Money (6 page)

To those of us who live in a world where markets and money are the dominant tools for the organisation of social life, this begs an obvious question. If the tribal societies of Dark Age Greece had none of these things, how did they organise themselves? The shock at encountering a society that functions according to completely different rules from one’s own is well captured by the question which the British economist Paul Seabright was asked by the director of bread production in the Russian city of St. Petersburg shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Please understand that we are keen to move towards a market system,” the former Red Director explained, “but we need to understand how such a system works. Tell me, for example, who is in charge of the supply of bread to the population of London?”
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The answer, of course, is that nobody is in charge—the decentralised system of money and markets is what keeps Londoners supplied with everything from Warburtons sandwich to artisan spelt. But just as the Soviet mind was astonished by the notion that the economy could operate without a plan and a planner to co-ordinate it, our minds are apt to be amazed by the opposite: the idea that society could function without any markets or money at all. What did the job before money and markets existed? The
Iliad
and
Odyssey
provide a rich and detailed answer.

The political apparatus is simple but rigid. It is an aristocratic world of chieftains, clerics, and common soldiers. But the hierarchy is flat: a chieftain amongst his followers seems more like a first among equals than a modern monarch, and Agamemnon, the Greek commander-in-chief at Troy, appears to stand in the same relation to the other chieftains. The relatively modest social distinctions are, however, rigidly observed. When a rancorous foot soldier accuses Agamemnon of arrogance in front of the assembled troops, the chieftain Odysseus responds to the breach of protocol in swift and brutal fashion, beating him with his staff and threatening to strip him and thrash him around the camp. This exercise of naked power, unmediated by any more civilised social institutions, might appal the modern reader. To the Dark Age Greek, nothing could have been more natural and appropriate. “Odysseus has done many thousands of great things for the Greeks before now both in government and in battle,” the poet reports the troops as saying to one another approvingly, “but making this scurrilous chatterbox shut up is really the best of all of them: never again, I’ll wager, will [he] dare to rebuke chieftains in this shameless manner.”
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So much for the art of politics. How else did Dark Age Greek society organise itself in the absence of money? For the provision of the most basic needs—food, water, and clothing—the answer was simple, since it was essentially an economy of self-sufficient households in which the individual tribesman subsisted on the produce of his own estate. But the poems also emphasise three social institutions that played important roles in organising the community. The
Iliad
is concerned with the state of war. Here, it is the sharing out of booty following the sacking of a city or the defeat of enemies that is the most important mechanism. As a system for the distribution of income, it was evidently far from perfect. The rules appear to be subject to frequent dispute. Indeed, the plot of the poem turns on the dispute between the Greeks’ best warrior, Achilles, and their commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, over their respective rights to captured booty.

By the time of the
Odyssey
, the world is at peace again. The poem
follows Odysseus as he wends his way home from Troy, and his son Telemachus as he travels the Aegean in search of his father. A different institution now dominates the scene: the practice of exchanging gifts between chieftains. It was the custom, on receiving or parting from fellow aristocrats, to present gifts—gifts that would be reciprocated on one’s own next visit. The purpose of this primitive form of economic exchange was to express in visible and tangible form the bond between social equals and to retouch the cement of the social infrastructure for the future. Like booty distribution, its rules were sometimes contested: the Trojan War itself was the result of a breach of protocol by Paris, who stole Menelaus’ bride, the beautiful Helen. But outside times of war, it was the most important system of economic interaction in the Dark Age Greek world; one, indeed, so central to its worldview that when another poet writing two centuries or so after Homer’s time wished to capture the essence of the good life in a single verse, he wrote: “Happy the man who has his sons, his hounds, his horses—and a friend from foreign parts.”
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The raw principle of “might is right” alone, albeit moderated by booty distribution and reciprocal gift-exchange, seems a somewhat threadbare fabric out of which to fashion even a simple society. And indeed the poems describe a third crucial institution that was altogether more profound: the sacrifice of oxen to the gods and the distribution of the roast meat in equal parts to the congregation of the tribe. Through this solemn ritual perhaps the most basic of all principles of Greek political organisation was expressed in visible—indeed, in edible—form: the fact that every male member of the tribe was of equal social worth, and, by the same token, owed an equal obligation to the community as a whole.
⁶

These three simple mechanisms for organising society in the absence of money—the interlocking institutions of booty distribution, reciprocal gift-exchange, and the distribution of the sacrifice—are far from unique to Dark Age Greece. Rather, modern research in anthropology and comparative history has shown them to be typical of the practices of small-scale, tribal societies.
⁷
Of course, such pre-monetary social institutions have assumed many forms, reflecting
the peculiar circumstances and beliefs of the peoples in question. But the anthropologists Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry have identified a widespread twofold classification. Comparative studies of societies from Madagascar to the Andes reveal “a similar pattern of two related but separate transactional orders: on the one hand transactions concerned with the reproduction of the long-term social or cosmic order; on the other, a ‘sphere’ of short-term transactions concerned with the arena of individual competition.”
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The pre-monetary institutions of the Homeric world conform to the scheme. On the one hand, there was the primeval institution of the sacrifice and the egalitarian distribution and communal consumption of its roast meat—a ritual expression of tribal solidarity before deity probably inherited from the most distant Indo-European past.
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This was the institution that governed the “long-term transactional order.” On the other, there were the conventions of reciprocal gift-exchange and of booty distribution. These were the rules that governed the “short-term transactional order,” concerned not with cosmic order and harmony between the classes but with the more mundane matter of ensuring that the everyday business of primitive society—drinking and hunting when at peace; rape and pillage when at war—did not dissolve into chaos.

Yet the primordial social practices described in the Homeric epics and attested in the Aegean archaeological evidence were far from the only known means of organising society in the era of the Greek Dark Ages. A mere thousand miles to the east were civilisations much older, much larger, and much more sophisticated. These were the ancient riparian societies of Mesopotamia. In stark contrast to the rocky, mountainous, seaboard geography of most of the Greek world, Mesopotamia was a landscape of tremendous fertility, encompassing the rolling hills of the Fertile Crescent in the north and the rich alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the south. No doubt it is on account of these basic environmental conditions that
Mesopotamia can claim to be the birthplace of so many of the basic aspects of human civilisation. It is close to the northern reaches of the Euphrates, in modern-day Turkey, that agriculture seems to have been invented and the very earliest evidence of sedentary human settlement has been found.
¹⁰
It was in the delta of the two great Mesopotamian rivers, in modern-day Iraq, that the technique of irrigation appears to have been first developed.

These fundamental scientific discoveries permitted what were, by the standards of the era, vast concentrations of people—and as a result, the development of Mesopotamia’s greatest and most influential social innovation: the city. By the early third millennium bc, the city of Uruk was thriving on the banks of the Euphrates in the far south, covering five and a half square kilometres and housing thousands of inhabitants.
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But Uruk was only the pioneer of a number of great city states that flourished throughout Mesopotamia, and which a thousand years later would be unified by the world’s first regional state, headquartered in the great metropolis of Ur.
¹²
By the beginning of the second millennium bc, more than sixty thousand people lived within the city itself. In its hinterland, meanwhile, thousands of hectares of land were under cultivation for dates, sesame, and cereals, and hundreds more were devoted to dairy farming and sheep herding. There were fish farms and reed factories in the marshes of the south, and numerous artisans’ operations in the city itself making pottery, reedwork, and prestige goods for use in religious ritual. The scale and diversity of these activities, and their concentration in a single centre of population, were unimaginable in Dark Age Greece.

Unsurprisingly, the social system that developed was also radically different from the primitive tribalism of the Dark Age Greek world. Ultimate power in Ur was shared between the palace—the seat of a semi-divine king who combined the roles of military leader and chief justice—and the temples—home both to the deities who were believed to regulate the universe, and to an extensive clerical bureaucracy whose job it was to do the same for the economy of the city on earth. Monumental temple architecture dominated the centre of the city—the great ziggurat dedicated to the god Nanna which
still stands today; the temple of his heavenly spouse Ningal; and the Ganunmah, a vast storehouse which also served as the headquarters of the clerical administration.
¹³
These officials choreographed virtually every aspect of Ur’s economy: “[t]he fields, the herds, and the marshes were owned mainly by the temples, who used citizens to take care of the daily work. The temple administrators were always, however, the ultimate authority.”
¹⁴
The contrast with Greece could not be more stark. In Mesopotamia, geography and climate led to scale and complexity, which in turn led to the world’s first bureaucratic society—and its first command economy.
¹⁵

A state with such a complex, hierarchical, and bureaucratic form of organisation demanded altogether different technologies of social co-operation and control from the primitive institutions that governed the small, tribal societies of Dark Age Greece. It is therefore not surprising that Mesopotamia witnessed the invention of three of the most important social technologies in the history of human civilisation: literacy, numeracy, and accounting.

The ancient world was mystified by the origins of literacy. It seemed inconceivable that a technology so self-evidently fundamental to civilised life could have been dreamt up by feeble-minded mortals. The only possible explanation, therefore, was that it had come from the gods—either as a generous gift, or as stolen goods. The Egyptians, for example, believed that Thoth, the baboon-faced god of knowledge, presented writing to mortals, and the Greeks that Prometheus did the same. In ancient Mesopotamia, on the other hand, it was held that the secret of literacy had been acquired by stealth. The great goddess Inanna had stolen writing for her city of Uruk by taking advantage of Enki, the god of wisdom, while he was drunk.

When modern scholars began to show an interest in the same question in the eighteenth century, they demonstrated more confidence in the powers of human invention. Archaeological evidence was marshalled, and by the early twentieth century a reasonable
theory, consisting of two hypotheses, had been constructed. First, writing had not evolved gradually, but had been invented—exactly by whom was unclear, but it was generally presumed to be by wise sages who “agreed upon a conventional method of recording [language] in written signs … intelligible to all their colleagues and successors.”
¹⁶
Second, the earliest writing must have been “pictographic”—that is, it consisted of stylised pictures of what it was intended to represent—since it would otherwise have been difficult for the sages to agree on the symbols and disseminate them easily amongst the population.
¹⁷

Until the early twentieth century, all available evidence seemed to corroborate this pictographic theory of the origins of literacy. The earliest writing indeed appeared suddenly in the archaeological record, and did so in the form of Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Chinese characters, and the colourful pictograms of the pre-Columbian Aztec codices. In 1929, however, a new discovery turned the theory on its head. Excavations at Mesopotamian Uruk uncovered a vast archive of clay tablets inscribed with detailed accounts of palace and temple transactions. Dating from the late fourth millennium bc, the writing on these tablets represented by far the oldest specimens ever discovered. But unlike the pictographic scripts of Egypt, China, and Central America, this script consisted of abstract signs composed of combinations of inscribed flicks of a reed pen—a so-called “cuneiform” script. As the excavations continued throughout the mid-twentieth century, more and more evidence accumulated. The earliest known writing was represented not by pictograms but by a script not qualitatively different from a modern alphabet. If the conventional theory’s second hypothesis was incorrect, perhaps its first hypothesis of spontaneous invention was also flawed. All of a sudden, the origins of writing were plunged back into obscurity; four decades would pass before a new light was to illuminate the ancient question from a quite unexpected angle.