristotle's views on trade and prices. Trade is "natural" when 'it serves the survival of the community by maintaining its self-suffi- ciency. The need for this arises as soon as the extended family grows (~verpopulous, and its members are forced to settle apart. Their au-tarchy would now be impaired all round, but for the operation of giving a share (metadosis), from one's surplus. The rate at which the shared services (or, eventually, the goods) are exchanged follows from the requirement of philia, i.e., that the good-will among the members persist. For without it, the community itself would cease. The just price, then, derives from the demands of philia as expressed in the reci- procity which is of the essence of all human community.

From these principles derive also his strictures on commercial trad- ing and the maxims for the setting up of exchange equivalencies or the just price. Trade, we saw, is "natural" as long as it is a requirement of self-sufficiency. Prices are justly set if they conform to the standing of the participants in the community, thereby strengthening the good- will on which community rests. Exchange of goods is exchange of serv- ices; this, again, is a postulate of self-sufficiency and is practiced by way of a mutual sharing at just prices. In such exchange no gain is involved; goods have their known prices, fixed beforehand. If exceptionally gain- ful retailing there must be for the sake of a convenient distribution of goods in the market place, let it be done by noncitizens. Aristotle's theory of trade and price was nothing else than a simple elaboration of

his general theorem of the human community.

Community, self-sufficiency and justice: these pivots of his soci-

ology were the frame of reference of his thought on all economic mat- ters, whether the nature of the economy, or policy issues were at stake.

The Sociological Bent

On the nature of the economy Aristotle's starting point is, as al- ways, empirical. But the conceptualization even of the most obvious facts is deep and original.

The desire for wealth, Solon's verse had proclaimed, was unlimited with man. Not so, said Aristotle, in opening up the subject. Wealth is, in truth, the things necessary to sustain life, when safely stored in the keeping of the community, whose sustenance they represent. Human needs, be they of the household or of the city, are not boundless; nor is there a scarcity of subsistence in nature. The argument which sounds strange enough to modern ears, is powerfully pressed and carefully elaborated. At every point the institutional reference is explicit. Psy· chology is eschewed, sociology imposed rejection of the scarcity postulate (as we would say) is based on :uuuu~v••.., of animal life, and is thence extended to those of hu- life. Do not animals from their birth find their sustenance waiting

in their environment? And do not men, too, find sustenance s milk and eventually in their environment, be they hunters, or tillers of the soil? Since slavery to Aristotle is "natural," without inconsistency describe slave raids as a hunt for peculiar and consequently represent the leisure of the slave-owning citi- as supplied by the environment. Otherwise, no need save that for ....u .....,... is considered, much less approved of. Therefore, if scarcity "from the demand side," as we would say, Aristotle attributes misconceived notion of the good life as a desire for a greater rtnctan~::e of physical goods and enjoyments. The elixir of the good elation of day-long theater, the mass jury service, the holding tum of offices, canvassing, electioneering, great festivals, even the of battle and naval combat-can be neither hoarded nor physi- possessed. True, the good life requires, "this is generally ad- " that the citizen have leisure in order to devote himself to the of the polis. Here again, slavery was part of the answer; another much more incisive part lay in the payment of all citizens for the

•u~,............... of public duties, or else, in not admitting artisans to citi- a measure Aristotle himself seemed to commend.

For yet another reason the problem of scarcity does not arise with ..;.,~~n+l"'. The economy-as the root of the word shows, a matter of domestic household or oikos-concerns directly the relationship of persons who make up the natural institution of the household. possessions, but parents, offspring and slaves constitute it. The · of gardening, breeding or other modes of production Aris- excluded from the purview of the economy. The emphasis is alto- institutional and only up to a point ecological, relegating tech- to the subordinate sphere of useful knowledge. Aristotle's of the economy would almost permit us to refer to it as an process through which sustenance is ensured. With a similar of phrasing, Aristotle may be said to put down the erroneous IOn,cet:lti.LOn of unlimited human wants and needs, or, of a general of goods, to two circumstances: first, the acquisition of food- through commercial traders, which introduces money-making the quest for subsistence; second, a false notion of the good life a utilitarian cumulation of physical pleasures. Given the right in-stitutions in trade and the right understanding of the good life, Aris- totle saw no room for the scarcity factor in the human economy. He did not fail to connect this with the existence of such institutions as slavery, infanticide and a way of life that discounts comfort. Short of this empirical reference his negation of scarcity might have been as dogmatic and as unfavorable to factual research as the scarcity postu- late is in our days. But with him, once and for all, human needs pre- supposed institutions and customs.

Aristotle's adherence to the substantive meaning of "economic" was basic to his total argument. For why did he have to probe into the economy at all? And why did he need to set in motion an array of argu- ments against the popular belief that the significance of that dimly apprehended field lay in the lure of wealth, an insatiable urge com- mon to the human frame? To what purpose did he develop a theorem comprising the origins of family and state, solely designed to demon- strate that human wants and needs are not boundless and that useful things are not, intrinsically, scarce? What was the motive behind this orchestration of an inherently paradoxical point which, moreover, must have appeared too speculative to be quite in keeping with his strongly empiricist bent?

The explanation is obvious. Two policy problems-trade and price -were pressing for an answer. Unless the question of commercial trade and the setting of prices could be linked to the requirements of com- munal existence and its self-sufficiency, there was no rational way of

judging of either, be it in theory or in practice. If such a link did offer, then the answer was simple: first, trade that served to restore self-suffi- ciency was "in accordance with nature"; trade that did not, was "con- trary to nature." Second, prices should be such as to strengthen the bond of community; otherwise exchange will not continue to take place and the community will cease to exist. The mediating concept was in either case the self-sufficiency of the community. The economy, then, consisted in the necessaries of life-grain, oil, wine, and the like -on which the community subsisted. The conclusion was stringent and no other was possible. So either the economy was about the ma- terial, substantive, things that sustained human beings, or else there was no empirically given rational link between matters such as trade and prices on the one hand, and the postulate of a self-sufficient com- munity, on the other. The logical necessity for Aristotle's insistence on the substantive meaning of "economic" is therefore evident.

also that astonishing attack on the Solonic poem in an over- of a treatise on economics.

Natural Trade and Just Price

trade, or, in our terms, market trade, arose as a bum-

issue out of the circumstances of the time. It was a disturbing

which could neither be placed, nor explained, nor judged ade-

. Money was now being earned by respectable citizens through

simple device of buying and selling. Such a thing had been un-

or rather, was restricted to low-class persons, known as bucks-

as a rule metics, who eked out a living by retailing food in the

place. Such individuals did make a profit by buying at one price

selling at another. Now this practice had apparently spread to the

of good standing, and big sums of money were made by this

..,L.."'"' formerly stamped as disreputable. How should the phenome- 11

itself be classified? How should profit, systematically made in this ,......"~·, be operationally explained? And what judgment should be

on such an activity?

The origin of market institutions is in itself an intricate and ob-

subject. It is hard to trace their historical beginnings with pre- and even harder to follow the stages by which early forms of

developed into market trade.

Aristotle's analysis struck to the root. By calling commercial trade

rcapew~~e-·no name had yet been given to it-he intimated that it was nothm1e.: new, except for the proportions it assumed. It was huckster- written large. The money was made "off" each other (ap'aiielon),

the surcharging methods so often met with in the market place. Aristotle's point, inadequate though such a notion of mutual sur- was, reflected a crucial phase of transition in the history of the economy: the juncture at which the institution of the market

to move into the orbit of trade.

One of the first city markets, if not the very first, was no other than

.

·the agora in Athens. Nothing indicates that it was contemporaneous

with the founding of the city. The first authentic record of the agora ·:is of the fifth century when it was already definitely established, though still contentious. Throughout the course of its early history · the use of small coin and the retailing of food went together. Its be-ginnings in Athens should therefore coincide with the minting of obols sometime in the early sixth century. On Asian territory it may have had a precursor in Sardis, the Lydian capital, to all accounts a thoroughly Greek type of city. Here again pioneering in small change marks the trail, especially if we include as we should, the use of gold dust. On this point Herodotus leaves little doubt. The Midas legend dates the presence in Phrygia of large amounts of river gold about 715, while in Sardis the market place itself was crossed by a gold-bearing stream, the Pactolus. In Herodotus' birthplace, Halicarnassus, stood that huge monument to Alyattes to the cost of which the love trade of Lydian girls had so generously contributed, while Gyges, founder of the Mermnade dynasty, appears to have initiated the coinage of elek- tron. Alyattes' son, Croesus, adorned Delphi with the splendor of his massive gold gifts. No beads or shells that might be employed as money stuffs are known from Asia Minor; the mention of gold dust is therefore crucial. The probability is strong that the twin Lydian inno-

vations of coinage and the retailing of food were introduced together in Athens. They were not yet inseparable by any means. Aegina, which preceded Athens in matters of coinage, may have used coins only in foreign trade. The same might be true of the Lydian coins, while gold dust circulated in the food market and in love deals. Up to this day the market place in Bida, capital of Nupe, in Nigeria, is said to tum after midnight into a place of mercenary sociability, with gold dust presumably circulating as money. In Lydia, too, the presence of gold dust may have induced the retailing of food in the market. Attica followed in its wake, but replaced the specks of gold by fractions of obols of silver.

Broadly, coins spread much faster than markets. While trade was abounding and money as a standard was common, markets were fewand far between.

By the end of the fourth century Athens was famous for her com- mercial agora, where anyone could buy a meal cheaply. Coinage had spread like wildfire, but outside of Athens the market habit was not particularly popular. During the Peloponnesian War fleets of sutlers accompanied the navy, for the troops could only exceptionally rely on subsisting from local markets. As late as the beginning of the fourth century the Ionian countryside possessed no regular food markets. The

chief promoters of markets were at that time the Greek armies, notably the mercenary troops now more and more frequently employed as a venture. The traditional self-equipping hoplite army had been

only in brief campaigns on a sack of barley meal brought along home. By the turn of the fifth century regular expeditionary were formed, only the cadres of which consisted of Spartan or citizens while the bulk was recruited from abroad. The em- of such a force, especially if it was supposed to cross friendly raised logistic problems, on which scholarly generals were

to comment.

tracts offer many instances of the actual and the ideal

assigned to the market in the new strategy. The food market from the troops could provision themselves from the hand money due from their C. 0. (unless local requisitioning was practicable) part of a broader issue-the sale of booty, especially slaves and as well as provisioning from sutlers who followed the army in hope of profit. It all boiled down to so many market problems. ,....,.......·..,'F> each we have evidence of organizational and financial ac- initiated by kings, generals or governments responsible for the undertaking. The campaign itself was quite often no more a rationalized booty raid, if not of the renting out of an army to

some foreign government for the benefit of the home country financed the venture on business grounds. Military efficiency, of was the paramount requirement. An expedition's sale of booty, only for reasons of military tactics, formed as much part of efficiency

did the regular provisioning of the troops, while it avoided, as far as be, the antagonizing of friendly neutrals. Go-ahead generals de- up-to-date methods of stimulating local market activities, financ-

sutlers to wait upon the troops, and engaging local craftsmen in mn.rr,ncl'•n markets for the supply of armaments. They boosted market and market services by all means at their disposal, however tentative and hesitant local initiative sometimes may have been. There in effect, but little reliance on the spontaneous business spirit of the residents. The Spartan government sent a civilian commission of :"booty sellers" along with the king who commanded the army in the field. Their task was to have the captured slaves and cattle auctioned on the spot. King Agesilaos busied himself to have markets "prepared," ~·set up," and "offered" to his troops by the friendly cities along his prospective itinerary. In the Cyropaedian utopia, Xenophon described . how any trader who wished to accompany the army and needed money for supplies, would go to the commander and, after giving references as to his reliability, would be advanced money out of a fund kept for that purpose. (Cyr. VI ii 38f). Around that time Timotheus, the Athenian general, heedful of the sutlers' financial needs, acted on lines similar to Xenophon's educational novel. In the Olynthian war (364 B.c.), having substituted copper for silver in paying his soldiers, he persuaded the traders to accept it from the soldiers at that value, firmly promising them that it will be accepted from them at that rate for the purchase of booty, and that anything left over after purchasing booty would be redeemed in silver. (Ps. Arist. Oecon. II 23 a). It all goes to show how small the reliance on local markets still was, both as a means of provisioning and as a vent for booty unless fostered by the military.

Local markets, then, in Aristotle's time were a delicate growth. They were put up on occasion, in an emergency or for some definite purpose and not unless political expediency so advised. Nor does the local food market present itself in any way as an organ of long-distance trade. Separation of trade and market is the rule.

The institution which eventually was to link the two, the supply- demand-price mechanism, was unknown to Aristotle. It was of course the true originator of these commercial practices which were now be- coming noticeable in trade. Traditionally, trade carried no taint of commerce. In its origins a semi-warlike occupation, it never cut loose from governmental associations, apart from which but little trading could take place under archaic conditions. Gain sprang from booty and gifts (whether voluntary or blackmailed), public honors and prizes, the golden crown and the land grant bestowed by prince or city, the arms and luxuries acquired-the kerdos of the Odyssey. Between all this and the local food market of the polis there was no physical connection. The Phoenician emporos would display his treasures and trinkets at the prince's palace or the manorial hall, while the crew would settle down to grow their own food on foreign soil-a yearly turnover. Later forms of trade ran in administrative grooves, smoothed by the urbanity of port of trade officialdom. Customary and treaty prices loomed large. The trader, unless compensated from commission fees, would make his "gain" from the proceeds of the imports that were the trophy of the venture.

Treaty prices were matters of negotiation, with much diplomatic higgling-haggling to precede them. Once a treaty was established, bar- gaining was at an end. For treaty meant a set price at which trading took its course. As there was no trade without treaty, so the existence treaty precluded the practices of the market. Trade and markets not only different locations, status and personnel, they differed also

ethos and organization.*

We can not yet tell for certain, when and in what form higgling-

. and gain made on prices entered the realm of trade, as implied . Even in the absence of international markets gain made in trade had been normal. There can be no doubt however, that sharp eye of the theoretician had discerned the links between the tricks of the huckster in the agora and novel kinds of trading that were the talk of the day. But the gadget that established kinship-the supply-demand-price mechanism-escaped Aristotle. distribution of food in the market allowed as yet but scant room the play of that mechanism; and long-distance trade was directed by individual competition, but by institutional factors. Nor were local markets or long-distance trade conspicuous for the fluctua- of prices. Not before the third century B.c., was the working of a v-ut:uJtauu-u,uce mechanism in international trade noticeable. This llnn,en~:d in regard to grain, and later, to slaves, in the open port of The Athenian agora preceded, therefore, by some two centuries setting up of a market in the Aegean which could be said to embody a market mechanism. Aristotle, writing in the second half of this period, n:;~;.;u~·u·.~"d the early instances of gain made on price differentials for the symptomatic development in the organization of trade which they a~.:LuallV were. Yet in the absence of price-making markets he would seen nothing but perversity in the expectation that the new urge money making might conceivably serve a useful purpose. As to ........~,·,"• his famous commendation of peaceful strife had never trans- fcend<~d the prizes of premarket competition on the manorial level- praise for the potter, a joint for the lumberman, a gift to the singer who

Exchange of Equivalencies

This should dispose of the notion that Aristotle was offering in his ·Ethics a theory of prices. Such a theory is indeed central to the under- standing of the market, the main function of which is to produce a price that balances supply and demand. None of these concepts, how-

ever, was familiar to him.

The postulate of self-sufficiency implied that such trade as was re- quired to restore autarchy was natural and, therefore, right. Trade went with acts of exchange which again implied a definite rate at which the exchange was to take place. But how to fit acts of barter into a frame- work of community? And, if barter there was, at what rate was it to be performed?

As to the origin of barter, nothing could appeal less to the philoso-

pher of gemeinschaft than the Smithian propensity allegedly in-

herent in the individual. Exchange, Aristotle said, sprang from the

needs of the extended family the members of which originally used

things in common which they owned in common. When their numbers

increased and they were compelled to settle apart, they found them-

selves short of some of the things they formerly used in common and

had therefore to acquire the needed things from amongst each other.~> 6

This amounted to a mutual sharing. Briefly, reciprocity in sharing

7

was accomplished through acts of barter. Hence exchange.

The rate of exchange must be such as to maintain the community. Again, not the interests of the individuals, but those of the community were the governing principle. The skills of persons of different status had to be exchanged at a rate proportionate to the status of each: the builder's performance exchanged against many times the cobbler's per- formance; unless this was so, reciprocity was infringed and the com- munity would not hold.9 *

Aristotle offered a formula by which the rate (or price) is to be set: it is given by the point at which two diagonals cross, each of them

11

representing the status of one of the two parties.

determined by four quantities-two on each diagonal. The method is obscure, the result incorrect. Economic analysis represented the four determinative quantities with correctness and precision by pointing out the pair of indices on the demand curve, and the pair of indices on the supply curve, which are determinative of the price that clears the market. The crucial difference was that the modern economist was aiming at a description of the formation of prices in the market, while such a thought was far from Aristotle's mind. He was busied with the quite different and essentially practical problem of providing a formula by which the price was to be set.

Surprisingly enough, Aristotle seemed to see no other difference between set price and bargained price than a point of time, the former there before the transaction took place, while the latter emerged

12

The bargained price, he insisted, would tend to be because it was agreed to when the demand was not yet satis- This in itself should be sufficient proof of Aristotle's naivete con- the working of the market. He apparently believed that the

set price must be different from the bargained one.

The set price, besides its justness, also offered the advantage of natural trade apart from unnatural trade. Since the aim of trade is exclusively to restore self-sufficiency, the set price en- this through its exclusion of gain. Equivalencies-as we will call the set rate-serve therefore to safeguard "natural" The bargained price might yield a profit to one of the parties at expense of the other, and thus undermine the coherence of the

instead of underpinning it.

To the modern market-adjusted mind the chain of thought here

mt~seJGted and ascribed to Aristotle must appear as a series of paradoxes: It implies the ignoring of the market as a vehicle of trade; of price 'tu•u•••L.,.un as a function of the market; of any other function of trade that of contributing to self-sufficiency; of the reasons why set price differ from market-formed price, and why market prices should be expected to fluctuate; finally, of competition as the device that pro- a price unique in that it clears the market and can therefore be

retJ•anlerl as the natural rate of exchange.

Instead, market and trade are here thought of as separate and dis-

institutions; prices, as produced by custom, law or proclamation; trade, as "unnatural"; the set price, as "natural"; fluctuation of as undesirable; and the natural price, far from being an im- personal appraisal of the goods exchanged, as expressing the mutual

·estimation of the statuses of the produ~rs.

For the resolution of these apparent contradictions the concept of

.equivalencies enters as crucial.

In the key passage on the origin of exchange (aiiage) Aristotle gave

.perfect precision to that basic institution of archaic society-exchange of equivalencies. The increase in the size of the family spelt the end of their self-sufficiency. Lacking one thing or another, they had to rely on one another for supply. Some barbarian peoples, Aristotle said, still practice such exchange in kind "for such people are expected to give in exchange necessaries of life for other necessaries of life, for example, wine for corn, as much as required in the circumstances and no more, handing over the one and taking the other in return, and so with each of

the staples of the sort. The practice of barter of this manner and type

was not, therefore, contrary to nature, nor was it a branch of the art of

wealth-getting, for it was instituted for the restoring of man's natural

13

that ali householders had a claim to share in the necessary staples at given rates, in exchange for such staples as they themselves happened to possess. For no one was expected to give away his goods for the ask- ing, receiving nothing in return; indeed, the indigent who possessed no equivalent to offer in exchange had to work off his debt (hence the great social importance of the institution of debt bondage). Thus barter derived from the institution of sharing of the necessities of life; the purpose of barter was to supply ali householders with those neces- sities up to the level of sufficiency; it was institutionalized as an obliga- tion of householders to give of their surplus to any other householder who happened to be short of that definite kind of necessary, at his request, and to the extent of his shortage, but only to that extent; the exchange was made at the established rate (equivalency) against other staples of which the householder happened to have a supply. In so far as legal terms are applicable to so primitive conditions, the obligation of the householder was directed towards a transaction in kind, limited in extent to the claimant's actual need, performed at equivalency rates by exclusion of credit, and comprising ali staples.

In the Ethics, Aristotle stressed that in spite of the equivalency of goods exchanged, one of the parties benefited, namely, the one who felt compelied to suggest the transaction. Nevertheless, in the long run, the procedure amounted to a mutual sharing, since at another time it was the other's turn to benefit by the chance. "The very exist- ence of the state depends on such acts of proportionate reciprocity ... failing which no sharing happens, and it is the sharing which binds us together. This is why we set up a shrine of the Graces in a public place to remind men to return a kindness; for that is a special characteristic of Grace, since it is a duty not only to repay a service done one, but

14

self-sufficiency ."

The institution of equivalency exchange was designed to ensure

another time to take the initiative in doing a service onesel£." Nothing, I feel, could show better the meaning of reciprocity than this elaboration. It might be calied reciprocity on the square. Exchange is here viewed as part of reciprocity behavior in contrast to the marketing view which invested barter with the qualities which are the very reverse generosity and grace that accompanied the idea of reciprocity. ut for these strategic passages, we might still be unable to identify vital institution of archaic society, in spite of the sheaves of docu- tary evidence unearthed by archaeologists within the last two or generations. Figures representing mathematical rates between of goods of different kinds were throughout translated by Orien- as "price." For markets were assumed as a matter of course. those figures connoted equivalencies quite unconnected with and market prices, their quality of fixedness being an inborn not implying any antecedent fluctuations brought to an end by process of "setting" or "fixing" as the phrase seems to imply.

...n~~~,- itself betrays us here.

The Texts

This is not the place to elaborate on the numerous points at which presentation differs from previous ones. However, in brief we must back to the texts themselves. Almost inevitably an erroneous view been formed of the subject matter of Aristotle's discourse. Com- trading, which was taken to be that subject, was, as it now just only beginning to be practiced in his time. Not Ham- _____.._,,_ Babylonia, but the Greek-speaking fringe of Western Asia with Greece herself were responsible for that development- over a thousand years afterward. Aristotle could not, therefore, been describing the working of a developed market mechanism discussing its effects on the ethics of trade. Again, it follows that of his key terms, notably kapelike, metadosis and chrematis- were misinterpreted in translation. Sometimes the error becomes . Kapelike was rendered as the art of retail trade instead of the of "commercial trade," chrematistike as the art of money-making of that of supply, i.e., the procuring of the necessaries of life kind. In another instance, the distortion is manifest: metadosis was to be exchange or barter, while patently meaning its opposite,

, "giving one's share."

Briefly, in sequence:

Kapelike, grammatically denotes the art of the kapelos. The mean- of kapelos as used by Herodotus in the middle of the fifth century,

broadly established as some kind of retailer, especially of food, a of a cook shop, a seller of foodstuffs and cooked food. The in-vention of coined money was linked by Herodotus with the fact that the Lydians had turned kapeloi. Herodotus also recounts that Darius was nicknamed kapelos. Indeed, under him military stores may have

15

Unfortunately, this still leaves the Aristotelian meaning of the word kapelike wide open. The suffix -ike indicates "art of," and so makes kapelike signify the art of the kapelos. Actually, such a word was not in use; the dictionary mentions only one instance (apart from Aristotle) and in this instance it designates, as one would expect, the "art of retailing." How, then, did Aristotle come to introduce it as the heading for a subject of the first magnitude noways restricted to retail trading. namely, commercial trade? For that and no other is without any pos- sible doubt the subject of his discourse.

The answer is not hard to find. In his passionate diatribe against gainful trading Aristotle was using kapelike with an ironical overtone. Commercial trade was of course, not huckstering; nor was it retail trading; and whatever it was, it deserved to be called some form or variant of emporia which was the regular name for seafaring trade, together with any other form of large-scale or wholesale trade. When Aristotle referred specifically to the various kinds of maritime trade, he fell back on emporia, in the usual sense. Why, then, did he not do so in the main theoretical analysis of the subject but use instead a new- fangled word of pejorative connotation?

Aristotle enjoyed inventing words, and his humor, if any, was Shavian. The figure of the kapelos was an unfailing hit of the comic stage. Aristophanes in his Acharnians had made his hero turn kapelos and in that guise earn the solemn praises of the chorus which lauded him as the philosopher of the day. Aristotle wished drastically to con- vey his unimpressedness with the nouveaux riches and the allegedly esoteric sources of their wealth. Commercial trade was no mystery.

When all is said, it was but huckstering written large. · Chrematistike was deliberately employed by Aristotle in the literal sense of providing for the necessaries of life, instead of its usual mean- ing of "money-making." Laistner rendered it correctly as "the art of supply," and Ernest Barker in his commentary recalled the original sense of chremata, which, he warned, was not money, but the neces- saries themselves, an interpretation also upheld by Defourny and by Finley in an unpublished lecture. Indeed, with Aristotle the on the nonmonetary meaning of chremata was logically unavoid- since he held on to the autarchy postulate which was pointless

of a naturalistic interpretation of wealth.

signal error in rendering metadosis as "exchange" in the

crucial passages of the Politics and the Ethics cut deeper stillY' case of metadosis Aristotle kept to the common meaning of the It was the translators who brought in an arbitrary interpretation. archaic society of common feasts, raiding parties, and other acts help and practical reciprocity the term metadosis possessed operational connotation-it signified "giving a share," espe- to the common pool of food, whether a religious festivity, a cere- meal, or other public venture was in question. That is the meaning of metadosis. Its etymology underlines the uni- character of the giving, contributing, or sharing operation. Yet are faced with the astonishing fact that in the translation of these in which Aristotle insisted on the derivation of exchange from .......v"'"· this term was rendered as "exchange" or "barter," which it into its opposite. This practice was sanctioned by the leading , which recorded s. v. metadosis those crucial three passages exceptions! Such a deviation from the plain text is understandable as an expression of the marketing bias of latter-day translators, at this point were unable to follow the meaning of the text. .......a . . ~•" to them was a natural propensity of men and stood in no of explanation. But even assuming it did, it certainly could not sprung from metadosis in its accepted meaning of "giving a share." they rendered metadosis by "exchange," and thus turned statement into an empty truism. This mistake endangered the whole edifice of Aristotle's economic thought at the pivotal point. By his derivation of exchange from "giving one's share" Aristotle pro- vided a logical link between his theory of the economy in general and the practical questions at issue. Commercial trade, we recall, he re· garded as an unnatural form of trade; natural trade was gainless since it merely maintained self-sufficiency. In support of this he could effec- tively appeal to the circumstance that, to the limited amount needed to maintain self-sufficiency, and only to that amount, exchange in kind was still widely practiced by some barbarian peoples in regard to the necessaries of life, at set equivalences, benefiting at one time the one,

at another time the other, as chance would have it. Thus the derivation of exchange from contributing one's share to the common pool of food was the linchpin that held together a theory of the economy based on the postulate of self-sufficiency of the community and the distinc- tion between natural and unnatural trade. But all this appeared so foreign to the marketing mind that translators took refuge in turning the text upside down, eventually losing their hold of the argument. Perhaps the most daring thesis of Aristotle, which up to this day must stagger the thinking mind by sheer force of originality, was in this manner reduced to a platitude that, had it carried any definite meaning at all, would have been rejected by him as a shallow view of the ultimate forces on which the human economy rested.

Aztec-Maya; Dahomey; Berber; India

Anthropology as History

A BOOK on the economy in early societies must call upon the data ,.,.... L ...••~•and social anthropology along with those of history. In both man's experience with substantive economies finds its record. varied and often strange patterns of economic action described in One of this book have already suggested rethinking of some con- and definitions in economic theory, signaling as they do the in- . of that theory outside the marketing system of the

Western nineteenth century.

The Empirical Approach

For its part, but without the written documents of history, anthro- has amassed an immense record of scattered and haphazard about man's behavior with things for use, subsistence and con- onrpti·cm and about his relationships with his fellows over such things. is well to know something of the lessons that the field work of ilthror:•olc>2:is:ts teaches and to explore the implications of that work any new economic discipline which should analyze and generalize data. Gathering of empirical data in the field, picking up economic without separation from other information, treating them in the · or social context in which they were met, covers a hundred or more of experience in anthropology. Its theorizing, busy with processes, the similarities and differences among cultures, addressed itself thus to what it found rather than to deducible consequences of any first principles of human nature. Anthropology, as we learn in another chapter of this book,* felt no need for economic theory and did not seek to discover any of those principles of human action such as economic theory's rationalizing, or economizing, to establish them as central. It turned instead to the dynamics of the emergence of cultural content.

This experience of first recording and next trying to understand man's endlessly multifarious behavior and his many systems of motives, products of his various cultures and civilizations, confirms anthropology in its kinship with such an empirical discipline as history. Empiricism continues to separate them among the social sciences from such emi- nently conceptualizing disciplines as economics, political science or sociology. It means for both anthropology and history that the burden of proof is shouldered by him-a Kroeber, a Darwin, a Toynbee-who should assert a comparison or identify a common process or claim dis- covery of a universally unfolding law working out many times in the record. It has made further them kin in that both disciplines must deal in time sequences, must treat past and present, must seek recurrences, parallels, convergences. Both deal with events and occurrences, not with man's nature or the timeless necessities.

The comparative, temporal, empirical and processual bent of mod- em anthropology makes it nevertheless complementary to a compara- tive sociology and social psychology of the world's peoples, past and present. It is pressing upon its neighbor disciplines the recognition of the sweeping force and pervasive results of cultural process and thereby transcending traditional sociology's and psychology's concentration on contemporary Western man and his society. The same empirical bent also nourished anthropology's essential kinship with history and pre- history. Anthropology's great archeological branch treats trends and processes in the cultural record of peoples whose achievements lie not in writing but in the mute artifacts of the ruins they have left behind. That elder branch of the subject still continues today to extend back- ward the so-called "ethnographic present," the time of first European contact with the world's non-Western peoples, and so to join the pres- ent to the past history of all mankind. Anthropology, indeed, maintains its original three branches intact even today. Cultural anthropology, archeology, and physical anthropology-the original interest in man's up from the animals-still interfertilize. It is this very proces- and temporal concern, this comparison of past and present, which

them together.

triple experience of the three branches of anthropology, scan-

processes in past and contemporary peoples for parallels, differ- and convergences in the record of man's cultural achievement, to be connected to the difficulties for economic theory to which

systems give rise. Much already partly tested theory is to be from the work of anthropologists to date on this record of man's · . If it mostly does not distinguish man's "economic" activity his action in other fields, nevertheless it is specifically relevant, it touches upon those alternate substantively economic patterns concern us in this book. Much of what anthropologists have about man's culture apart from economic institutions is in point when we turn to the particular questions which arise of his many different ways of treating goods and goods-handlers and

Admittedly, there is as yet no body of generalizations that treats ,...,v•.•v•......." behavior from the specifically anthropological point of Instead, we possess a vast body of diverse data about the various · and motives with which non-Western peoples' livelihood is and in which goods pass from hand to hand, move into distribu- among new persons, and in new modes of consumption. Karl

· has already devised an at least tentative classification of these ways of goods-handling; in broad outline, reciprocative, redis- and marketing systems can be distinguished.* They are by no mutually exclusive, nor do they claim to be exhaustive. Yet empirical classification for descriptive purposes is useful; it is a breakthrough from nonempirical and a priori interpretations, and implications and ramifications, as well as its limitations, will occupy

in many sections of this book.

Were anthropologists in their turn to attempt even the first step in cep,tmth.z:.ing the data, they too would probably turn to consideration

arrangements, forms of interpersonal relationship, and self- ......,....,-..... logics based on them. In this lies a most important con- . . . ""'"Ul;..:; among the empirically-minded social sciences of the present And if anthropologists were to move in this direction, they too be forced to read those "economic" patterns of behavior and motive against the same general view of society that another chapter of this book has elevated to a central tenet of modern sociology.* They would start with society as a system in which "the units . . . are not individuals, but patterns of interaction"** of persons with one another. Not free human nature, nor free individuals, nor even any hard and

fast psychological attributes of man, within his biological and physio-. logical limits as an animal, give the anthropologist his starting point. In treating any culture patterns, even those of economic institutions, the anthropologist selects these "patterns of interaction" to begin with, not because they are logically prior, but because they are empirically decisive in those comparisons of present and past to which he subjects

his data.

Not many anthropologists have yet begun to take this step explicitly

in regard to economic data. Chapple and Coon in Principles of Anthro- pology, 1942, seem to be the first to attempt it. Firth seems to sense its necessity, as it is implicit in the efforts of British social anthropology. "Economic anthropology," to date, is not yet a reality. It is still freeing itself from the belief that other chapters in this book demolish, that . economic theory itself already has something to offer for an easy ex- planation of other economic systems than the market system of the recent West. The first generalizer, Herskovits, now asserts allegiance to formal economic theory and has tried a reduction of the data in that direction, away from the attempts of Mauss, after Durkheim, in which the early French ethnologists discovered empirical regularities in the reciprocities of gift-giving. But even Herskovits must continually stop to point out how little the categories of economic theory and the con- cerns of rationalizing and economizing which it follows out to their logical end help with ordering the ethnographers' data and how differ· ent, deviant, and quite outside the motivational categories of rational action in the market are the behaviors and motives with which he must deal.***

Yet anthropology is deeply committed to this priority of social patterns in any scheme for the understanding of the substantive econ· omies of the human record. Our discipline is preconditioned to derive specific motivations, whether "economic" or otherwise, from such arrangements rather than from abstract human nature or needs. But it also sees these patterns and arrangements as historically achieved than as consequences of the play of general forces of human or circumstance, as the economist might view them. Anthro- expects the social arrangements underlying economic behaviors

motives to be particular human inventions of historical times and It expects social and economic inventions, like technical and ones (of which we have a better record so far), to have spread

combined in diffusions, evolutions and convergences and to con- to do so today and in the future, rather than simply to prove · to the effects of universal processes of association, as soci- sees them. This processual bent of anthropology has substantial '11'-"'""'.."• as we shall see. It makes of the interpretation of non- economic data a vitally historical, even "culturological" pur-

rather than a psychological, economic, or sociological one.

the anthropologist must not only identify the social arrange- of human interaction and organization as invented and patterned culture that explains economic behaviors and motives, but he must account for its presence. For him a common denominator of action, such as reciprocations or redistributions, with their mechanisms of trade or forms of money use, is both an ar- t of human interactions and an institutional import of a new ergem~e among the people where he happens to find it. He must for its being there, historically and geographically. He must for it functionally, that is, for its connection with the other of the people's culture of that time and place. He must add the reasons for its presence the functions it performs and the values embodies for those who act it out and by which it is kept alive, nctiorted as custom, and transmitted as Kulturgut of their cultural He must account for its continuation then and there, as

He cannot always do the first accounting, of course. Ethnographic are haphazard and even written history must be finely sifted our knowledge of the presence of any particular institution or pattern grows firm. For many of the inventions and institutions interest us today, "origins" are lost in the mists of time and in endless successions and transformations of cultural evolution. But anthropologist must try. For a culture pattern is a concrete thing, presence or absence is an historical fact and whose emergence is

event.

He cannot always do the second thing either; but he can try to spell out its contemporary functions. For a culture pattern coexists with others and it supports or opposes the others in some sort of integration or lack of it. Such integration possesses details and has a structure that is important for the continuation of a culture and society and the integration has form and laws of being which the social sciences are un- certainly exploring. An imperative rests upon an anthropologist, whether or not he is explicitly a social anthropologist committed to functionalism or other special theories of cultural or social integration, to spell out in faithful, empirical detail all observable and checkable dovetailing of transmitted action, interaction, meaning and context which makes up any culture pattern, social, lingual, or technical.

And he cannot always do the third thing: account historically for the continuation of a pattern he has identified and interpreted. Yet here again he must continue to try, for human culture, like other animals' behavior, is adaptive, functional for survival, and presumably even rewarding. Its continuance rests upon its successful transmission to the new generations who must use it and pass it on in turn. Its further elaboration seems at least in good part to come from the further gains it yields. The anthropologist exploring culture patterns, including those behind variant non-Western economic behaviors, must treat the rise and fall of his subject matter as an historian accounts in his field for the growth and decline of institutions and empires.

To see social arrangements, then, as prior to economic actions, institutions, and value and motive schemes, and to see them specifically as culture patterns, that is, as contrivances and devices man has achieved with the human material given by the existence and the characteristics of his fellow human beings, is not merely the bias with which anthro- pology will take its next steps into the explanation of the record of substantive economics. It is not merely the occupational bias which anthropologists bring to any experience, as one might perhaps surmise. It is one grand view imposed on all social science analysts, from the discovery of the three first categories of substantive economies prior to this book/ through the sociologists here, to the work of others here and yet to come. It may well be, moreover, the view to which empirical discoveries are impelling us all.

Note that sociologists often write as if the priority of the presence or absence of particular social arrangements over economic actions and motivations of a particular kind were a matter of logical premise in the world-view of their discipline. So it is, of course, when a theory social system, or of the economic system, "embedded" in the system, is under construction. In another view, however, particu- . arrangements are the empirical controlling elements, and their is one of relevance, perhaps even of causation. The real issue the deductive theories deriving economic action from man's or gain-seeking faculties and the findings of the newer social is only half stated when the sociologist limits himself to insist- that his science has taught him to see economic behaviors depend- upon the social systems in which they are "embedded." For anthro- finds these systems in turn dependent upon, and serving to particular patterns or inventions of human interactional and arrangement and its symbolization, achieved in time and place, way that technology or science also depend upon and unite the particular inventions of mankind's variously unfolding develop-

Using social arrangements as a frame of reference, then, and seeking out by an operational method that extracts them as common · in the data of action and motive, are not merely biases or ,..v.,v~-...,.._a. premises in anthropology and the newer social science turning to the comparative record. They are discoveries already about the relevant priorities of phenomena in our science. institutionally operational method working with nonmarket eco- data is very much akin, as we shall see, to other contemporary in social science. It makes the same path as has anthropology a discovery of the common-denominator patterns of arrangement,

.....,,i-'"'"" and form in human interpersonal action.

In other branches of social science today these patterns seem to

out to be the things controlling human motives and human insti-

action. I have tried elsewhere to show their force in the small

2 and short-term attitude and behavior of industrial relations,

George Romans has documented their determination of group

and attitude in the wide range of studies of social behavior

3 accomplished by observational and empirical methods, and

* reminds us of the central place of these arrangements in cur- social system theory with Parsons and its other formulators. It is a:mtmr1abory discovery, indeed, that in the non-Western economic we have before us here the same priority of relevance faces us. In the Berber markets, in the Indian redistributions, in the African and American "ports of trade" which find review here, we have had again and again to seek out these patterns and to dig down into the arrange- ments of action between persons before we could go on to search for an explanation of the motives of our actors, the values which prompt them, the circumstances they cope with, or the gains they win. We had again and again to connect these backward to common-denomi- nator patterns of action before we could structure all these things into a representation and interpretation of the institutions the record gives us.

And we have had to do all this comparatively. Our common, emerg- ing social science is not an endless excavation of particular details alone, but like all science, a generalizing of probes, propositions, and proofs. If Arnold, Revere, and Chapman here find a common form of early trade in "the port of trade," in "weak hands" (to use Polanyi's apt phrases), in eighteenth century Dahomey, in Asia Minor three thou- sand years earlier, and pre-conquest Mesoamerica, or if Benet finds elements of "free markets" in an anarchic Barbary, we can be sure of these findings only because we can, in the end, demonstrate that com- mon patterns exist behind these things our authors describe and be- cause we can check the record for the known and specified arrangement of interpersonal action applying to any two of them despite their differences of setting and detail. Priority of one kind of datum over another is not a matter of disciplinary or philosophical affection for one kind of phenomenon over another. It is a matter of just such comparison, discovery and check among the observers of the run of cases. Just such comparison pushes us to the "scientific fact."

Stated baldly thus, and if our proofs are accepted and our "facts" are "true," there seems little to argue with in the discovery that social arrangements serve as a frame of reference to economic actions and motives. But to see these arrangements as culture, as human inventions, with anthropology, presents continuing difficulties, even in sociology. It finds it sometimes difficult to decide between the claims for prior relevance between these arrangements and "values" in the scheme of social system theory. We touch here on a great debate still raging everywhere in social science as it did once in philosophy. But the view of common denominator, social arrangements as culture patterns, de- rived from the experience of anthropology, comes to our rescue. In that view social arrangements make their own values in the process of be-coiJmn1gculture patterns, or "instituted." The evolution of a culture pat- is just such an emergence of summary and symbolizing values, t~J,.,. . . . . .""' vocabulary and concept about a new pattern of action, making ready for recognition, sanction, and transmission. Action comes first, anthropology's view of culture, whether it be the wheel, or divine , or parallel cousin marriage, and values come second in the evolutionary or diffusionary problems with which the science had to deal. In this anthropology repeats the discoveries of small and industrial studies, where new group norms and new shared i&LLnu·~..,., likewise arise out of changes in interpersonal and group action. a culture pattern is not complete, any more than an "institution" fully emerged, until the summarization, symbolization, and evalua- tion which crystallizes the connection between the new action and its :resultant values is achieved in a configuration which has won the instant · and the long term habit of the human actors who "carry

culture trait."

Read properly, then, social science's experience with "culture" and

"institutionalizing" a process, here the substantive goods-han- dlings of the "economic process," offers no difficulties in giving both historical and methodological priority to action over values. Much of the trouble with this discovery lies in our semantic training (we say we ••act out" a value) and in our philosophical tradition of idealism ("In the beginning was the Word."). The long squabble of idealism and realism haunts us unnecessarily. Anthropological experience with cul- ture shows the same phenomena of emergence as does sociological ex- perience with group process, though the data are different. What stands

. in the way of acceptance of the common finding seems to be a tendency to read the anthropologist's term "culture" as a synonym for the sociolo- gists' own word "values." Thus it is easy for sociologists, often assuming out of philosophic tradition that values ("common meanings" they

.. sometimes call them) are prior to social action-a tautology of long standing since "social" action is in tum the action based on "common

4

By the same route it is easy for sociologists-and many anthropolo- gists as well-to take another finding of our common social science, one equally important to our understanding of the nonmarket econ- omies under examination here, for an obstacle to following the his-torical and evolutionary emergence of culture patterns out of com- mon-denominator arrangements in the determination of economic (and other) institutions and values. Anthropology has discovered in its record of man's doings the process of cultural diffusion, by which two peoples come to share a trait or institution out of their contact with each other, and its counterpart, the process of cultural convergence or cultural parallelism, in which two peoples, in no contact, come to share a very like trait, too, but by a quite different route. Comparison of traits and patterns from people to people and time to time and place to place, the very comparison which yields us similar social arrange- ments behind widely separated civilizations in these pages, like the common "ports of trade" in distant Mesoamerica and Syria, has led us to these discoveries in dealing with all sorts of doings of man. It is not surprising that comparison has led to analogous discoveries once again when we have turned to explore the record of his economic acts. But too often both sociologists and anthropologists forget these proc- esses of culture and jump logically from the specificity of particular culture patterns to the uniqueness and integration of cultures as wholes. They read the discoveries of anthropology about "culture" or "values" to bar comparison or to license neglect of it, and to reify integrated "cultural wholes" and "social systems" into unique entities whose essences and consequences have no parallels anywhere. To·some of them, then, in this context to say that the prior social arrangements behind economic motive and behavior are culture patterns is tanta- mount, erroneously, to saying that no connections can be drawn at all between one people's institutions and the next.

There seems to be a tendency in social science today to condemn as idealistic and to impute to anthropologists a view according to which whole cultures are unique and the economic arrangements springing

up in them without parallel. This is the reading of culture which we are presently expounding as fallacious. We have already described how anthropology must of course explore the instant case and unravel the functional and other interconnections and integrations of traits within a culture, just as sociologists must always look from particular norms or processes to the whole social system before them. But to work out the place of a phenomenon in situ is another thing than to compare it with others; both things must be done in science and both yield knowledge. The experience of anthropology has always com- prised both. The discoveries of convergent evolution and diffusion in doings could not have taken place without ethnographic and comparisons.

Now the main point of anthropology, and of the work which has us to handle economic action and value as culture patterns, in this comparison of the common-denominator social arrange- and this discovery of the processes leading to the evolution of · from out of them. It is not any finding that economic in- ~uLJLvu", whether market ones or nonmarket ones, are culture traits they are), or that culture traits are expressions of values (a tautology which delights some anthropologists still), or that of social action are prior to values (which they are), or that arrangements and culture traits are the independent variables is true). It is rather that each term of the analysis leading to findings must have particular, empirical, historical documenta- Moreover, once this proof can be provided we can at once go on to depicting the processes which have given us the actual events past emergence of these institutions. It is in this way alone, in them as culture traits, that we can legitimately spell out the dynamics and reconstruct the true history of economic insti- . This dynamics and this rewon history is the best account we

ever have of their "origins."

Methodological Conclusions

The usefulness of the historical bent of anthropology and its ex- . with culture traits and processes is easy enough to see when treat institutional origins and history. Its insistence that action is to values is perhaps easier to accept in that context than is the • u • p a • . a u ...... discovery in social and group dynamics. Examples come enough from well-known history, where the painful searches re- here are in the long past. After all, a use of gold for personal 1nc.11ment rather than for collective worship had to exist in Europe in Spain before conquistadores should sack the New World for should corrupt "innocent" Indians to their gold lust. The course historical civilization and the diffusion of pecuniary values ran from to West, not the other way, as we all know. But the consequences this historical bent and the cultural experience for methods of re- indeed in the very analysis and comparison of diverse data of behavior and motive which fills the ethnographic and historical record, is not so easy to grasp or to accept. Nevertheless, a temporal, processual view of social arrangements, culture traits, and resultant institutions pervades the most basic operations of anthropological research and dominates the methods which have brought ethnographic data into accord with those of substantive economic analysis in these pages. In their most basic methods both anthropology and historical-institu- tional or substantive economics, at least as developed here, are proces- sual and operational. They share a realization that their compar~son, their synthesis, their structuring of their data must always reflect the particular observations of persons, times, and actions which their data-gatherers actually make. To demonstrate the existence of an eco- nomic institution of nonmarket kind, for example, Polanyi here and elsewhere must show both what was done and when and with and by whom. He must also show explicitly what was not there and when and by whom an action we might expect to take place did not occur, as he

does in showing that "sales" are not made to random demanders but only to recognized trading partners in reciprocal systems and that reciprocity exchanges involve merely appropriate and worthy, not equivalent unit-reckoned returns.* And he must show that these specifics of time, place, person, action, and quantification recur, repeat, grow standard, or come to be supplanted by others.

Anthropology's method with culture traits is equally specific, ob- servational, operational and processual. For traits of human social organization it must also specify who and who not does a thing, where and when, and where and when not, with what and without what else, at what rates of occurrence. It must also establish the regularities, the limits, and the restoring sanctions upon deviations, in order to demon- strate patterns of existence. And when it treats changes, it must touch the changes in these particulars as they arise, in new time and new circumstance.

This careful documentation of detail of observation and this em- pirical handling of events in time and this painful documentation of regularities of recurrence reflects not only the kinship of anthropology and institutional history but it also marks as well their common di- vergence from the formal and often timeless logic of economic theory and sociology alike. The doctrine of culture trait, like the concept of institution, rests upon experience which asks questions about function,

gain, conformity to man's nature, powers or needs, after and not before details of observation about man's behavior have been taken up,

ordered, synthesized, classified and recognized.

is an especially important theoretic and methodological point. we come to the problem of functional equivalency among traits institutions in different societies and cultures, it may become . To the anthropologist a social arrangement ("real culture," e.g., polygyny), a culture pattern (i.e., one of "ideal" culture, e.g., but not rigorously observed monogamy), an institution (e.g., bride-price, usury) exists in its own right and has form, struc- and characteristics independent of functions and relationships other social or cultural data. Such real things-concrete inven- ordering persons, acts, symbols, etc., into patterns of unique Lt;u\,;c;--...Jua••~"' in function, take on or lose functions from time to people to people, just as they accrete or slough off their other elements. A social arrangement, a culture trait, an institution defined exclusively or even primarily by its function, and the first

to know about it is not what it does for men or society. The first to know is how it operates within itself and how it carne to be. then can one ask what its functions are now, were once, and may be in the future. Moreover, of course, not its functions but its give it the character by which the observers (ourselves) and the ("the natives") recognize and value it, and the question of just function it performs is an empirical one to be solved by further

not an answer deduced from the essence of the thing.

Thus in anthropology and history to analyze an institution as a event rather than-as in economics or sociology-to explore in general terms as a functional equivalent for doing what is done something else in another society or other circumstances is to ask questions and to work toward different answers however

--·-l--- the ultimate knowledge may prove to be.

For the anthropological view of the evolution of traits, like the his- view of institutions, is that the functions they perform and the they bring do not in themselves call these things into being account for their continuance. Necessity is not the mother of in- nor is reward its father. The two together may remain child- Inventions are rather events of discovery or creation, whether they technical or institutional, and they make good their new trending or arrangement of persons, materials, and actions per saiturn into

new configurations of achieved form which make of culture traits new emergences. Once the jump is made, and the new form attained, then functional serviceability and sometimes unexpectedly huge gain confirm the existence of the new trait and work strongly to elaborate and to extend it. But the record is replete with trends not so consum- mated and with jumps approached but never made.

Consciousness of emergence, and the combination of temporal and formal observations which have yielded it out of ethnographic data, is another of the empirical discoveries of anthropology which make it different from the system-building disciplines of sociology and eco- nomics. It is a discovery, too, which enforces, as we shall see presently, the quite other than simply functional method which the research of this book on the ethnographic record of man's substantive economic behavior has had to carry out.

Thus the search for the ordering similarities in economic matters of ethnographic and historical record which is the latter-day equivalent ' of the old-fashioned study of the origins of economic institutions, and .· which has motivated our studies is not by any means merely a search for alternate ways in which man has solved his universal problems. It is not a study of the functional equivalents of our economic institutions in other cultures and societies. It is doubtful indeed whether beyond subsistence man has had any universal economic problems; rather his problems arise, like his values, from his institutions and their evolu- tions. To restrict a study of economic institutions to the functional equivalents among societies, and to neglect the discovery that they are also in part culture patterns and behave like these, would be to fal- sify the facts. Rather, the facts of economic evolution resemble in great measure the facts of cultural evolution.

The facts of cultural evolution are not, as it may seem, that most cultures and most societies have developed alternate ways of doing much the same thing and that different economic institutions are noth- ing but different cultural devices for winning a livelihood, meeting scarcities, spreading goods about, effecting necessary exchanges. There is danger here of meekly surrendering to empty truisms, since all cul- tures survive for a time in an environment and most of their people stay alive on the goods somehow brought to them. The facts of cultural evolution instead tell us that some peoples in some real past events by chance and hard thought have combined specific prior actions and relationships in new ways or experimented with new ones. Their new combination of old ways, their new mvention out of former materials ueattn(:a or diffused to them, was not independent of their old

but it was nevertheless a jump into the unknown. Culture pat- like all inventions, recombine both old and new; they have both which is specific and limited, and a future of uncharted di- and promises. A new pattern, newly emergent, of course, takes on functions, established connections with the older social cultural order, brings gains and rewards which confirm its dis- in its use. Each new advance in mastery of it, each rewarded use, brings greater and greater reward, for a time, and in this culture is functional in the adaptive sense as well as in the inte- one. The people among whom our innovation spreads soon to experience and value unexpected consequences in greater and rewards as they also begin to encounter unexpected pains and in their expanding use of a new technique, a new art or ~:awllu•·"• device, a new social or economic institution. Who could that domesticating grains and herd animals would bring first a increase of population and then a desiccation and destruc- of the land? Who could see that sacrificial blood-offering would to human sacrifice and brittle empires of warfare and hate, or ,......,.,,,.·..."' machines to mine pumps and clothmill looms in England lead to an industrial and technical revolution over the whole

The history and ethnography of human culture is full of examples such emergence, elaboration, and revolution. A people evolving a culture, or inventing a new culture trait or a complex of them, minor technique to major economic institution, has often found riches in its hand. Such peoples have often entered upon long deep elaborations of such a new pattern. They have often flourished it as it has flourished for them. They have built upon it, explored embroidered it, mined and exhausted its resources. We need not the process with a Spengler for whole civilizations, or hypos- the resources into motive forces with such cliches as ascribe Eng- nineteenth century glory to her coal and iron or Plains Indians' to the horse. Here again what cultural innovation gives com- over what absolute or relative new riches and power is a question empirical discovery and exploration, a something to be learned both the men on the spot and by the commentators who come after- palely to record the accidents of history. Suffice it to say that story of culture is also the story of man. Man is the animal (maybe the chief animal) who has hit upon the device of culture for achieving mastery of the environment by freeing himself of slavish dependency · on it. He is one animal, perhaps the chief one, who explores and ex- ploits his habitat by a device, the cultural one, which creates for him successive environments both natural and artificial. And he is no fool; he can quickly see and use up his advantage while it lasts.

Certainly the concept of functional equivalents among culture pat- terns and institutions is useful. But its usefulness ceases where the sweep of cultural evolution and variation starts. Certainly, in these pages and in others, we can find that gift-giving does the same things for human individual and social life as does the market. Both are mechanisms of distribution and survival. But they are different mecha- nisms, based on very different social arrangements, in many ways op- posite cultural and institutional elaborations. Presumably as well they have very different antecedants, advantages, and limitations. Certainly they have very different distributions among the world's times, places, and peoples. To understand them we must know not only these cir- cumstances, but also the relative order of their historical emergence,

and the necessary precursors and preconditions they must have had. ·~J·.· The experience of anthropology with culture patterns, then, teaches .

us not only this processual thinking which extends beyond functional-

1

ism and system-building relyings on putative needs of individual or \

society. It commits us as well to a humble descent to operational 1

methods in which both analysis and synthesis are bound to consistency with the observations, descriptions, and eliminations shown by the record. Where, as with both culture patterns and social arrangements, specificities of time occurrence and recurrence go into the data-gather- ing and data-ordering, the operations treating these must be reflected in the models and the definitions we construct for what we find. Where specification of persons, listing who acts and who does not, is a neces- sary part of the recording of the behaviors we are examining, this operation, too, must continue to appear in the classifications of data we erect and the building of alternate institutions or systems we carry out. Where determining the order of action or initiative between per- sons is part of the observation which goes into discriminations of status and relationship, that operation also must carry over into our models of institution, social arrangement, economic system, etc. In this way, if we find, as we do in some of them, that common-denominator social ar- rangements underlie convergences and parallelisms of economic in-then we must be very clear that we derive these comparisons

regularities in the data themselves and not from an a priori bias

own. It is the consistent use of these operations basic to so many 5

modern social sciences that give us this power of control and

Port of Trade Enclaves in Aztec and Maya Civilizations

The Problem of Aztec-Maya Trade

MUCH of the obscurity that has veiled the contacts of the Aztec

and the Maya and prevented an understanding of the econqmic rela-

tions obtaining among the peoples of Mesoamerica now appears to be

1

lifting. Trade carried on over long distances, more than any other ac- tivity, bound together the two great culture areas of Mesoamerica. Yet this trade that so intimately linked the Aztecs of the Basin of Mexico and the Maya of Yucatan had to overcome very considerable physical and perhaps even more formidable organizational obstacles. The dis- tance between the centers of these metropolitan areas was great. As the crow flies, Tenochtitlan (on the site of Mexico City) was more than 500 miles removed from the Maya heartlands in the Yucatan peninsula. The length of the traject over high mountains and primeval forest may have been almost twice as much. Yet over most of this area not only the empires, but also numerous tribes and tribal con- federacies were frequently at war with one another; slave raiding was constant; feuds, massacres and border violence the rule.

How, then, were these difficulties surmounted? What was the op- erational nature of this trade between the different and distinct cul- tures? These are the questions to which this chapter is devoted.

subject is restricted geographically to the Aztec empire and Maya states; institutionally it comprises only long distance trade un:~u~·~ut;u from market institutions, from which trade was to a

,,., """-LIJL<:; degree separate.

To the modern mind this may sound paradoxical. But long-distance

was an institution apart: geographically, it was trade beyond the its personnel formed a distinct social group; its members only made their appearance in markets; both the organizing and the negotiating of exchange in foreign countries formed of this specialized occupation. This particular form of adminis- trade should not then be confused with any other form of ex- such as the important local market complex itself, corner food-

peddlers, the sale of services, or the variants of neighborhood

To return to the long-distance trade between Aztec and Maya, three will recur in our analysis: the commodities imported and ex- the personnel engaged in the foreign economy; and the geo- locations where the meetings of the long-distance traders

place.

Luxury wares and their raw materials formed the main items of

It did not as a rule directly concern the common people as con- This was an added reason why the democratic exchanges of home market places, where everyone with a few cacao beans in his was welcome, had no room in a trading system reserved to the

and the needs of the state.

. Even more significant was the person of the trader. At no time does

trade over these vast areas appear as random activity of individuals; it is not simply an extension of the face to face exchanges '"'·u•u•u in the metropolitan market places. Rather it was the highly occupation of persons dedicated to performing their duties the authority of their professional organizations. It emerges, among the Aztecs, as an institution of characteristic social, ·~--~-··- and ecological configuration. To a large extent this trade de- the type of contact maintained between civilizations across

and political boundaries.

locational focus of the exchange transactions was the "port of

the name introduced in this book to denote those towns or cities specific function was to serve as a meeting place of foreign The word "port" as employed here, need not imply a coastal

or riverain site, although ports of trade were usually thus situated. Transshipments naturally developed from the earliest times on the bor- ders of ecological regions, such as highland and plain, desert and jungle, forest and savannah. Prior to modern days, the port of trade should therefore be regarded as the main organ of long-distance com- merce. Trade was here treaty-based, administered, as a rule, by special organs of the native authorities, competition was excluded, prices were arranged over long terms. Ports of trade usually developed in politically weak spots, such as small kingdoms near the coast, or chieftains' con- federacies, since, under archaic conditions, strangers shunned terri- tories that were incorporated in military empires. To the hinterland empires the "ports" served as a "bread basket," that is, as a source of supply.* Even powerful rulers were wary of layi1;1g their hands on the "port," lest foreign traders and strangers shy off and trade suddenly dry up. Independent trade areas of this kind, harboring numbers of warehouses, storing the goods of distant trading peoples, while the local population of the area itself did not engage in trading expeditions have been found to exist in widely different parts of the globe.

We submit that the key to the volume and intensity of long-dis- tance trading between Aztec and Maya should be sought in the ex-istence of such port of trade territories-whether enclaves or buffer states-which served as intermediaries to the trade of militarily power- ful metropolitan units. To such areas outside of their political boun- daries both the Aztecs of Mexico and Maya of Yucatan traveled to ex-

change goods. The ports of trade had their setting mainly on the lagoons and rivers of gulf areas. Situated to the south of the Aztec Em- pire and beyond the cultural province of Yucatan Maya, these areas ex- tended westward from Yucatan on the Gulf of Mexico as well as east- ward to the Gulf of Honduras, and even to points further south. It happened that these were also the regions where cacao cultivation was predominant, a significant fact, since the cacao bean was the universal money in the Mesoamerican and Central American regions.

Port of trade areas (see map, p. 118) probably benefitted from their relative neutrality and enjoyed a fair measure of independence. Admit- tedly, they were occasionally to some extent controlled by Aztec col- onists or factors, that is, by Nahuatl-speaking people who had estab- lished themselves in a ward or quarter of the neutral trading towns; the Yucatan Maya also had their factors living in some of the ports of moreover various ports had their own agents in other ports. Such agents or factors did undoubtedly wield considerable power, may often have been, wholly or partly, rulers of the port towns or However, with the exception of Xoconusco, none of the of trade paid tribute to the Aztec state or to the Maya. For the

part the port of trade areas were autonomous.

Another notable fact appears to be that no traders native to these

of trade traveled to the Basin of Mexico to trade, although some have visited Yucatan. The documents indicate that the active ran from the metropolitan centers to the ports of trade, the ex- taking place in the ports of trade themselves, of which a dozen

existed in the neutral enclaves.

The Aztec of the Basin of Mexico

2

The Aztec Empire at the beginning of the Spanish conquest,

•t.l;;l.lu~;u from northern Veracruz on the Gulf coast to the state of

.uc:::rtc:::l'u. on the Pacific; and south, above the Isthmus of Tehuante-

It can be loosely described as a wide belt stretching across central

3

part of the Central Mexican Plateau. Its floor in this area reaches altitude of some 7,400 feet. At the time of the conquest the Basin Mexico comprised a number of cities and towns on the edge and on of several connecting salt and fresh water lakes, which have almost entirely dried up. The capital of the Empire-ruins of its eremcmi':al buildings can still be seen in the central plaza or zocaio of City-was Tenochtitlan. Its "twin city" to the north on the same island was Tlatelolco. Together.they had a population of about one million, while in the entire valley there lived perhaps as many as

4

less precise but more familiar name Aztec will be used to refer to Nahua-speaking inhabitants of Tenochtitlan.

Their culture was an ancient heritage, parts of which can be traced back to the classical period of Teotihuacan (300 to 900 A.D.). Its great pyramids still look down on the northern part of the Basin of Mexico. · The structure of Aztec society has baffled historians and ethnolo-

6 10

.gists for generations. • The Aztecs, Nahuatl speakers, were in a po-);.bi:sto,nca1 sense a new people. Their empire, which, most likely, state structure, was less than a hundred years old at the time of•nn<lnP~t Theirs was a highly stratified and complex society, based . Intense religiosity was expressed in the pageantry of rituals. Almost every public act was sanctified by an appeal to the an appeal which sometimes culminated in human sacrifice and cannibalism. The splendor of its capital, Tenochtitlan, was de-

by its conqueror, Herman Cortes, in these terms:

great city of Temistitan is built on a salt lake, and from the main- to the city is a distance of two leagues, from any side from which you... The city has many squares where markets are held, and trading on. There is one square, twice as large as that of Salamanca, all by arcades, where there are daily more than sixty thousand and selling, and where are found all the kinds of merchandise

in these countries,II

The metropolis fell to the Spaniards in August of 1521 after nearly months of siege; then it was "a vast charnel-house, in which all

12

hastening to decay and decomposition."

The basis of the regime of the Spanish conquest was the usurpa-

of political power and economic control achieved through military Deliberately, the Spaniards utilized those of the aboriginal that would further their own ends, attempted to destroy which opposed their objectives, and let those disintegrate for they had no need. Accordingly, they utilized such aboriginal in- as the ancient system of tributes and status, slavery, forced tenantry and cacao bean money. However, temples were de- idols smashed and religious codices burned. As to long- trade, they had no use for it and allowed it to disintegrate. had other means of acquiring goods; during the conquest by and confiscation, later by tribute and in the markets. The long-distance traders were an anomaly in them. Their trade were different from the Spanish, and so were their ports, their of transportation, and motivations. Markets were another . The Spaniards were highly dependent upon the markets dur- the early years, principally for food. These circumstances taken explain the striking paucity of data, in the writing of the •a~"'"-" and in later reports to the Spanish Crown, on an insti- of enormous importance in the aboriginal society, namely, the

1 of long-distance trade. 3

For the purpose at hand the different fate of trade and markets is in itself significant. The fact that the markets remained in existence and, even though in modified form, continued to be a major focus of in- terest to the Spaniards, while the whole system of long-distance trade suffered rapid disintegration, goes to show that even prior to the con- quest trade and markets were separate institutions, for had they been closely interdependent it would have been hardly possible for the Spaniards to continue one without the other.

The long-distance trader among the Aztecs was called pochteca.

This term will be used generically to refer to the various types of full-

time professional traders who carried on trading relations exclusively

4

The only ex-

Precisely where the pochteca fit into the Aztec status structure is not easy to determine. They did not belong to the "nobles" (piiii) nor to the commoners (macehuaili) but neither do they appear to have constituted somehow a "middle class." Actually, they were closely as-

sociated with the piiii. Sahagun, referring to some honored pochteca,

with peoples beyond the frontier of the Aztec Empire.l

ception to this was the trade with the isolated province of the Empire, the enclave of Xoconusco in the Guatemala region. Although Xoco- nusco definitely formed part of the empire, goods flowed to the center not only as tribute or tax, but also were traded by the pochteca.

15

ticed at the time of the conquest.

ranking officers and especially the slave traders, are repeatedly referred to as persons of great wealth and as highly esteemed by the sovereign. Certain of the pochteca traded in distant ports on behalf of the sover- eign for the coveted elite goods. On the other hand, they were obliged

They invited the piiii to their sump-

calls them "nobility by fantasy."

tuous feasts as honored guests. There is a reference to individual poch- teca as having been granted private ownership of a piece of land, tradi- tionally a prerogative of the piiii, although it was not extensively prac-

16

to present gifts and pay tribute in kind, although not in service,

differing from the piiii who may be economically classed as receivers of 8

tribute.l Also the sovereign cautioned the pochteca not to appear too haughty in presumption of their wealth, lest they lose the esteem in

19

which he held them, have them killed, and their goods confiscated. For the rest, their status seems most nearly to approximate that of some skilled craftworkers. The latter pai~ tribute with their finished product; the pochteca, with their wares. Alike they were exempt from personal services or labor for the state and from service in the army,

in times of emergency. Also both groups dealt largely in luxury The pochteca brought the raw materials from the distant tropics as quetzal and macaw feathers, animal skins, and precious stones which the craftsmen made their wares, and then carried some of finished products back to the foreign ports. Yet there was no close between this trade and the crafts, for just as the pochteca also other commodities, such as slaves and fine fabrics, craftsmen

probably often directly commissioned for some of their work by

20

sovereign and the piiii.

the pochteca were most closely identified with the feather

the amanteca, whose status was comparable in Western terms that of jewelers. Sahag(m states that their barrios (quarters) were to- their principal gods coupled, that they reciprocated at feasts

21

of organization through which they were in association. The of at least eighteen towns, most of which were in the Basin of were known to have traveled together. They also jointly or-

22

'"uo•v•...v, twin towns of the capital, live in their own barrios. Again,

term needs explanation. In common parlance, it means simply

quarter or ward of a town. The Spaniards, however, used it also to refer

.not only to a quarter, but also to an entire town, in still other cases to a

of a quarter, termed, in Nahuatl, calpuiii, i.e., clan owned

land; sometimes even only a subdivision of clan land, i.e., land owned

a lineage or extended family, Tiaxiiacaiii. One ethnologist (A. Man-

maintains that in this context they (barrios) were clan lands and

23

24

na1:evt~r their barrios were, and they might well have been the terri- tory of stratified clans as Monzon believes, there are on record names for seven of them dispersed and repeated over a wide area of the Az- tec Empire. And often more than one of these barrios existed in the same town.

Be this as it may, the pochteca possessed a tight-knit structure, with their own hierarchy, special gods, distinctive rites, particular feasts and religious celebrations, unique insignia and a strict moral code, as well as an ethical point of view on the hazards and rewards of the profession,

26

a separate, autonomous body, rather they formed part of the com- munity very close to the piiii, and had strong ties with the craftsmen, especially the feather workers. They also sacrificed and ate slaves in honor of the main god of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, the so-called Aztec

27

retaliation the Aztecs declared war on the offenders.

was conquered and thereby subjected to tribute payments, the pochteca

29

and a high regard for honesty and group solidarity.

to judge their own members. Yet, as we know, the pochteca were not

tribal god, Huitzilopochtli.

ciety confined to trading. As they pushed beyond the political fron- tiers into enemy, that is non-tribute-paying territory, they were fre-quently assaulted, robbed, imprisoned or slaughtered, whereupon in

28

The exception to this rule, as we noted, was the

ceased to trade there.

Nor, indeed, was their role in Aztec so-

geographically isolated province of Xoconusco, far to the south on the

Pacific coast. It is significant, if true, that the pochteca themselves con-

30

In most cases where trade preceded tribute,

quered this province.

once a province had been conquered and began to pay its tribute, long- distance trading ceased. In this sense, then, trade was followed by tribute; commerce by administration. For an example of the type of I goods paid in tribute, these were paid by Quiauteopan and its five ·~ towns, as recorded in the Codex Mendoza. Admittedly, this province

is not typical because the list does not include the usual quota of maize, beans, and other foods. Every six months the following was paid to Tenochtitlan: 400 large mantles, 40 large copper bells, 80 copper axe

blades, 100 jars of bees' honey; and yearly, 1 war dress with its shield

of rich feathers and 1 pan of turquoise stones. As we shall see, most of

these items were exported by the pochteca, which suggests that trade

31

the profession was hereditary.

courage, and training. Young men making their first expedition were counseled and admonished by their elders. The top-ranking officers

preceded tribute.

There is no doubt that the pochteca differed in rank; also, as stated,

32

Yet it called for considerable ability,

were old men who no longer went on expeditions.

grading was basic to the ranking system is another question. The inter- relationship of the different status groups remains a problem, as does that of the different towns and barrios in which the pochteca lived. If, as has been suggested, the pochteca were organized in stratified clans the various ranks may have constituted separate clans or sub- 34

It has been possible to discern the following four or five ranks, some which may have been localized, that is, may have existed only in a

barrios or towns of the pochteca.

1. Top-ranking officers. For the highest rank there are several terms,

of which is pochtecatiatoque, literally, a senior or principal person

35

They inhabited one or several of the barrios of Tenochtitlan

Tlatelolco. These were highly esteemed old traders who stayed at

bidding farewell to the outgoing expeditions with words of en-

and admonishment. They commissioned the expedi-

pochteca with goods to be exchanged for them in the ports of

and upon whose return the gain would be shared by both parties.

is even a mention of women commissioning goods, this case

36

probably provided also the judges among the pochteca.

2. Slave traders. This group ranked very high, but just what their was to the pochtecatlatoque is not clear. Sahagun says they were, "the major and most principal of all the merchants, wealth being in men themselves." Slave traders domiciled in actually resided also in Tochtepec, in Oaxaca near the frontier of the Empire. These frontier residents were so ""''Tf"<tnt- that the pochteca from Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco made visits there to take part in certain of their rituals and to extend these members among the slave traders their personal invitations

8

noble, person of quality; nenenqui-traveler, passenger). They dearly loved by the sovereign. It is clear from the data given by "'"'n"o'nn that these were royal administrative trade officials. He de- them as going to the Gulf coast area and exchanging goods on behalf of the sovereign and also for themselves with the

pochteca.

sovereign; if so, undoubtedly from among the old pochteca of

Sahagun implies that such persons were appointed by

the only reference known to the writer to women as pochteca. pochtecatiatoque presided at the important feasts and ceremonies

37

attend the yearly celebration in the capitaJ.3

3. King's traders. These were called the teucunenenque (teuctli

of Xicalango (also Coatzocoalcos and Cimatan).

39

He also tells

that they were honored for having conquered the outlaying prov-

o£ Ayotla, in which was located the trading port of Xoconusco,

40

:m1:::nt1"<me:d earlier. However, Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, writing at the close of the sixteenth century, gives credit for the

41

conquest to the emperor Ahuizotl and his troops.

icler relates that Moctezuma the Younger summoned the Teucunen- enque and ordered them to go with other principle senores to collect tribute from the Gulf coast towns of Ahuilizapan and Cuetlaxtlan. Upon their arrival they were attacked, smothered with chile smoke, disemboweled, stuffed with straw, seated upon handsome benches and cursed in farcical obsequiousness by their slayers. When Mocte- zuma received news of this affront, he was incensed. He declared war

and the towns were reconquered in quick order.

42

Significantly, in all

of these varied activities there is a very close relationship between

the Teucunenenque and the emperor, while at the same time there is

43

no mention of them as top officers, nor slave traders, nor spies.

4. Trader-spies. These, the nauaioztomeca, were described by Sa- haglin as "not so principal." He mentions them only in the role of trader-spies and this may well have been their exclusive function. In this capacity they are described as entering enemy territory with a knowledge of the local dialect or language, disguised as natives, to seat themselves in the market place, ostensibly to exchange their wares, but really listening, observing and inquiring for vital inforrna- .tion. Upon their return they reported all to the emperor. As would be expected, these "trader spies" did not trade in luxury goods for which the other pochteca were famous, but in common goods such

as knives and combs of flint.

44

The Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary of

Molina written in the sixteenth century gives further evidence for

the existence of this rank. In it naualcalaquini is defined: to enter a

place in dissimulation with caution and in secret, while oztorneca

45

is defined as harriero and in derivations as walking merchant.

5. Oztomeca or "walking merchants" are mentioned by Tezozo- moc and may have been the same as the naualoztorneca, although he does not describe them as trader-spies but rather in two instances as

46

the traders whose slaughter was motive for war.

been merely a general term for trader, synonymous with pochteca.

The caravan or expedition was led by a "captain" pochteca, and included non-pochteca, the slaves and tarnernes or porters. The par- ents of young men on their first trip were solicitous that the captain look after their boys. Certainly the slave traders and king's traders also went on expeditions and it is probable that all kinds of pochteca out jointly, as it was always a perilous journey. Thus there be among the usual expeditionary crew both age grading and

48

ere:naes of rank.

ow did the pochteca obtain the commodities which they ex-

Sahagnn describes a trip in which the king supplied them 1600 quachtli (cotton cloths) which they took to Tiatelolco and there equally with the Tiatelolcan pochteca. Thereupon both took the cloths to the market in Tiatelolco and purchased rich with which to trade on behalf of the sovereign as well as

4

and finery "for their own trading." Sa Upon arriving in the

of trade of the Xicalango area, they exchanged these goods again

49

piedra de Iumbre with which to trade.

In another instance Sahagnn quotes a trader saying that he had purchased stone knives, bells, needles, cochineal

50

the local rulers.

This same source gives accounts of the slave traders buying slaves in the market of Azcapotzalco for the purpose of ceremonial sacrifice, a of the pochteca y~rly celebration.51 They may also have pur- slaves for export. Slaves were sold in various markets, one of most important being that of the just mentioned Azcapotzalco. the home of the slave traders was, as we may recall, Tlatelolco. certainly sold their slaves in the market and a person could his children and even himself. A slave could even purchase a slave. there is no mention of the pochteca selling slaves in the markets

the Basin of Mexico.

52

Evidently those who sold slaves in the

were not the pochteca who traded slaves over long distances.

as to exports in general, a comparison of the items sold in the

of the Basin of Mexico with the goods exported by the

reveals that all of the latter goods were available in the local

53

the markets of Tenochtitlan-Tiatelelco which they traded in foreign However, they may also have had other sources, one of them

the royal cloths supplied by the palace, and other treasures. The most frequently mentioned types of goods exported are: (men, women and children); richly worked garments for men women (there is one reference to clothes "for the common

ornaments of gold and precious stones; skeins of rabbit fur; ,c<JDrler bells. Copper and obsidian ornaments, needles, combs and knives of obsidian, red ochre and cochineal dyes, sweet smelling herbs • and piedra de Iumbre are also mentioned.

Garments and ornaments seem to be by far the most important : items as they are frequently mentioned and many different kinds are ·. described.54 It is significant that most of these goods are manufactured·:~ articles, and most of the raw materials out of which they were made were not found in the Basin of Mexico but came in partly as tribute

from outlying provinces, perhaps also with local vendors and cer- tainly with the pochteca on their return trips. The extent to which exports relied on markets is not yet clear.

The commodities most frequently described as imported by the pochteca are: rich feathers; precious and semi-precious stones. Cacao, cacao stirrers, gold, animal skins and fans are also mentioned.~>G Thus in contrast to exports, imports mostly consisted of rawmaterials. This is qualified by "mostly" not because of the fans or stirrers which probably were not very important, but because thereis occasional mention of some of the imported precious stones and animal skins as having been "worked." This undoubtedly means pol- ished and tanned as there is no account of actual manufactured ob-

56

Aztec society, absence of the mention of copper and the infrequent references to gold as imported would seem to indicate that most of it was obtained either in the local markets or through tribute payment. The present states of Oaxaca and Guerrero were known sources of gold and most of this region had been conquered by the Aztecs.M However, the pochteca are known to have traveled as far south as the

58

Here attention should be drawn to the extraordinary importance of feather objects. Feather working was an ancient and, as we have seen, a highly respected craft. There were numerous types of feathers. The most highly prized came from birds of the highlands of the south, those of the quetzal bird being outstanding. Apparently it was an extremely arduous task to hunt or capture these birds. Some con- servation of the species was practiced; sometimes the captured bird

was carefully held while its best feathers were plucked and the bird

jects in either case.

Given the great importance of gold and copper objects in the

present Costa Rica-Panama border for gold.

however, that the question of gold, its sources, forms, and uses merits a study in itself.

then set free in order to give another supply.

59

Among the amazing of objects made or adorned with the feathers were head gear, on shields and helmets used in ceremonies, garments and

60

by the pochteca. This is baffling because cacao was very as the principal money of the various cultures and as the ingredient of the people's favorite chocolate drinks. Cacao beans, with other objects, were used both in exchange and for payment debts and tribute.61 It was cultivated or in use all the way the Basin of Mexico to Costa Rica, although it may not have employed throughout this entire area. A recent dissertation en- "When Money Grew On Trees" shows that its principal areas of were central Veracruz, northern Oaxaca and the Xoconusco far to the south, yet forming part of the empire. Beyond the it was grown in the Xicalango region of the Gulf coast, south- Guatemala and the Gulf of Honduras.62 It will be noted that of these areas were the central regions of the great ports of trade. the Aztecs, then, if cacao was not a principal trade import, it have been because the 900 loads received annually in tribute pay-

63

indirectly been due to cacao production. Indirectly, since wealth cacao might well have attracted from the hinterlands and regions"ble to the pochteca, the fine feathers and precious stones which

sought.

Other money in use with the Aztecs were a particular kind of small

cloth, gold dust in transparent quill containers, "rich feathers"

64

ornaments, standards and banners.

uu.,.u;,. , there are only a few mentions of cacao as having been

supplied most of their needs.

Xicalango and the Gulf of Honduras as Aztec ports of trade may

perhaps small copper axes and pieces of tin.

moneys circulated and what might be paid for with each will necessitate .....,~.·..., research. Although barter also obtained, the various money ob- jects, and especially cacao, were extensively used in the markets. Like cacao, some were also used in payment. It is not possible to say with

:ll:lllu t;d lllx whether cacao served as a standard, that is, whether all other had established equivalencies in relation to cacao. This writer acquainted with only one reference which definitely stipulates an exc:ha1uge equivalency between cacao and cloth. Sahagnn writes that a was worth one quachtii (cloth, and presumably money) or one .. hundred cacao beans.&~> This equivalency need not have obtained uni-

.versally, of course, as the exchange values of the moneys were known to vary in different regions. Nevertheless, the existence of equivalencies between objects used as money appears established and of money ob- jects cacao was certainly the most widely spread, and thus, practically, must have served as a standard.

For the relation between long-distance trade and the markets, it is a most suggestive fact that we have not come across any mention of the pochteca using money of any description in the ports of trade. Money as a means of exchange was employed, of course, primarily in the mar- ket. Trade, as carried on by the pochteca was directed towards ports of trade in which transactions were performed in kind, whether with the intervention of the administration of the store houses where the staples were deposited, or through direct acts of exchange in kind.

In principle, all foreign trade was barter, and the method of opera- tion was barter. The description referred to above of the pochteca teucunenenque receiving cloths from the emperor and going to Tiatel- olco where they shared them with other pochteca "and spoke of the business which the king had entrusted them with" is evidence of ad- ministered trade, that is, trade between politically independent enti- ties. This is further substantiated by this same chronicler's account of their arrival at the ports of trade:

When the traders arrived at the province of Anahuac Xicalango, they gave the rulers that which the ruler of Mexico had sent them and they greeted them on his behalf, and the ruler of rulers of this same province, of the town of Xicalanco, and the town of Cimatecatl (Cimatan), and Quatzaqualco (Coatzacoalco) gave them large polished green stones, and other long polished chalchiuites (turquoise), and red stones and other emeralds . . . and other stones. . . . They also gave them shells and red and yellow fans, and cacao stirrers . . . rich feathers . . . tanned skins of wild beasts ... all these things were brought back by the traders from that province of Xicalanco for the ruler of Mexico; and when they returned and

66

Sahagnn further says that the traders took goods to Xicalanco "for the common people" consisting of earnings of copper and flint, flint combs, small knives, bells, needles, cochineal and sweet smelling herbs. He does not say how this ware was exchanged. However, in the entire account by Sahagun of the pochteca trading in these foreign provinces there is no mention of prices or markets or of their exchanging with anyone but the rulers. The only exception is the spy traders, the naua-loztomeca, who went, not to the ports of trade, but into enemy terri- where they sat in the markets disguised as natives-a strong indi-o£ the local ethnic character of markets, as contrasted with trade. There are no data on how the slave traders carried on exchange. The rulers and other nobles who bought slaves in the ports of trade must

have either sacrificed them, or put them to work as domestics or in the cacao fields.

The pochteca also exchanged the goods which had been commis-

sioned by the pochtecatiaioque with whom they shared the "gain"

return. There is no direct indication of what this gain consisted

but, as will be evident from the passage cited below, it must have

in goods.

67

Where barter prevails gain must necessarily take that

Just how the pochteca returned with their precious ware is of great ''•~•,,.,.,.,~•. The crucial point is that their goods were not destined for the market. They made sure of returning on a good luck day. They waited night-time before entering the capital and came in secretly so that no one should notice them. They did not go directly to their houses, but to that of a relative or some person of confidence where they deposited their goods. If anyone inquired there about what they

had brought back they would say:

... this wealth that I bring, take care of it for me but don't think I entrust it with you because it is mine, it belongs to the sefiores, the princi- pal merchants, they recommended that I bring it here.tls

And only after reporting to the pochteca officers did they go home to sleep.

The Maya of Yucatan

We now enter the world of the Maya. The paucity of data on trade striking. Yet the little that the Spanish documents reveal is sug- gestive. By taking advantage of modern research on related subjects, in particular the organization of the pochteca and the use of cacao money and comparing them with accounts of the Basin of Mexico we can piece together a fragmentary image of the preconquest situation. The degree to which it has been possible to attain some clarity is due chiefly

to the excellent studies of Roys, Scholes, and Chamberlain.

The absence of the mention of trade in the Spanish eye witnesses' accounts on Yucatan afterits discovery, in 1517, has two very different reasons: The one was the indifference of the conquistadores to this obviously non-gold-bearing area. Once the Spaniards were resigned to the lack of gold in a region, they were little interested in observing native trading customs. The other was the almost immediate disap- pearance of the native trading system after the conquest of the Aztec capital in the north, in 1521. Actually, the entire area under considera- tion had had a very active and tightly knit trade organization, based on regional ecology, agricultural specialization and localized manufacture. Consequently, the entire network of trading relationships, from the Basin of Mexico south to Yucatan and Honduras and even to Panama, was drastically affected by the fall of Tenochtitlan, the center of eco- nomic and political power. A few years after that event the basis of the Indian societies had shifted and the delicate web of trade relations had become torn or tangled; by the 1540's it had all but disappeared.

The accounts of some of the participants of the first three expedi- tions directed towards the western mainland (1517-1519) and of later entradas into the unexplored inland regions deserve close scrutiny for what they may reveal of trade and markets.

We will enumerate certain isolated facts in regard to trade in Yucatan taken from these records, mostly written by the conquista- dores and early missionaries, and compare them with accounts of the Basin of Mexico and other areas.

By coincidence the very spot where the Spaniards first touched the mainland, the northeastern corner of Yucatan, was one of the few com- mercial centers of the entire peninsula. The conquerors were much impressed with the richly dressed Indians who greeted them at Ecab (Belma), in northeastern Yucatan. In their enthusiasm they called it "el Gran Cairo." Ecab and the neighboring inland towns of Cachi and

72

At Cachi there was a market court on one corner of the square, where disputes were settled

by certain officials.73

In 1527 the Adelantado of Yucatan, Francisco de Montejo, sailed

down the eastern coast to the Bay of Chetumal. Here he found the town of Chetumal two leagues inland from the bay. He described it as having two thousand houses, stone walls facing the coast for defense(!), fertile lands, highly developed bee culture and as being an important trading center. It was also the only extensive cacao-producing area of entire peninsula. Later his lieutenant Alonso Davila came to the area and was so favorably impressed with the many maize fields, populous settlements and the strategic location that he established Spanish town of Salamanca there. This was one of the few places, other being the northeastern tip, where the Spaniards found gold In this same bay region was the town of Bacalar. It was also to have had a thriving commerce. Situated on a lake of the

74

name, it was joined by a river to the Bay of Chetumal.

The land around the Bay of Chetumal region, in some essential appears closely comparable to the coastal strips of the Gulf Mexico and the Gulf of Honduras. This point of embarkation for trading and for receiving goods from the hinterland was, like Xicalango-Gulf of Mexico, a land of bays, lagoons, rivers, lakes and all of which made for extensive canoe travel. It also had cacao But the similarity to the other two areas becomes even striking when we see that, despite several eye witness reports,

is no mention of markets or market places. (See map, p. 118)

In contrast to the Basin of Mexico with its unified imperial govern- Yucatan at the time of the conquest, according to Roys, was into eighteen politically autonomous entities, which he de-

as follows:

Certainly each of these subdivisions was independent of its neighbors.

of them possessed a well-organized political system headed by a single

: others were more or less closely knit confederacies of towns or groups

towns; still others seem to have been merely collections of towns in a

area, whose relations with one another are largely a matter of con- 75

The greater part of the northern peninsula was limestone with a thin layer of humus on top and it was covered with a shrub or brush growth. Only the northeast had sufficient rainfall to per- of forest growth. The center of the peninsula was traversed from to west by a low mountain range. This country would have pre- great difficulties for living were it not that the underground table was sufficiently near the surface to make water accessible natural or artificial wells, caUed cenotes. It was therefore these cenotes that the farming communities were located. beans, squash, cotton and cassava were the most important There were settlements along the coast dedicated exclusively to fishing. Here salt gathering was also important. Apiculture was exten- sively practiced. Game, and especially deer, was plentiful. But metals were entirely lacking, although flint was to be found, and apparently it was even mined along the foothills of the sierra. Flint was the material

76

tern, the Maya-Yucatecan society was highly stratified, ritualistic and commercial.

The long-distance trader in Yucatan was a person of noble status

and wealth. He trafficked mainly in slaves, cloth and salt, to a lesser

extent in honey and flint, i.e., mostly in raw materials. His principal

ports of trade were aboutXicalango in the Gulf of Mexico to the

southwest, and on the Gulf of Honduras to the southeast. In the latter

area he had warehouses and factors (agents). There apparently was a

manner of distinction among the traders, between what Roys calls

the "professional merchant," the ppolom, and "those who traveled,"

77

definition of the traders as a group which obtained among the Aztecs. Nor is there any mention of their occupation of a special section of a town or city. Nor is there evidence, as we saw, of a comparable degree of internal ranking and differentiation of typesof traders. Nor do we find any such complex ritual and ceremonial activities as characterize the Aztec traders. It is not by any means suggested, however, that Yucatecan-Maya trading institutions represented simply a watered down version of the Aztec, or a simpler commercial system than was theirs. Trade in Yucatan was a vitally important activity. The Maya social and political stratification, internecine warfare, as well as the economics of production and consumption, was to a large extent de- pendent on the maintenance of trade relations beyond their ethnic frontiers.

Indeed, the Yucatecan trader was apparently much more closely identified with his political rulers than was the Aztec trader. In at least one case, dating back to the middle of the fifteenth century, the

78

used for cutting implements and weapons.

Notwithstanding the apparent simplicity of its basic neolithic pat-

the ah ppolom yoc.

There does not seem to have existed in Yucatan the same sharp

son of the ruler of Cocom is referred to as a trader.

nection of, if not identity with, the rulers and traders, coupled with the absence of any indication of trading in the market places of for· eign ports, points towards the practice of administered trade carried on by chieftain's clans through warehouses in the ports of trade.

As we have noted, the main export commodities at the time of the

were slaves, cloth and salt. Flint and honey ranked second.

....,..,,........,., to the Mexican exports, none required specialized labor in

mt::1cttne. Nearly every woman wove cloth. Anyone living near the

could generally obtain permission to gather salt. Flint was readily

and easily made into tools or weapons; and most families pas-

bee hives. Slaves, of course, are a special case. Their acquisition

trade both within Yucatan and abroad was a primary cause for

and wars between the provinces. They were also bought and sold

79

ucatan.

Because the cultivation of cotton and its spinning and weaving were

in Yucatan, cloth may not have been an important item of within Yucatan proper. The same may have been true of honey. slaves, salt and flint were traded internally. Many other were also traded "domestically," such as fish, pottery, canoes, copal gum for incense, maize, game, fruit, wooden idols and small

80

goods. At the time of the conquest, only a relatively few types of were being exported.

Turning now to the imports, we will recall that the Spaniards were weary of complaining of and continually disheartened by the amounts of gold to be had in Yucatan and that all of it had been lPCirte~d. The lure of richer plunder from the various regions of the Empire was an important factor in the relatively late conquest the peninsula. Yucatan was not definitely conquered until after theUPP•ress;ion of the Great Maya Revolt of 1546-47. For our purposes is significant that the largest amounts of gold objects acquired by the •pa1rua:rds were from the region of the large market towns on the north- coast and from the important trading area of the Bay of Chetu- on the East coast. About the time of the conquest gold articles imported from the Xicalango region, having been brought there pochteca from the Basin of Mexico where the ornaments and ritual

!llrapn<~rmuxa were made. Bells, axes or celts, plates and thin sheets of and skeins of dyed rabbit hair seem to have followed the same

Precious and semiprecious stones including jade and jadite rnT·n.,,n.· crystalline green stones, yellow topaz, obsidian and the fine quetzal and macaw feathers that originated in the southern highlands

were traded in via the Gulf of Honduras as well as the Gulf of Mex-ico. A type of red shell, Spondyius princeps, was relayed to Yucatan via Honduras from the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. Cacao was also imported in large quantities. Of all the above-mentioned items only cacao was native to the two main ports of trade areas, the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of Honduras.sl

Money, in the sense of quantifiable objects used in exchange, was

common in Yucatan. Cacao was the most important, but cotton cloths

of a standard size, strings of red shells (spondyius princeps), copper

hatchets, and bells as well as jade beads and salt were also used as

money. Of these, only the cotton cloth and salt were native to Yucatan.

As in the case of the Nahua area, this matter calls for further research.

However, as suggested above, in view of the extensive use of the cacao

money and its predominance over other money, it may well have been

a standard against which all other commodities were equated through-

out the entire area of central and southern Mexico and Central Amer-

ica. As among the Aztecs, it was also used to make a kind of chocolate

82

traders carried a kind of pocketbook filled with cacao beans. These may have been used as cash to pay for lodgings on the journey. One of the early chroniclers, Gasper Antonio Chi, asserts that the Yucatecans, being a hospitable people, gave shelter to all traveling strangers; except

83

The goods were transported by human caravans and canoe fleets. Overland the noble ah ppoiom yac led his slave porters single filealong the foot trails through the underbrush and forest, which had been cleared just enough to allow the passage of one man with a pack. The mounted Spaniards later complained of these trails that they had not been cleared for a man on a horse and that consequently a rider often got himself entangled in the overhanging vegetation. The traders led, the porters followed. The porters were slaves, destined to be sold in the foreign ports. This was a convenient arrangement for the traders, because the goods which they exported were bulkier than those which they brought back. At their destinations they exchanged all of their goods, including their slaves, mostly for manufactured items, and so simplified the problem of portage on the return trip. Apparently the Maya did not pay their porters as did the Aztecs their tamemes. The Maya may have had a corps of slaves who always accompanied them

expeditions and simply augmented the number of this corps going out with the slaves to be sold. Like the pochteca, how- they stopped along the trails at shrines, in this case those of their

84

on the east coast they journeyed by canoe to the Gulf of

and perhaps around the peninsula and down the west coast

The porters then became rowers. The canoes were made from

-"'""~·n out tree trunk and were traded from the Chetumal Bay

Some were reported to be very large, holding as many as forty to

85

men.

Aztec pochteca, Mayan ppoiom, in either case persons of the upper

enter on a long-distance carrying service on behalf of the com- . The pochteca of the Nahua are a highly elaborated gild, prob- of communally settled clan origin; the ppoiom, though perhaps higher rank, are less specialized because their exports are not wares but raw materials. We know their gods, their porters, routes, their military and political status, but what was the jour- aim? How would the pochteca and the ppoiom trade in the ab- of markets? Obviously nothing but barter in kind was feasible, it would be transacted even while their respective countries may

been engaged in hostilities.

Pochteca as well as ppoiom were moving toward definite geographi- areas organized to serve just that purpose. The actual exchange of

took place in ports of trade. We now turn to the discussion of locations.

Gulf of Mexico—Xicalango

The ports of trade on the Gulf of Mexico extended from a point in State of Veracruz to the westernmost section of the Laguna de.....uuui•v.,, i.e., the "lagoon at the border," the town of Xicalango

86 (See map, end pages)

This was (and is) a hot alluvial plain covered by a network of rivers,

swamps and bogs interspersed with tropical rain forests and savannahs. From the lagoon of Tupilco, just east of the Coatzal- River through this entire region there predominated a people Maya stock, the Chontal. It was, as we have noted, one of the >nn1cip,a1 cacao-producing areas. Within the region there were a num-ber of small sefiorios, politically autonomous entities, each with its lords and nobles, working population and a varying number of subject

87

Neither politically nor militarily was there any strong : concentration of power present. '

Many and far-flung routes come together here at the various ports of trade. People and goods traveled by canoe, almost exclusively. From the north came the famous pochteca of the Aztec with their luxury wares. Inland, down from the southern and eastern sierras came people with precious stones and feathers, from the Zoque and Tzeltal-Tzotzil ;· towns and mines. Traders following other riverain routes west came down the Candelaria River from Acalan and across the base of Yucatan from the Gulf of Honduras as well. Up the Gulf Coast towards the east the canoes traveled at least as far as the town of Campeche. There · is no direct evidence that the traders spanned the entire distance around

the Yucatecan peninsula by canoe to the east coast. Roys assumes that they did so because it is known that traders from Xicalango made pilgrimages to the shrine of the merchant god on the Island of Cozu- mel. He admits, however, they may have traveled up the eastern coast .·

88

for Aztecs in their long distance trade. Sahagt1n documents the journey of the pochteca to this region. ·

Cargoes of richly worked fabrics and clothing, ornaments and spindle whorls of gold, copper bells, obsidian knives and combs, and skeins of dyed rabbit hair all firmly secured on the backs of their porters, which the pochteca of the various cities of the Basin of Mexico as- sembled, in making ready for their departure overland, were destined for these two main ports of trade: Xicalango on the Gulf coast and

89

wooden staff, symbol of their god, Yiacatecutli. They also carried fans, corn mash and other dried foods for the journey. Some of the porters were slaves and others the lowly tamemes, clothed in rags and subsisted

90

. . . they will make those wretches to carry on their backs a whole day, nay some two or three days together, which they do by tying the chest on side with ropes, having a broad leather in the middle, which they over the forepart of their head, or over their forehead, hanging thus t upon their heads and brows, which at their journey's end hath blood stick in the foreheads of some, galling and pulling off the and marking them in the fore-top of their heads, who as they are tamernes, so are easily known in a town by their baldness, that leather

having worn off all their hair.91

porter and slave carried approximately fifty pounds. There is

~.-"'""'"·•nn of how much the pochteca themselves may have carried.

trotted single file over mountain trails. If, as Bernal Diaz reported,

averaged five leagues a day, it must have taken many days to cover

92

At night they stopped to sleep in any cave, gorge or beside a large boulder or under a tree. Each night they tied black staffs together, thus improvising the image of their god ·. To it they offered their blood by piercing their tongues, legs or arms, and in burning incense in its honor they felt assured safe journey. Sometimes also they worshipped at shrines of their along the trail. A strange proscription was laid upon them: during entire journey until the return home, they could not bathe nor wash cut their hair. It was, however, permissible to wash the neck.93 The first lap of the journey was terminated in the town of Toch- near the southern border of the Empire, in the northeastern of the present state of Oaxaca. Tochtepec was the chief frontier center and the home of a colony of rich slave traders who had come from Tlatelolco. It was the gateway into the enemy through which the pochteca passed to reach those two great

94

first lap.

that of Xicalango, to the east, Xocon- to the west. At Tochtepec the caravan split, some going over the to the isolated Aztec province of Xoconusco, that Aztec ex- on the Pacific coast. The others went instead down the sierra to marshy swamp lands of the Gulf coast. As enemy territory lay upon departing the pochteca took to swords and shields, and

95

centers to the south,

armed their slaves, marching cautiously and only at night.

Those towards the Pacific had the protection of a line of Aztec arri:SOilS along the sierra trail until they reached Xoconusco. Those toward Xicalango, on the Gulf, did not have so far to go and they had no garrisons to protect them, the local rulers of the of trade would send emissaries to greet them and give them safe at the final part of their journey. Upon arrival, as has been described, the pochteca presented themselves to the rulers of

96

coalco, Cimatan and Xicalango.

There were apparently five major groups of ports of trade in

Gulf of Mexico area; (1) the settlements at the mouth of the ~~·"'•.c.ru. coalco River, (2) the inland towns of Cimatan and (3) those of the Chontalpa, (4) the town of Potonchan at the mouth of the Grijalva River and (5) the famous Xicalango at the western end of the Laguna de Terminos.

1. Coatzalcoalco was a coastal town just beyond the frontiers of Aztec Empire but in the vicinity of an Aztec garrison. The po1~hteca arrived here bearing greetings and goods from their ruler. At the

of the conquest it was known to have been Nahuatl-speaking. The

97

Spaniards described this country as rich and populous.

2. Inland from the coast, further east, lay the Nahuatl town

Cimatan with its two closely allied neighboring towns. Cimatan COn·

trolled vital trade routes from both the inland sierras and the Basin of

Mexico due to its strategic position near the great rivers which flowed

down from the highlands and its accessibility to the Aztec trader&

coming from Tochtepec. It was the most powerful of the eight Mexican

or Nahua speaking towns in Tabasco. It had conquered several Zoque

towns to the south.

98

Scholes and Roys write that,

There can be little doubt that the temples of a town of such importance were set on pyramids, and the more important buildings, on raised plat- forms, presumably of earth in this locality.DD

Bernal Dlaz described the palisades which surrounded it for defense

100

a thickly populated region and rich in cacao. In the lowlands between the Rio de Dos Bocas (present Rio Seco) and the Rio Nuevo 6 Gonzales lay at least twenty-three Chontal speaking towns. According to a docu- ment recently discovered, there were five other towns to the west of the Rio de Dos Bocas and five more to the east of the main group of twenty- three. This entire group of towns was called the Chontalpa. Here the Aztecs had factors and warehouses in the towns of Mecoacan, Chila- teupa and Teutitlan Copilco (modern Copilco). Scholes and Roys say the Aztecs sold their goods to local traders. Nevertheless, they infer that this region was not a commercial center because, according to a document of 1541, there was no market, although as the presence of long-distance trading among the Nahua and Maya.

Next in order was Potonchan, near the mouth of the Grijalva Like its neighbor to the east, Xicalango, it had traffic with the Usumacinta Valley and the Gulf of Honduras and hence east coast of the peninsula of Yucatan. Although there is no evidence, Scholes and Roys believe the traders also went up the coast and across to the island of Cozumel and the trading towns area. Potonchan was inhabited by Chantal speakers and thus with Xicalango where there were at least some Nahua As Sahagun and other sources fail to mention Potonchan as of trade for the pochteca and as it was inhabited by a Maya this writer suggests that it traded exclusively with Mayas and the pochteca at all. Although the town is described at some in the sixteenth century sources, there is no record of a mar-

The port of trade of Xicalango was the leading commercial site the Aztecs. As we know, they called this entire Gulf area, Anahuac-!llt<~tu!I·u. The town itself was situated near an inlet on the western of the Laguna de Terminos. Scholes and Roys suggest that "the merchants with their employees and slaves occupied a quarter the town...." The ruling class, including the important local spoke Nahuatl while the native inhabitants spoke Chon- This is a situation which was quite common, if not typical, in Aztec ports of trade. It raises in a concrete way the question of the between the Nahua colonists-traders and the local rulers. a Nahua ruling class which included the traders and given the importance of trade for the community, it can be surmised that Nahua traders were the actual rulers. The close tie if not identity the traders and rulers was described for Yucatan and will be even more clearly in the province of Acalan and Naco on the of Honduras. Therefore this pattern may perhaps tell us some- of an ethno-historical interest. Xicalango differs from both Yuca- and Acalan but is similar to Naco in that the trader-rulers were

and warehouses testify, it was an important trading center.

is of eminent importance for a dearer understanding of the of long-distance trading. As we shall see, it is precisely the of markets and trading in the ports of trade, that seems to

i)rei:.!!lllers_ that is, Nahua colonists. The chronicler lxtlilxochitl men~tions a "feria" (fair) in Xicalango but does not describe it nor associate

10

situated to handle long-distance trade from the highlands to the south and west, Xicalango enjoyed a similar advantage in regard to Acalan, the Usumacintla Valley and hence the Gulf of Honduras up to Yuca- tan. As we know, they may also have taken the coastal route to north- eastern Yucatan. Xicalango shared all this traffic with its neighbor, Potonchan. But it contrasted to Potonchan not only on account of Nahua residents, but also because it was the preferred port of trade for the pochteca.

It is for Xicalango, that Sahagun gives his most detailed description

105

it with the pochteca.

Scholes and Roys recognize that just as Cimatan was favorably

4

of administered trade.

emerge. Hence our knowledge that no local traders from Xicalango went north to the Basin of Mexico. This trade was apparently handled exclusively by the pochteca. The Xicalango traders did however travel southward, to Acalan and the various ports of the Gulf of Honduras. They also may have gone to Yucatan as noted since there is indication that they went to the island of Cozumel to worship at the shrine of a merchant god. Cortes, in 1524, during his march to Honduras acquired • a cloth map from the traders of Xicalango which he is said to have

Some features of its concrete organization

106

by peoples of the Maya linguistic stock; among them the Zoque, and the Tzeltal-Tzotzil. The other large group, the Chiapaneca, were an Otomangue speaking people.

The foothills and sierra of the present states of Tabasco and Chiapas

were the home of the Zoque. Here the people are described in the

sixteenth century, some years after the conquest, as wearing tufts of

feathers and skeins of green birds for ornaments, with necklaces and

nose and ear plugs of wood, gold, topaz and other stones. Roys com-

ments: "We know little of their political or social organization, except

that there was among them an upper class which prided itself on its

107

followed as far as Acalan.

The inland sierras to which we have referred were also inhabited

noble status."

Cimatan, while others were subject to the Chiapanec (the Otomangue group) and there were many independent towns and villages. This province, too, produced some cacao in the lowlands towards the Gulf coast, and manufactured cloth. It had mines of amber or so-called yellow topaz and produced cochineal which was used to make a red The English missionary, Thomas Gage, visiting in 1625, de-

it as the richest part of Chiapas and comments on its important

with Tabasco and Yucatan. He names the chief com-

as silk, which was certainly post-hispanic, and cochineal which,

used in pre-hispanic times, may have increased in production

109

the conquest.

In the Tzeltal-Tzotzil region lay the town of Zinacantan, in the

of Chiapas. Amber was obtained in trade by the Aztecs from rea. This product was much desired by the Culhua as well as the for lip and nose beads. It was probably exported to the Gulf of

and hence to Yucatan as well as the Basin of Mexico.l1°

To the Aztecs, to whom this was enemy territory, Zinacantan was

known as a town of "merchants." Sahagun reports that spy traders

here to sit in the market place disguised as natives. We have

noted that their wares were not the luxury goods for which the

were famous, but rather goods which the common people

111

This is the only mention by Sahagun of pochtecas actually in a market. It took place in unfriendly territory, in a town despite it being a trading town, cannot be called a port of trade. other words, a port of trade, although located in a foreign territory, be a friendly site, that is, safe for the traders. In some cases the ;uu.uu._,,., of the Culhua ports of trade consisted in the circumstance by some means Nahua traders had usurped political and economic

buy.

from the local inhabitants.

inacantan, site of a Mexican garrison, was one of the strong points protected the Culhua traders as they passed through enemy terri- and along the sierra down to the outlying Culhua province of

near the present-day frontier between Mexico and Guate-

Institution Analysis