Labor Omnia Vincit

This is an important book for a number of reasons. It marks new trends in historical studies in the area of the ancient eastern Mediterranean, if this geographical term can describe (greater) Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Mycenaean world. It considers fundamental issues of social organization, economics, and politics beyond royal personages and their bureaucracies, wars, great events, and preoccupations with ethnicities and migrations. The essays concern not only what was done but how were things done. Crucially one can extract from the essays new ideas about governments and society, especially about how people of various social standing were recruited into government service at several levels. Indeed, the book challenges prevailing conceptions of governments as separate from the rest of society. It’s not that these topics themselves are totally new, but the essays try to fit institutional forms and agents into a new model that can become a productive research agenda. Its main argument is that governments don’t coerce people into laboring for the state. The book is not an easy read. It stems from a conference held in 2005, and gathering the essays and moving them into print took ten years. An earlier version of one chapter, by Karen Radner, was already published in 2007. Several of the chapters are nearly monographic in length and in detail. Walther Sallaberger and Alexander Preuss devote 67 pages to the texts and archaeology of Tell Beydar dating to the middle of the third millennium; Piotr Steinkeller in 99 pages considers labor in the Ur III period; Seth Richardson reports in 92 pages on agriculture and construction in Larsa in the early Old Babylonian period; Michael Jursa summarizes labor in the first millennium BCE in 51 pages; Mark Lehner wins the palm for the lengthiest chapter, 125 pages, on the workers’ town at Giza; Ogden Goelet in 59 pages surveys labor in a variety of Egyptian periods; Linear B tablets are discussed by Dimitri Nakassis and Tom Palaima in two chapters together encompassing 65 pages. Piotr Steinkeller’s valuable introduction is 36 pages; Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky’s discussion of labor in the Neolithic of the Near East is 32 pages; Karen Radner’s chapter on hired labor in the Neo-Assyrian period is 15 pages; Michael Hudson’s concluding chapter is also 15 pages. The long chapters present much primary data, some tabulated numerical data, and there are also translations of texts. Whereas scholars who are adept in the various time-periods and places will appreciate these detailed presentations, other scholars of the “ancient world” and certainly all scholars of economics, ancient history, world history, politics, and so forth will either skip the discussions of the data or be confused by them. This book is part of a series of books edited by Michael Hudson and colleagues on aspects of the economy, mainly in Mesopotamia. The overall goals of the series are first to argue that ancient Mesopotamian economies are in some fundamental ways not unlike modern economies. That is, in Mesopotamia there were principles of bookkeeping, in which time is money, and there was wage labor. The point is even clearer in the case of the Old Assyrian trading system in which profit is made and entrepreneurial behavior is clear. The second goal is to trace changes in the economy of Mesopotamia (and other places). Finally, in what ways is economics in the “ancient Near East” fundamentally different from that in the modern world? The central theme of this book (although not enunciated