Sumerian Merchants and the Problem of Profit

Abstract

The theory that the Sumerian economy was controlled by the state or temple has until recently been a premise generally accepted by those who have attempted to deal with economic activity in the third millennium B.C. This theory has necessarily had a profound effect upon the interpretation of the role of the merchant in this period of Mesopotamian history. Since our evidence is by no means sufficient to reconstruct merchant activity in detail, our view of this aspect of Mesopotamian economic life is decisively conditioned by our theory of the total economy. For this reason, I have sketched out in what follows the theoretical basis which underlies the position taken in the present paper, as well as my understanding of the theoretical position to which it stands opposed.During the 1920's, Anton Deimel reconstructed, on the basis of surviving tablets available to him, the basic structure of the archive of Bau in Girsu during the administrations of Lugalanda and Uru'inimgina (UruKAgina). Operating with the evidence assembled by Deimel, and taking his rather tentative deductions to what seemed at the time to be the logical conclusion, Anna Schneider and others arrived at a view of Sumerian society in which the temple functioned as the heart and brain of the whole. In the context of such a view, which for many years has affected both Assyriological and popular literature on the subject, the merchant can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as an employee of that central controlling agency. Thus, the economy of the third millennium tended to be categorized under such rubrics as “theocracy” and “statism”. The economy of this era was contrasted with the “capitalism” of the Old Babylonian period, and the differences between the economy reflected in the documents of the two eras were often assigned to the influx of new Semitic peoples, a classic case of explaining unknowns by another unknown or, perhaps, of the uncritical generalization of some specific Semitic stereotype such as the Carthaginian in Plautus' Poenulus.