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Clash of the Titans: The Economics of Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia Between Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Models

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Ancient Economies in Comparative Perspective

Part of the book series: Frontiers in Economic History ((FEH))

Abstract

The scholarship on Bronze Age Mesopotamian economies has been split between the construction of broad theoretical narratives aimed at explaining macro-economic features and long-durée phenomena, and the development of models for making sense of micro-economic and utilitarian aspects of early urban life. The former traditionally relied on the top-down application of super-models borrowed from other social disciplines and on textual sources, whereas the latter mostly relied on excavated material culture for building bottom-up reconstructions. The paper aims at proposing a framework for integrating multiform empirical datasets and theoretical models for achieving a more complex vision of early Mesopotamian economies, following an interdisciplinary social science perspective. Considering the abundant evidence on the decision-making of institutional bodies for the study period, particular focus will be given to the concept of “political economy” and how it can be applied to the societies of Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See for example, the CRANE project https://www.crane.utoronto.ca; the SESHAT project http://seshatdatabank.info.

  2. 2.

    Here a digital repository that contains editions of 14.000 cuneiform royal inscriptions: https://cdli.ucla.edu/projects/royal/royal.html.

  3. 3.

    Collections of proxy data are available for the ANE, such as ancient climate, river levels, demographics, and bodily height (Brooke 2014). It is however regretful that, apart from paleoclimate, these datasets are almost never taken into consideration by ANE specialists.

  4. 4.

    See https://cdli.ucla.edu; http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu; http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk; http://psd.museum.upenn.edu; http://ebda.cnr.it.

  5. 5.

    See also the critique by M. Smith http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2018/11/ian-hodder-says-archaeology-is-bullshit.html.

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  1. Department of Economic History, Institutions, Politics and World Economy, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Giacomo Benati

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sciences of Antiquity, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Marcella Frangipane

  2. Polimoda, Florence, Italy

    Monika Poettinger

  3. Department of Economics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany

    Bertram Schefold

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Benati, G. (2022). Clash of the Titans: The Economics of Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia Between Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Models. In: Frangipane, M., Poettinger, M., Schefold, B. (eds) Ancient Economies in Comparative Perspective. Frontiers in Economic History . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08763-9_7

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