The Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC

The project will present the first comprehensive synthesis ever of the economic sources from first millennium BC Babylonia (Southern Mesopotamia). These sources, clay tablets written in the Cuneiform script, constitute one of the three largest groups of texts from antiquity known today. The project is divided into two phases. The first phase of about three years will investigate the single most important economic process of this time, the demographic, agricultural and generally economic growth which began in the seventh century BC and continued at least until the first centuries AD. The main research agenda are demography, agriculture and land use patterns, the money based market economy, the development of prices and wages, and individual economic "strategies" and investment patterns. The second phase will investigate three different, but interconnected topics. The first of these are the various social strata and institutions in their role as economic agents (foremost the king and the royal establishment, the temple households and the cities, and "private" (urban) households). Special attention will be given to the different ways these groups and institutions interact economically. The second topic will treat aspects of material culture which are of relevance for economic history. One important subtopic here is the Neo-Babylonian private house. Here the usually text-oriented approach of the project will be supplemented by an archaeological one. The third topic of the second phase is animal husbandry, the single important branch of the economy not discussed comprehensively in the first phase of the project. Cumulatively, the resulting studies will present a coherent picture of the economic development of the period. Methodologically, the project will attempt to integrate the archive-oriented "microhistorical" approach common nowadays in studies on the Ancient Near Eastern economy with a more generalising reconstruction of the economic longue durée. The questions to be asked will be formulated according to explicitly discussed models, which will then be tested against the evidence. The project will collect as many new sources as possible for its subtopics from among the thousands of unpublished tablets in museum-collections world-wide, but mostly in the British Museum in London. The comprehensive description of first millennium economic development achieved by the project will not only make the results of specialist work on Neo-Babylonian economy much easier accessible for the entire field of Ancient Near Eastern studies, it will also for the first time make this period accessible for neighbouring fields such as Ancient History, Egyptology or general economic history. This is of considerable importance as the first millennium BC was a formative period in general for European history in which the Mediterranean cultures were in regular contact with Mesopotamia.

The project will present the first comprehensive synthesis ever of the economic sources from first millennium BC Babylonia (Southern Mesopotamia). These sources, clay tablets written in the Cuneiform script, constitute one of the three largest groups of texts from antiquity known today. The project is divided into two phases. The first phase of about three years will investigate the single most important economic process of this time, the demographic, agricultural and generally economic growth which began in the seventh century BC and continued at least until the first centuries AD. The main research agenda are demography, agriculture and land use patterns, the money based market economy, the development of prices and wages, and individual economic "strategies" and investment patterns. The second phase will investigate three different, but interconnected topics. The first of these are the various social strata and institutions in their role as economic agents (foremost the king and the royal establishment, the temple households and the cities, and "private" (urban) households). Special attention will be given to the different ways these groups and institutions interact economically. The second topic will treat aspects of material culture which are of relevance for economic history. One important subtopic here is the Neo-Babylonian private house. Here the usually text-oriented approach of the project will be supplemented by an archaeological one. The third topic of the second phase is animal husbandry, the single important branch of the economy not discussed comprehensively in the first phase of the project. Cumulatively, the resulting studies will present a coherent picture of the economic development of the period. Methodologically, the project will attempt to integrate the archive-oriented "microhistorical" approach common nowadays in studies on the Ancient Near Eastern economy with a more generalising reconstruction of the economic longue durée. The questions to be asked will be formulated according to explicitly discussed models, which will then be tested against the evidence. The project will collect as many new sources as possible for its subtopics from among the thousands of unpublished tablets in museum-collections world-wide, but mostly in the British Museum in London. The comprehensive description of first millennium economic development achieved by the project will not only make the results of specialist work on Neo-Babylonian economy much easier accessible for the entire field of Ancient Near Eastern studies, it will also for the first time make this period accessible for neighbouring fields such as Ancient History, Egyptology or general economic history. This is of considerable importance as the first millennium BC was a formative period in general for European history in which the Mediterranean cultures were in regular contact with Mesopotamia.