Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE THE GENESIS OF COINED MONEY
- PART TWO THE MAKING OF METAPHYSICS
- 9 Did politics produce philosophy?
- 10 Anaximander and Xenophanes
- 11 The many and the one
- 12 Heraclitus and Parmenides
- 13 Pythagoreanism and Protagoras
- 14 Individualisation
- 15 Appendix: was money used in the early Near East?
- References
- Index
15 - Appendix: was money used in the early Near East?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE THE GENESIS OF COINED MONEY
- PART TWO THE MAKING OF METAPHYSICS
- 9 Did politics produce philosophy?
- 10 Anaximander and Xenophanes
- 11 The many and the one
- 12 Heraclitus and Parmenides
- 13 Pythagoreanism and Protagoras
- 14 Individualisation
- 15 Appendix: was money used in the early Near East?
- References
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
I must first define ‘the early Near East’. By ‘early’ I mean the period from the beginning of writing at the end of the fourth millennium bc to the collapse of the Assyrian empire in 612 bc, which occured at about the same time as the invention of coinage in western Anatolia. By ‘Near East’ I refer primarily to the riverine societies of the Tigris and the Euphrates (Mesopotamia) and of the Nile (Egypt), but also to other societies of the fertile crescent (Syria and Palestine), as well as Anatolia. The evidence for the economies of these various societies is mountainous; but it is also sporadic, limited to particular places, particular periods, and particular contexts. Numerous economic activities were of course never recorded. Of the records made some have survived. Many surviving records (in particular thousands of clay tablets) have not been published, and many published records have not been subject to economic interpretation.
The economies of the early Near East were, broadly speaking, of the redistributive type (4a). Redistribution organises the flow of goods to and from centres in such a way that, although it may need to use a single measure of value, none of the goods are likely to acquire a combination of our listed characteristics of money (1c) sufficient to qualify them as money.
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- Information
- Money and the Early Greek MindHomer, Philosophy, Tragedy, pp. 318 - 337Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004