Palace economy
| Part of a series on |
| Economic systems |
|---|
|
Major types
|
|
A palace economy or redistribution economy
The concept of economic distribution is at least as old as the advent of the pharaohs. Anthropologists have noted many such systems, from those of tribesmen engaged in common subsistence economies of various sorts to complex civilizations, such as that of the Inca Empire, which assigned segments of the economy to specific villages. The essence of the idea is that a central administration plans production, assigns elements of the population to carry it out, collects the goods and services thus created, and redistributes them to the producers.[citation needed]
A palace economy is a specific type of distribution system in which the economic activities of the civilization are conducted on or near the premises of central administration complexes, the palaces of
In ancient palace systems, the producers were typically part of the
Etymology
The thread leading to the current use of the terms came from the study of the palaces of the
In 1956 Ventris and Chadwick published an idea that they had been considering previously:[4]
Nor is there any evidence in the tablets of anything approaching currency. Every commodity is listed separately, and there is never any sign of equivalence between one unit and another.
Contemporaneously M. Finley had noticed the evidence of redistribution in the tablets and sought to understand how that could occur in those pre-currency times. In The World of Odysseus he noted that most distribution was internal:[5]
All the production work, the seeding and harvesting and milling and weaving, even the hunting and raiding, though carried on by individuals, was performed on behalf of the household as a whole ... and from the centre they were redistributed ....
Finley further hypothesized that gift-giving, "the basic organizing mechanism among many primitive peoples,"[6] had been developed into a system of exchange, without prices, and dependent on the ad hoc valuation of the exchangers:
The act of giving was ... always the first half of a reciprocal action, the other half of which was a counter-gift.
Finley's observations were immediately and almost universally accepted; however, some reservations developed over the decades since then. Mycenaean ships were sent out from the palace complexes laden with ceramics, oils, perfumes and other goods precisely as though they were exports for sale, rather than gift-giving.
Ventris died in 1956. Like the other archaeologists of the time, he never envisioned the palace economy as anything more than the day-to-day economics of the palace, although Ventris and Chadwick did remark on the "similarities in the size and organization of the royal palaces" of Nuzi, Alalakh and Ugarit.[7] Similarly, Finley in the late 1950s did not refer to his system as a palace economy. The status of the word had changed by 1960, when historical theorists had put the two together.[8]
Exactly who was the first is unclear, but the best candidate is
By the time 1965 had arrived, the palace economy was being applied widely over all the Aegean and Near and Middle Eastern civilizations of the Late Bronze Age. It became such a fixture that subsequently it was applied to modern economic system types. There was, however, a notable abstention. Chadwick, who inherited the work and tradition of Ventris, in The Mycenaean World (1976), notably does not refer to a palace economy. Instead he implies questions, such as[13]
... it is not so clear how small a palace can be ... What we can infer from the palace buildings is that there are administrative centres ... each centre of administration implies an administrator, whether he be an independent monarch, a semi-autonomous prince, or a local baron ....
This implying that the palace economy model might be simplistic foreshadowed the current trend. Halstead summarizes a forum begun by Nakassis and others as[14]
The term 'redistribution' has been used with a range of meanings in the context of the Aegean Bronze Age and so obscures rather than illuminates the emergence and functioning of political economies.
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Bronze Age
Cretan civilization
Middle Minoan Crete
As early as the Middle Bronze Age, roughly the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, the eastern Mediterranean was dominated by a civilization named Minoan by its discoverer, Sir Arthur Evans, excavating the Palace of Knossos, which he termed the Palace of Minos. The civilization was maritime, its fleets were legendary, its settlements were mainly coastal, and its operations were mainly peaceful. There are legends, such as that of Theseus and the Minotaur, which indicate that tribute of some sort was collected by Crete from overseas locations, but its legendary history is far different from the wars and warriors of the mainland.
The evolution of palatial structures, if that is what they were, began on Crete in the Middle Minoan (MM) period of the Middle Bronze Age. The beginning of what Shaw calls "the big three" – Knossos, Phaestos, Malia – is dated to MMI, but others began in MMII. The relationships between all the foundings remain unknown, but a single foundation act is now to be ruled out.[15]
The type of economic system prevailing on Crete and presumably wherever Cretan influence reached is very well documented by hundreds of tablets found at multiple locations in Crete. Only the persistent resistance of the writing script, Linear A, to decipherment prevents these documents from being read, and the information they contain assimilated. Consequently, nothing is known about the economy beyond what can be deduced from the archaeology or inferred by drawing risky parallels to the information presented in Late Bronze Age documents, which can be read. That the Minoans, as Evans called them in the absence of knowledge of their real name or names, may have had a palace economy is pure speculation.
Late Minoan Crete
The economy of the
Other locations
The palace economies in
Asia
The
See also
Notes
- ISBN 0415127734.
- ^ Blake, Emma; Knapp, A. Bernard, eds. (2005). "The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory". Blackwell Publishing. pp. 275, 287.
- ^ Connor, Andrew James (2006). Temples as Economic Agents in Early Roman Egypt: The Case of Tebtunis and Soknopaiou Nesos. University of Cincinnati. pp. 355–56.
- ^ Chadwick 1973, p. 198.
- ^ Finley 1979, p. 62.
- ^ Finley 1979, p. 64.
- ^ Chadwick 1973, p. 106.
- ^ Nakassis, Dimitri (2010), "Reevaluating Staple and Wealth Finance at Mycenaean Pylos", in Pullen, D. J. (ed.), Political Economies of the Aegean Bronze Age, Oxford: Oxbow Books, p. 127
- ^ Polanyi, Karl, "On the Comparative Treatment of Economic Institution in Antiquity with Illustrations from Athens, Mycenae, and Alalakh", in Kraeling, Carl Hermann; Adams, Robert McCormick (eds.), City invincible: a Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, December 4–7, 1958, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 329–50
- ^ Clark, Grahame (1961). World prehistory, an outline. Cambridge [Eng.]: University Press. p. 148.
- ^ Starr, Chester G (1961). The origins of Greek civilization: 1100–650 B.C. New York. p. 48.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Palmer, Leonard R (1963). The interpretation of Mycenaean Greek texts. Oxford: Clarendon.
- ISBN 9780521290371.
- .
- ^ Shaw, Joseph W (2006). Kommos: a Minoan harbor town and Greek sanctuary in Southern Crete. Athens: American School of Classical Studies at Athens. p. 119.
- OCLC 03452414.
References
- Chadwick, John (1973). Documents in Mycenaean Greek (1st, 2nd ed.). Cambridge: at the University Press.
- Finley, Moses I. (1979). The World of Odysseus (2nd ed.). New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140205701.
- Bendall, Lisa Maria (2007). Economics of religion in the Mycenaean world: resources dedicated to religion in the Mycenaean palace economy (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology.