Urban Economy Begins

The project aims to rethink the core features of early city-state economy, as emerging from an in-depth analysis of cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia and Syria, dated to the Early Dynastic period (ca. 2900-2350 BCE). The impetus for the project comes from the fact that large amount of new textual sources has been published in recent years. However, such valuable materials are yet to be exploited for the reconstruction of economic developments within the first city states, with profound implications on subsequent historical phases. The project has great potential to expand our knowledge not only in the field of Ancient Near Eastern studies and related disciplines, but also on many fields concerned with the study of economy in comparative perspective (Economic History, Political Economy, Financial Sciences, Economic Law), as well as on Assyriology, and Digital Humanities (with reference to methodologies and tools for computational analysis of ancient written sources).

The ancient Near East provides us with the earliest, larger, coherent evidence for the study of how economy developed in the first cities. The most informative sources on this topic are cuneiform texts from the Early Dynastic period (ca. 2900-2350 BCE). The corpus consists of roughly 7.500 tablets, most of which are presently of difficult access to non-specialists of cuneiform sources (lack of English translations, edition in scattered articles, no coherent treatment for the early periods). The evidence stems from several sites, scattered over a very large area: southern Mesopotamia (sites of Abu Salabikh, Adab, Girsu, Isin, Kish, Nippur, Shuruppak, Umma, Ur, Zabalam), the middle-Euphrates region (Mari), all the way to upper Syria (Ebla, Tell Beydar). Such textual sources are not only abundant (roughly 7.500 in total), but also diverse in nature: contracts, cadaster texts, accounts dealing with primary production (farming activities and animal husbandry), rosters of workers and ration lists, documents concerning the circulation of precious metal, prestige items, etc. In particular, the project aims to integrate a large amount of new data relevant to the discussion, which has not yet been exploited in order to advance our knowledge on the topic of early urban economy in the ancient Near East. Depending on the dating and location of the inscriptions, the underlying language of the texts is either Sumerian (an extinct language without known living cognates), Akkadian, or Eblaite (both belonging to the Semitic family group). Although some linguistic features of these ancient languages still remain elusive to us, administrative texts are well understood, due to their schematic nature, standard phraseology, as well as absence of complicated sentences. The project is limited to the analysis of textual material only, which provides the most relevant data with respect to the specific goals we intend to achieve. As for the time frame, the earlier textual material from the Uruk IV and III periods - the so-called proto-cuneiform texts, ca. 3300-2900 BCE - is out of the scope of the project. As it is well known, the archaic nature of those texts poses serious philological problems that make interpretation exceedingly difficult.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines current methodologies in the fields of History of the Ancient Near East, Assyriology (philology of cuneiform sources) and Digital Humanities (computational analysis, data-mining, data visualization, web-GIS), the project aims to re-evaluate economic structures and operative factors within the urban system (temples, palaces, households, bureaus, private actors, markets, etc.), in their socio-economic context, with focus on quantitative aspects of production, workforce, resource management.