Can you tell me where the market is?

The readings this week really challenged my concept of trade and state. I found Berdan's article to be a great jumping off point to look at Ancient trading networks in particular the Old-Assyrian evidence. The distinction between market and marketplace really intrigued me. Although those are merely semantic differences in English, I wonder how they might translate into studies of economics in ancient languages.

In Akkadian you of course have kārum: port, chamber of commerce(a particularly loaded term), trading colony (OA), likewise maḫīrum: market place, but also market. The maḫīrum can also have a gate, where it seems that perhaps cheap(er) goods can be obtained: CAD M1, 98). You might also find a barber in the maḫīrum (CAD G 16). What goods and services operate in these different terms, where would you find your locally orbiting goods produced by constituent farmers/sellers, where would you find your foreign goods sold by dedicated merchants. The Sumerian equivalent to maḫīrum is šakanka which doesn't have great lexical evidence other than that it's usually found in list near other words to do with prices and selling. One reference however links it with Dilmun as in "the market of Dilmun" or "the Dilmun market" suggesting either a destination abroad or a location for imported goods, again the context is lexical so it's lacking any sort of relational semantics. There is of course the famous evidence from Herodotus book 1 p. 197 of bearing the sick into the "market-place" where they are diagnosed by passers-by.

We also discussed to some degree the dearth of evidence about trading in well established empires of the 1st millennium. Little is mention about trade in the NA period. It was surely still going on as the king's booty could not support the entire NA apparatus. I remember reading, although I'm not sure where, that being an independent city-state on the border of the NA empire was very advantageous, (think kingdom of Judah vs. annexed Israel). This position allowed for direct entrance into the well oiled logistic machine of the empire and the ability to sell goods to a much wider market than your direct neighbors. This I guess would relate to Berdan's point of relay trade (Berdan 1989, 104) just replacing one stop on the relay with a much larger empire with its own internal self-sufficient network. We can only speculate on how this actually worked and perhaps our only evidence that it did work was the presence of foreign names in economic documents on both sides of the exchange.

In earlier economic documents from souther Mesopotamia before the formation of an Assyrian political identity there are names of witnesses and people involved in transactions who use the name Aššur as a theophoric element. This seems to suggest that perhaps even in this early period people, potentially traders, from Assyria are traveling to the south to establish links with cities and bring goods home. This would then find its continuation in the under-documented but bustling trade in the OA period of textiles from south to north.

A final interesting point is the use of trade in the establishment of political and cultural identity. We looked briefly at the concept of the koíne as developed by Marian Feldman in the later Assyrian empire in the next class (Feldman 2006). This seems to already be quite present in the kārum of kültepe with a mix of Assyrian and local cultural artifacts occupying the same space in the household (Kulakoǧlu 2011). Although the Assyrian traders were coming to Anatolia on the own and without any sort of state apparatus in tow they still brought their Assyrian identity which influenced and entered into dialog with the local identity. Obviously a large part of this (at least to modern researchers) was the importation of writing. Which then begs the interesting question, why did the Hittites adopt an Old-Babylonian script rather than continue the writing style of the Assyria traders?

Berdan, Frances F.; 1989.“Trade and markets in precapitalist states,” in Economic anthropology. Stuart Plattner (ed). Stanford University Press, 78-107.

Feldman, Marian H.; 2006. “Assur Tomb 45 and the Birth of the Assyrian Empire,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 343: 21-43.

Kulakoglu, Fikri; 2011. "Kultepe-Kanes: A Second Millennium BCE trading center on the central plateau" in Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia. S R. Steadman and G. McMahon (eds). Oxford University Press, 1012-1030.