Trade in the Ancient near East by J. D. HawkinsReview by: J. D. MuhlyJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1980), pp. 173-175Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/601072 .

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Reviews of Books 173

Christian, agrees that it has little in common with the classic De anima treatises of the early patristic period, and also accepts MacRae's contention that the tractate shares many features with Hermetic literature. He disagrees, however, with MacRae's judgment that the tractate does not clearly presup- pose "any typically Gnostic myth of the origins of the world or of the human condition." On the contrary, Menard believes that he can detect allusion to the Gnostic myth of a fall preserved in a fragmentary state on plate 23, where the author describes a man and woman who live together so that children begotten by the man become step-brothers to other children born to the woman. As the metaphor is extended, the author describes the plight of those step-children who can inherit only from the mother. Since their heritage is that of many vainglorious worldly passions, Menard regards the mother in that figure as being analogous to Hermetic physis or the Pronoia-Sophia figures found in other Nag Hammadi texts. I found MWnard's argument less than convincing at that point. That fact tended to also lessen somewhat the impact of the considerable erudition which he displays in his commentary, since the overwhelming majority of parallels which he brings to the reader's attention are drawn from other Gnostic systems.

The translation which Menard provides is generally good. There are now four translations of this text available. In addition to those by Menard and MacRae (with Doug Parrott), there are earlier attempts by Martin Krause (with Pahor Labib) in Gnostische und hermetische Schriften aus Codex II und Codex VI, Gluckstadt, 1971, pp. 133-49, and W.P. Funk in TL7 98 (1973) pp. 251-59. Menard has taken full advantage of earlier translations. In contrast to MacRae's work, he has been more willing to fill in the lacunae. Thus, for example, by suggesting a slightly different reading for the traces found at line 28:4, Menard is able to restore a continuous text for lines 4-6. His reading is possible, but it involves constructing a third future after jekas in contrast to the regular use of second future elsewhere in the text. Despite the effort that has gone into the several translations, there are a number of passages that continue to be perplexing. At 27, 32, for example, we are told that the Logos is put on the eyes "as a balm eswom mmoow." A literal rendering "which eats them (or water)" is no help. MacRae-Parrott have emended the text to read "(opening) them." Menard prefers "absorbant les eaux." That involves a bold but dubious rendering of wim. At 34, 24 a difficult passage contains the phrase je sgina je. MacRae-Parrott provide the bold rendering this time, reading "the result is that." MWnard, however, prefers a more cautious assumption that there is a lacuna in the text and reads "pour que . . ., puisque."

I would agree with Menard in his classification of the dialect as primarily Sahidic (p. 1), but the index to which he refers us provides something less than an adequate basis for

making a final decision on the matter. The index clearly shows the spelling of most nouns and verbal infinitives. Thus we learn that the noun translated "pleasure" is spelled either hloJ (24, 28) or hlac (31, 22) and that mntom (23, 23) contrasts with mmn9Jom (25, 9; 29, 32). But the index does not show that the preposition e also appears as a (27:22) or that the Greek particle de is also written nde (34, 5). Nor is it designed to indicate unusual verbal constructions such as the use of a second future e. .. a in (30:10) against the normal e... na found elsewhere. Some of these minor dialectical variations may be related to the use of sources, but that calls for further study.

ORVAL WINTERMUTE

DUKE UNIVERSITY

Trade in the Ancient Near East. Edited by J. D. HAWKINS.

Pp. iii + 231 + 3 plates. (XXIII Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale). London: BRITISH SCHOOL OF ARCHAE-

OLOGY IN IRAQ. 1977.

This volume represents the publication of most of the papers presented to the XXIII Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, held in Birmingham in July of 1976, as reprinted from Iraq, Vol XXXIX for 1977. The theme of the Rencontre was Trade and the papers collected together for this volume all deal with some aspect of the basic theme. The emphasis is upon the period 2400-1700 B.C., which will come as no surprise to any Assyriologist. Most of what we know about trade from cuneiform sources comes from Neo- Sumerian, Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian texts. With few exceptions the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian documents have yet to be exploited for evidence dealing with trade and foreign relations.

The general field of ancient trade is a popular one these days and that is certainly one of the reasons why the subject was selected as a theme for the Rencontre. The work done on the Old Assyrian trade within the past fifteen years, following the publication of Paul Garelli's Les assyriens en Cappadoce in 1963, has been particularly outstanding. The three main scholars in this field, Paul Garelli, Karl Veenhof and Mogens Trolle Larsen, were all present at the Rencontre and the opening session, devoted to matters Old Assyrian, was cer- tainly one of the highlights of the meeting.

While great progress has been made in the understanding of individual texts there is, within the field of Assyriology, no methodology for dealing with trade or other aspects of commercial exchange. There is, in fact, a general feeling that the methodology currently being developed by Anthropolo- gists simply does not apply to the Ancient Near East and is of no help in understanding cuneiform texts. Assyriologists are

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174 Journal of the American Oriental Society 100.2 (1980)

suspicious of or even hostile to any theoretical approach to their material (see remarks by Leemans, p. 1, and Limet, p. 51, n. 2). The sceptical attitude that Assyriologists have toward what might be called an 'anthropological approach' is in part justified by the failure of Anthropology itself to come to grips with complex literate cultures, especially ancient ones, and to master the skills necessary to do research in such areas.

A book review is hardly the place to deal with such a topic; I raise it only because it does concern a basic problem with the volume under review. Almost all of the authors represented here seem to take it for granted that they know what trade is and how trade operated, their only task being to comb through the documents looking for evidence of trade and then to put that evidence together into some sort of coherent framework. The bewildering variety of translations offered for mahdru and mahfru in the new M volume of the CAD shows the results of the failure to work out in a systematic fashion the meaning of these terms within the economic structure of the Ancient Near East. We still cannot agree upon what a tamkcru was or what he did. The exact meaning of mahcru and makdru and all the terminology derived from these two verbs has yet to be studied in detail. A recent start in that direction, by A. Leo Oppenheim in the Gtiterbock Festschrift, has not won many followers.

A non-Assyriologist, having figured out that tamkcru means trader or merchant, will certainly be surprised to read that, according to Benjamin Foster,

"There is, in short, no evidence in the available records that the Sumerian dam-gAr played any significant role in the acquisition of products foreign to Mesopotamia, or was anyone other than a businessman who sought profits for clients, including the state, in Mesopotamian markets with mostly Mesopotamian goods." (Foster, p. 37)

The fact is that the archaeological evidence for long-distance trade, such as that recently discussed by Philip Kohl ("The Balance of Trade in Southwest Asia in the Mid-Third Mil- lennium B. C." Current Anthropology', 19 (1978), 463-92: with CA Comment) simply is not reflected in the texts. They were produced by a bureaucracy that, according to Daniel Snell (p. 47) ". . . was not interested in where exactly the products were obtained."

Under such circumstances it seems to me that we would do well to begin with an examination of exactly what is meant by trade in the Ancient Near East, how and by whom it was organized and what it meant in terms of the economic and social organization of any particular period. An eloquent plea for such conceptual models was made by Mogens Larsen who argues that: ". . . it is not true that the "real" scholar is only interested in the texts and builds his theories exclusively on them, for any analysis entails some conceptual model. In fact,

the success of our efforts often depends on how well we understand the models which we are using." (Larsen, p. 119)

I am sure that it will be a long time before we see the appearance of a book on Models in Assyriology (to parallel the Models in Archaeology, edited by David Clarke in 1972, and the even earlier Models in Geography published in 1967), but Assyriologists working on trade might find profit in some of the papers published in Exchange Systems in Prehistorv, edited by T. K. Earle and J. E. Ericson, New York (Academic Press), 1977.

What Trade in the Ancient Near East does do is to make utter nonsense of the theoretical approach to ancient trade, and ancient economics in general, most closely associated with the writings of the late Karl Polanyi. In the third and second millennia B.C., as in all subsequent periods of man's history, people went into business in order to make money. The profit motive was paramount (see especially papers by Foster and Powell) and this can now be documented in great detail for the Old Assyrian trade between Assur and Kultepe (Larsen, p. 132f. and works cited therein). The word for 'profit (in a commercial transaction)' is nimelu and the same word is used with the same meaning in the texts from Nuzi 500 years later (Zaccagnini, p. 187f.). Larsen even argues that the word IMhlaDutum should be translated 'dividends' (p. 138f.) which certainly brings the Old Assyrian period into a world understood by any modern capitalist. The recognition of the importance of the family and of informal agreements within the family and between families also shows that the trade documented in the Old Assyrian texts does not represent a world unto itself but can be compared with that known from Medieval and Early Modern trade in Europe and the Mediterranean.

The Ancient Near Eastern economy was also a market economy. Polanyi's idea, derived from a passage in Herodo- tus, that commerce before Aristotle was carried on in a marketless economy, reflects a total ignorance of the infor- mation now available from cuneiform texts. Mahirum means 'market place' and sRmum ina mahirim lasu is to be translated 'there is no business in the market' (so CAD, s.v. mahiru, 93a). There are also references to the 'market gate' (bdb mahiri) and even to a bit mahfri that seems to refer to a stall in the market place. The basic problem is that Polanyi and his followers have been unable to appreciate the complexity of the pre-Classical world so that their references to primi- tive societies and to aboriginal economies seem almost ludicrous to anyone who has worked his way through Neo- Sumerian or Old Babylonian economic texts. The recent study by Jack Goody on "What's in a list?" (in his book The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge U. P., 1977, 74-111) shows that some Anthropologists are beginning to appreciate the potential of the documentation that survives for ancient Mesopotamian societies. The ostraca from Deir

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Reviews of Books 175

el-Medina suggest that Polanyi's theories can better be ap- plied to the economic structure of ancient Egypt and they are used to advantage in the new book by Jac. J. Janssen, Commodity Prices from the Ramessid Period, Leiden (E. J. Brill), 1975, esp. pp. 539-62.

On a more theoretical level there is much of real value on the functions and varieties of different systems of exchange and distribution in Frederic Pryor's study of The Origins of the Economy, New York (Academic Press), 1978. Of special interest is his discussion of the origins of money, the differ- ence between a standard of value and a unit of account, and his evaluation of the idea that money as a medium of exchange developed in response to the growth of foreign trade, the increasing cost of conducting trade by barter and the problem inherent in 'the double coincidence of wants.' These are classic problems in economic history that can be traced back from Plato and Aristotle through to Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Max Weber, but they are probably unknown to most Assyriologists. Pryor provides an excellent introduction, with very useful bibliography (pp. 149-83). There is also the very important Creighton Leture by Philip Grierson on The Origins of Money, now pubi. hed by the Athlone Press (London, 1977), though his discussion of the Hacksilber found at Tepe NUsh-i Jan (p. 8) can now be supplemented by even more recent discoveries at Eshtemona and 'En-Gedi in Israel, illustrated in color on the front and back covers of Qadmoniot, IX, 2/3, 1976.

This volume details what might be called the assyriological approach to ancient trade. The emphasis on the publication and elucidation of individual texts at the expense of a general methodology, one of the chief characteristics of this approach, is easily understandable in the light of the research problems facing any Assyriologist. There can be no other field of scholarly research with so much unpublished mate- rial. Anyone working on the Old Assyrian period has to face the fact that he has access to but a fraction of the known material, with thousands of unpublished tablets in the Ankara Museum not available for study. And now there is Ebla.

J. D. MUHLY UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Excavations at Masat Ho YUk and Investigations in its Vicin- ity. By TAHSIN OZG(4. (in Turkish & English). Pp. xv + 129, Figs. 11 1, Pls. 86, Plans 7. Ankara: TURK TARIH

KURUMA Yayinlari V, No. 38, 1978. TL. 400.

The monograph under review sets out to describe, in five consecutive chapters, the Hittite palace and its archive at Masat Hoyuk; a Hittite cemetery at Kazankaya; some Early

Bronze Age objects from the district of Corum-Amasya- Tokat; recent investigations at Bolus/ Aktepe near Tokat and finally, objects of Anatolian origin in the Hermitage Mu- seum, Leningrad.

Chapter I does not present all the results of excavations at MaSat Hoyuk (Hoyuk Tepe) conducted between 1973-1977. This mound, which is located 20km. south of Zile, 312km. northeast of Ankara and 1500 m. west of the modern village of Masat, was the seat of a Hittite provincial ruler (52). S. Alp, who will publish all the epigraphic material found in the archives and depots of the palace, has already concluded that

Mapat Hoyuk was the Hittite town of Tapigga (Belleten XLI/ 164 [1977]: 637-47). Ozguic has accepted this equation, based mainly on the text Mst. 75/113, without any reserva- tions (xiv). But lines 22-27 of this letter, which reports on the movements of an enemy, presumably the Kaska, do not prove beyond any doubt that it was written at Tapigga, a fortified district centre. Also, Tapigga, unlike Masat Hbyuk, was located on high terrain where herds of cattle and sheep were given shelter in the face of enemy threat (Mst. 75/ 113: 25-27). Even assuming that this letter was written at Tapigga, the possibility however remote cannot be excluded that it was intended to reach the Hittite king at Mapat. During military campaigns requiring the presence of the Hittite king or in the case of a direct threat to Hattusha, the king would have normally moved to a more suitable and/or secure temporary residence. This could have been the case when during the reign of Tudhaliya, father of Suppiluliuma I, the country was attacked on all its borders and Hattusha was destroyed by the Kaska. Masat H11yiik's assumed close prox- imity to the northern border area does not necessarily sub- stantiate the view that "the Palace of Masat Hoyuk of the third architectural level must have been destroyed before Bogazkoy itself was abandoned" (63). Bogazkoy could have been raided from the north via Corum as well (see J. Yakar & A. M. Dinqol, "Remarks on the Historical Geography of North-Central Anatolia during the Pre-Hittite and Hittite Periods," Tel Aviv I [1974]: 97-98). The documents referring to the "enemy, the army and impending danger" (63) have so far provided no clues to the time and sequence of these 'developments.' However, should the equation of Mapat Hoyuk=Tapigga be corroborated by additional data, then the historical geography of the north-central Anatolian pla- teau would have to be differently understood than it is currently.

The enormous building of the first Hittite period (level III) measures approximately 100 x 80 m. (52). The 40 rooms discovered thus far belong to the basement of this palace complex which originally stood at least two storeys high. It was built along the traditional lines of Anatolian palace architecture as observed at Kultepe, Acemhdyuk, Bogazkoy

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