Birth of the Multinational:
2000 Years of Ancient Business History,
From Ashur to Augustus
Karl James Moore and David Charles Lewis
* Excerpts from pp. 46-48:
Arising in the mid-fourth millennium BC, Sumer and its daughter civilizations of Babylon and Assyria led Western civilization for three thousand years, half of recorded human history.
Why did Mesopotamian Iraq come to excel in world politics and trade while richer lands like Egypt, India and China played more peripheral roles? The answer, once again, appeared to rest in the comparative historical geography of these cradles of civilization. ...
History took a different course in Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, which were ultimately destined to become the true cradles of private initiative and capitalism, the evidence for which in Mesopotamia is as old as writing itself.
The oldest written documents of human civilization itself, dating from 3200 BC if not earlier, evoke the crude and primitive business transactions of the very ancient communities arising just north of what was then the swampy coastline of the Arabian gulf. Far more suited as a source of irrigation water than the swift-flowing Tigris, the Euphrates in the fourth millennium BC became the major locus of settlement in Sumer.
Even though at first there was human life along the lower Tigris, both rivers and their adjoining canals constituted an interlocking web of land and water routes that would eventually "tend to strengthen local or regional units and impede the trend towards unification" permitting the rise of multiple power centers.
It would be too simple to assume, however, that geography of and by itself led to the rise of capitalism in Mesopotamia; it merely removed a major bureaucratic obstacle by preventing any single municipality or settlement from monopolizing access to the outside world.
Instead of encouraging a one-state monopoly upon trade and commerce, the terrain of Mesopotamia permitted an environment of competition to develop among various Sumerian towns that would help generate the revolution in technology, which, after 3100 BC, would usher in the Bronze Age. ...
Sumerian, Anatolian and other smiths, long accustomed to forging primitive Copper tools, began around that time to discover that when they mixed their soft red-brown Copper ore together with sufficient amounts of Tin in a super-hot furnace, they would produce a harder alloy called Bronze.
The more Tin they mixed with red Copper, the yellower and harder the new metal, known as Bronze became. The invention of Bronze alloys in foundries where the fires were heated to between 590 and 790 degrees centigrade made it possible for professional Metallurgists to mold soft Copper and Tin into sturdy plows, building tools, kitchen ware and other Items destined to vastly increase human productivity in a manner comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution of modern times.
The very map of Mesopotamian civilization itself was redrawn after 3100 BC. Sumerian farmers could now plow their lands to grow enough food to enable others to enter more specialized occupations and live off the new surplus produced by an increasingly capitalized agriculture.
An urban, commercial and money economy was thus made possible through the molding of Bronze ploughs, sickles and the invention of wheeled donkey-carts, all of which made it possible for the Sumerian farmer to send his excess Wheat and Barley to feed the new sculptors, carpenters, leather-workers, brick-layers, scribes and others now able to earn a living in places like Ur.uk. ...
In the Copper Age before 3100 BC, the people of Southern Mesopotamia dwelt, as did the rest of humanity in the Near East, in an almost completely rural subsistence economy. Sumerians and others lived in towns along or near their river valleys or wherever sufficient rainfall and moisture permitted them. Only one or two of these towns such as Eridu and Uruk merited the title of city.
The Sumerian landscape then changed dramatically between 3100 and 2900 BC as the Bronze Age Urban Revolution began to gain momentum.
The Tigris-Euphrates and western Iran quickly acquired dense clusters of concentrated farms and towns and a dozen growing cities like Kish, Ur, Lagash, Umma, Awan, Hamazi and Shuruppak.
The same phenomenon would, within several centuries, come as well to other regions: Northern Mesopotamia and Syria, Anatolia, the Indus Valley, but not before the Sumerians, crowding into their cities in search of new economic opportunities and military security, had clearly taken the lead in capital formation, technology and urban development. ...
The Urban Revolution gave birth to forms of politics, diplomacy, war and business, which, if different from our own, are, for the first time recognizable.
Evolving from pictograms, which appeared at the end of the Uruk Period (3500-3200 BC), the cuneiform alphabet of 3200-2900 was sufficiently streamlined and detailed enough to provide an eyewitness commentary upon early Dynastic civilization.
Humanity's first urban and capitalist civilization and its development were revealed day-by-day in the tablets of the time as well as in the silent testimony of the ruins of its royal tombs and impressive buildings. Decorated with images of ears of Corn and stalks of Wheat, the vases of Uruk spoke as much about the nature of its economy as volumes of tablets.
In the center of the developing institutions of these emerging sophisticated urban communities were the temples of their gods and the palaces of their Lugals, "big men" or Kings.
Following the work of Sumerologist Anton Deimel in 1931, five decades of scholars believed that the city-states of the ancient Near East were "socialist" theocracies in which the temple exercised supreme political power and owned all of the land.
Private ownership of lands was felt to be nonexistent until it was recognized in the early 1960s that city-states such as Lagash controlled large tracts of rural territory owned by family groups.
Individual and family property and commercial markets were an integral part of the Mesopotamian economy from the beginning, existing alongside and in perfect harmony with the public enterprises of the palace and temple.
The average Sumerian peasant was more than capable of supporting himself and his family from his irrigated plot on which he usually grew vegetables and wheat while raising chickens. Documents from Lagash prove that most of these plots were privately owned, even by the poor, and that Real Estate was a thriving business even in early Dynastic times.
If the urban Mesopotamian economy rejected communism, it was by no means a laissez-faire system either. Tablets from both Sumer and Ebla picture a very patrician and paternalistic form of mixed economy, which gave entrepreneurs certain freedoms within a mercantilist framework of strongly regulated commerce, much of which was still state-run. ...
The history of the ancient Near East between 3000 and 2000 BC was one of expanding trade and commerce, growing social inequality and the rise and fall of centralized bureaucratic governments many of whose functions were later assumed by new commercial organizations in the Assyro-Babylonian private sector.
