Did the Phoenicians Introduce the Idea of
Interest to Greece and Italy; and if so When?

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by
Michael Hudson, NYU —
IFA*
(from the
Temples of Enterprise book in progress)

*Delivered at
a symposium at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University,
March 15th-16th, 1990, this article was
published in Gunter Kopcke and Isabelle Tokumaru, eds, Greece
between East and West: 10-th — 8th Centuries BC
(Mainz: Verlag Phillip von Zabern, 1992).

This paper seeks to establish
that interest‑bearing debts were introduced to the Mediterranean
lands from the Near East, most likely by Phoenician merchants in
the 8th century BC along with their better known
innovations such as alphabetic writing. Contrary to what was
believed until quite recently, such debts — and for that matter,
commercial and agrarian debts even without interest charges — are
by no means a spontaneous and universal innovation. No indications
of commercial or agrarian debts have been found in Early Bronze
Age Egypt, the Indus valley, or even in Ebla, much less in
Mycenaean Greece. They are first documented in a particular part
of the world — Sumer — in the third millennium, and can be traced
diffusing from southern Mesopotamia upward along the Euphrates and
westward into the Levant as part of the Sumerian commercial
expansion. Originally documented as being owed to temple and
palace collectors, interest‑bearing debts became increasingly
privatized as they became westernized.

This implies a diffusionist
explanation of how interest‑bearing debt came to be introduced
into the Mediterranean lands. But diffusion usually involves
change. As commercial and agrarian debt practices spread, they did
so in new contexts, often without the public checks and balances
that had been developed in southern Mesopotamia. For instance, the
periodic royal debt cancellations found in Sumer, Babylonia and
Assyria from 2400 to 1600 BC were not transmitted to Greece and
Italy. As a result, debt-servitude tended to be irreversible, at
least prior to Solon's seisachtheia in 594 BC. This made
the debt problem more serious in the Mediterranean periphery to
what had been the Bronze Age core.

From the Iranian plains
to the Aegean, enough Bronze Age records have survived to show
that it was neither easy nor automatic for less centralized
societies to adopt commercial debt, or for that matter for the
Hittite and Mycenaean palace economies to do so. The inference is
that no debt balances arose to be settled as long as there was no
public enterprise set corporately apart, that is, no economic
bifurcation between public and private sectors. Economic units
that were self‑contained, such as the Mycenaean "households" and
oikos-type estates, had little need of debt balances, and
do not seem to have run up financial balances with
outsiders.

The archaeological
record shows that Assyrian traders introduced interest‑bearing
debt to their Asia Minor colonies such as Kanesh in Cappadocia
around 2000 BC (Balkan 1974). Yet signs of commercial debts and
interest are not found among the economic records of the Hittites
who subsequently dominated the region, nor is there a hint of such
debts in the Mycenaean or Cretan Linear B records. Even in Ugarit,
one of the most likely candidates for diffusing financial
practices to the Aegean, commercial and agrarian debts are found
only in quite circumscribed form. These facts make it doubtful
that either commercial or agrarian debts (to say nothing of
interest) played a role in Bronze Age Greece or early in the first
millennium. Yet the charging of interest on debts, above all
agrarian usury with its consequent debt‑slavery and forfeiture of
land rights, became classical antiquity's most important economic
dynamic, giving Greece and Rome their distinctive social character
when compared to more archaic communities or modern
anthropological enclaves.

Usury's polarizing
social impact appears as an intrusive wedge transforming the
traditional social balance between well-to‑do grandees and their
dependents or clients. Yet anthropologists since Mauss (1967) have
tried to trace interest‑bearing debt to the very inception of
Indo‑European speaking society. Creditor‑oriented economic
historians such as Fritz Heichelheim (1958:54f.) have been eager
to find signs of interest as a universally spontaneous phenomenon
already in neolithic times. Such attempts retroject modern ways of
thinking without placing the debt and interest problem in the
context of its times.

The following pages summarize
what limited historical evidence is known about commercial and
agrarian debts in archaic Greece and Italy. After specifying what
is not known and clearing the slate of some popular but false
assumptions, I propose to fill the gap with a working hypothesis
as to how interest‑bearing debt was brought from the Near East. Of
course, given the lack of definitive evidence, the solution which
I find most likely can be no more than a reasonable scenario at
best. But if we in this room cannot come up with a plausible view,
the job will be left to economists and anthropologists spinning
webs out of rather abstract "what if" assumptions. The popular
"common sense" approach all too often imagines that all societies
must have thought much like we do rather than recognizing how
different is the perspective of every society and epoch. It is the
task of archaeologically minded historians to ward off such
popularizations.

The
absence of indigenous interest‑bearing debts in Greece and
Italy

The first assumption that must
be rejected is that interest‑ bearing debt is a universal
phenomenon going back to early Indo‑European roots. If this
premise is indeed unwarranted, it is necessary to begin thinking
about just when the charging of interest may have been introduced,
from where it may have come and under what
circumstances.

Unfortunately, questioning
along these lines has been discouraged from late antiquity until
quite recently by the fact that usury was so strong a dynamic in
Rome and Greece that it seemed to be universal among all
Indo‑European speaking peoples. Certainly wergild‑type debts for
personal injury and their collection procedures were well attested
from India to Celtic Ireland (Maine 1888).(see note 1) However,
although such debts — along with practices such as standing surety
for individuals owing reparations debts for having inflicted
personal injury — certainly are widespread (Binchy 1970), there is
no indication of interest charges except where the practice is
adopted from without.

A search for evidence as to
just how and when the idea of commercial debt was introduced to
Greece and Italy soon founders for lack of relevant documentation.
The Homeric poems have little to say about debt except for the
argument over wergild depicted on the shield of Achilles. Most of
the economic surpluses cited in the Homeric poems take the form of
military booty rather than economic enterprise. Hesiod is no more
informative. We hear much of gift exchange as part of the general
ethic of hospitality, but none of this involves the commercial or
agrarian debt familiar from classical antiquity. There is no
archaic mention of interest as a stipulated return on capital, or
of money‑lending. The earliest inscription which tells us anything
about the extension of credit and the charging of interest is from
Eleusis c. 435‑430 (Cavignac 1908:41ff. and Bogaert
1968:92).

In the Mycenaean Bronze Age
commodities circulated as part of an internal redistribution‑type
exchange. Finley (1981:206) observes that in all the Linear B
archives, "No word on any existing tablet has been read which can
confidently be taken to mean 'to buy,' 'to sell,' 'to lend,' or
'to pay a wage' (or the corresponding nouns). Furthermore, Ventris
and Chadwick (1956:113) note that they 'have not been able to
identify any payment in silver or gold for services rendered,' and
that there is no evidence 'of anything approaching currency. Every
commodity is listed separately, and there is never any sign of
equivalence between one unit and another' (p. 198)."

This is one argument from
silence that carries weight inasmuch as surviving Linear B records
seem to be as representative a cross section as the archives found
in southern Mesopotamia replete with debt documentation. There is
no hint of credit or debt, much less of interest. "The word
o‑pe‑ro is translated 'deficit, but this doesn't at all imply
'business dealings' by a private merchant" (Finley 1981: 278). At
most we seem to have inventory balances and delivery obligations
by various localities to the central palace ‑‑ more a schedule
than a list of debts serving to bridge income and outgo in the
financial sense, or reflecting money due for the advance of
commercially productive assets. No doubt wergild‑type fines were
omnipresent in both Greece and Asia Minor, but they would have
been handled by oral common law.

Archaeologists are able to
trace such sophisticated economic practices as syllabic writing
and account‑keeping on clay tablets, seals and sealing, and many
idiosyncratic layouts and technical details of accounting formats
moving up the Euphrates to Sumerian outposts such as Asshur and
Mari, and on to Phoenicia, Ugarit, and ultimately Crete and
Mycenae. However, interest and commercial debt is not found among
the innovations reaching the Aegean. Probably this is because
Mycenaean palaces and temples (unlike the case in Mesopotamia)
were not set corporately apart from the community as "profit
centers" producing public goods and turning these over to a
private merchant class. Account‑keeping was used not as the
elaborate economic management and forward planning found in Sumer
by the twenty‑fifth century BC (Lambert 1961), but simply as a
check on the access by palace servants and subordinates to
storerooms.

As noted above, if
interest‑bearing debt had indeed spread to Mycenaean Greece, the
most likely point of transmission would have been the emporium
city‑state of Ugarit, where Mycenaean trade goods are found
concentrated in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, along
with products from most other neighboring Late Bronze Age regions.
However, Astour (1972:26) notes that the merchants of Ugarit
differed from their Babylonian counterparts primarily in the fact
that "money‑lending operations, so characteristic for the
Babylonian tamkaru , are very poorly represented in the hitherto
published business documents from Ugarit." Heltzer (1984:183ff.)
likewise rejects earlier speculations that the enslavement of
peasants may have occurred in Ugarit as a result of high‑interest
credit as is found in regions more closely linked to the
Mesopotamian core. In cases where land was foreclosed for debt,
foreign creditors had to relinquish these to the king of Ugarit
and were compensated for their loans accordingly. But mercantile
foreclosure on lands and personal freedom appears as an
essentially alien intrusion to Ugarit. There seems little reason
to believe that commercial debt was passed on to the Aegean.
Unless surviving Linear B records are skewed in a statistically
improbable way, there probably were no archaic debts to be written
down.

Debt hardly would seem to be
more likely in the Dark Age centuries following the collapse of
Mycenaean civilization in 1200. With the destruction of the
Mycenaean palaces, nearly all the Bronze Age administrative
adoptions were lost. The only practices that survived into
classical Greece were those which took on a life of their own
independently of the palaces — some myth and ritual, technologies
and possibly sharecropping arrangements miniaturized and
"privatized" in the context of the self‑sufficient family
oikos and, in a few cases, temples. Debts, especially at
interest, seem unlikely in these Dark Age centuries.

I already have mentioned the
absence of interest‑bearing debts in Homer. There is no debt
servitude. As Humphreys (1978:161) points out, in the
Odyssey (15.403‑84) the only male slave whose origin is
explained ‑‑ the shepherd Eumaeus — was captured and sold as a
child. Male slaves are as rare in Hesiod as in Homer. Women might
be bought, but they are foreigners (mainly captured war
prisoners), not debt pledges.

Mycenaean trade and Homeric
exchange were more in the character of gift‑exchange among
chieftains and aristocrats than production for profit. Without
profit‑seeking there was not much motivation for commercial debt.
The open question thus becomes how and when Greek and Italian
exports became commercialized, and how this transformed their
domestic division of labor and agrarian relations in a way which
led to the accrual of debt balances.

Some preliminary definitions
may help avoid the confusion into which much of the discussion
about archaic credit has fallen. By interest‑bearing debts I do
not mean simply the informal one‑upmanship of topping another
party's gift, such as Mauss (1925) and other anthropologists have
observed in modern tribal communities. Indeed, it is significant
that interest rarely is found on "anthropological"‑type debts,
i.e., on wergild compensation for personal injury or on the
gift exchange and marriage obligations familiar to most tribal
communities studied by anthropologists, including Homeric Greece.
Except for compensation fines these obligations tend to be
free‑floating and often vague as to the exact amounts owed.
Largely for this reason they rarely give rise to lawsuits or
foreclosure, in contrast to commercial and agrarian "economic"
debts.

Also to be distinguished from
interest are penalties for late payment of obligations, which
often double the debt principal. Rather, interest consists of the
formal charging of a fixed rate of return on a specified principal
sum, which typically consists of the value of goods advanced or
money lent. Interest rates range between 8 1/3% (1/12th, as in
Rome's XII Tables) and 33⅓% per annum (1/3, attested from the
neo‑Sumerian Ur III period 2100‑2000). These rates work out
mathematically to 20% to 12?%. The 20% midpoint between these
extremes is Sumer's earliest documented commercial interest
rate.

On relatively rare occasions
the rate of interest may rise to as high as 50 percent per year,
as attested in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and even in the modern world
(e.g. on Argentina's and Brazil's 1989 public debt). But
archaic interest rates typically reflected the smallest
unit‑fraction measure of their local societies: 1/60th
per month in Sumer (a shekel per mina, working out to 12/60ths, or
20% a year), a tenth (dekate) in Greece and a twelfth (an
uncia per as) in Rome. The Greek and Latin use of
terms meaning "young animal," "calf" or "birth" (tokos in
Greek, faenus in Latin) as terms for interest (the birth of
numerical increments due periodically) thus directly translate the
Mesopotamian usage of mash (kid or calf, birth).

The term usury refers to
interest‑bearing debt extended for noncommercial purposes. In
agrarian economies consumer or tenant debts bear an interest
charge for loans, advances or overdue obligations that do not
provide the debtor with productive assets enabling him to repay
the loan. Being part of a zero‑sum economic activity, such
interest is parasitic. It thus stands in contrast to commercial
loans whose interest is paid out of the incomes earned by
merchants productively investing the loan proceeds. This
distinction no doubt explains why the "economic freedom" acts
canceling debts in Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia, Nuzi (Arraphke) and
Israel applied only to agrarian personal debt, not to commercial
obligations. There also are other marked differences. No
collateral is pledged for anthropological debts, in contrast to
formal money lending, in which loans typically are extended among
unequals, e.g. from members of one sector or class to those
of another, or various interest‑bearing claims accrue to temples
from the community at large.

Of course, many personal loans
were extended without interest, e.g. in Greece the eranos
"friendly society" loans among aristocratic peers, and also loans
to public figures such as those made by the fourth‑century banker
Pasion. These obligations are social and interpersonal rather than
arms‑length "economic" transactions. They typically are owed among
equals, not by poor debtors to well‑to‑do creditors or
temples.

When lending money, food or
other assets to needy borrowers, creditors typically (either
directly or through slaves acting on their behalf) demand not only
interest but a pledge of movable assets or property rights in case
of default. This collateral often becomes a more important
consideration than the rate of interest. In fact, it was the
search for adequate collateral for debtors to pledge as an
alternative to the personal freedom of their family members that
catalyzed the alienability of land rights in many archaic
societies.

Turning from these general
principles to specific details, it soon becomes apparent that our
lack of knowledge about the financial dynamics of archaic Greece
and Italy is part of the larger problem of knowing little about
how their social life in general was organized prior to the sixth
or even the fifth century BC. There is almost no literary or
epigraphic evidence apart from the hints that can be extracted
from Homer and Hesiod. Outside of Athens the sixth century is
nearly as dark as the seventh, and even for Athens we have little
primary evidence apart from Solon's political poetry explaining
his actions as archon in 594. The next most important source is
Aristotle's Constitution of Athens written over a quarter
millennium later, around 325. The intervening local Atthides were
in the character of party pamphleteering over the debt issue and
other oligarchic‑democratic controversies, and hence cannot be
accepted as primary evidence (Jacoby 1949).

By the 5th century
we find such widespread acknowledgment of interest being charged
that it seems to have been there all along. Public Athenian
inscriptions and the plays of Aristophanes refer to interest
(tokos), and soon thereafter we find wealthy landowners
letting their slaves invest their peculium in usurious
activities. The estates of orphans are let out at interest, and we
find commercial investment in trade ventures. But it seems to have
been the Persian wars that really monetized Greek economic life
and established a credit economy. (To be sure, the change seems to
have been one of degree rather than an abrupt innovation.) While
coinage certainly was a catalyst, it was not in itself a cause of
usury and widespread foreclosure, which are found in the Bronze
Age Near East two thousand years prior to the invention of
classical coinage.

The real problem concerns how
far back we can trace commercial debts, agrarian debts and other
economic (as distinct from "anthropological") debts, with or
without interest, and under what conditions they may have been
introduced to Greece and Italy.

Burkert (1984) cites a wide
range of Near Eastern practices that diffused to the classical
Mediterranean lands, including those transmitted via the Etruscans
to the Romans. These practices include such highly
culture‑specific institutions as liver divination and related omen
procedures that can be traced firmly back to Babylonia. Italian
city‑founding ceremonies (Rykwert 1988) and the Etruscan and Roman
triumph ceremony (Versnel 1970) likewise bear a close kinship to
Mesopotamian temple‑founding ceremonies. And I need hardly remind
this audience of the many Mediterranean adaptations of Near
Eastern myths and rituals, especially Saturnalia‑type New Year
festivals (see for instance Bourboulis 1964). Much less explored,
however, are the Greek and Italian adaptations of originally Near
Eastern economic practices and institutions.

I believe that a major reason
for this neglect is an economic ideology that many classical
historians have accepted almost unconsciously. As noted above,
there is the assumption stemming from our economic philosophy that
phenomena such as interest‑bearing debt are so universal and
natural as not to require any diffusionist explanation. This view
precludes at the outset any investigation into how such practices
may have been transmitted from the Near East to the Mediterranean,
being decontextualized in the process. By "decontextualized" I
mean shifted from a primarily public‑sector context (the Bronze
Age palace economies) to the more individualistic and much more
decentralized, smaller‑scale context of Mediterranean
societies.

Until quite recently classical
scholars have not been very receptive to the idea of diffusion of
Near Eastern practices. There is still a tendency to view the
sharp break from ca. 1200 to 750 — that is, the Mediterranean Dark
Age following the collapse of Bronze Age Mycenae, Crete and much
of the Levant — as an altogether de novo creation of society in
which Greek society reverted to its allegedly Indo‑European roots.
Near Eastern influences are not acknowledged to have shaped this
classical flowering more than marginally, except in obvious cases
as alphabetic writing and a few related commercial practices
clearly traceable to the Phoenicians. However, when it comes to
the idea of interest, Mauss and subsequent comparative
anthropologists have confused the problem by identifying the
one‑upmanship of interpersonal gift exchange with the formal
charging of economic interest.

In Italy's case there was no
centralized Bronze Age economic organization to be stripped away,
not even a Linear B script to be lost. For many years the Romans
were viewed as a representative Indo‑European speaking people with
traditions fundamentally akin to those of the Greeks and Vedic
Indians. The Etruscan influence was recognized, but only recently
has the Phoenician‑Greek presence in Ischia — and hence their
influence on Etruria — been traced. Here would seem to be a clear
example of how Near Eastern financial practices were
decontextualized by peripheral societies to produce a rather naked
and even cruel development such as we find in Rome seemingly from
the inception of its Republic. But such lines of investigation
remain to be undertaken.

I propose the following
framework for analyzing the evolution of debt in Greece and Italy.
We know roughly what went into the Mediterranean Dark Age c. 1200.
There is no trace in the Linear B records of interest‑bearing
debt, or indeed of debt of any kind save for "deliveries" due from
various localities. We know of the agrarian usury that emerged
from the Dark Age by the seventh century, culminating in Solon's
seisachtheia. The question at issue is how and under what
conditions this interest‑bearing debt may have been
introduced.

One of the few hints
suggesting a Phoenician role is the fact that the weights and
measures used by Greeks and Italians seem to have been brought by
Phoenician merchants. A. E. Berriman's Historical Metrology
(1953) points out that the carat originally was the weight of a
carob grain, ceratonia siliqua, a tree native to the
Mesopotamian meridian, weighing 1/60th of a shekel. The
Greek term is keration ("small grain").

Additionally, by the time we
hear of mercantile credit and usury on a large scale, in the
fourth century, the major creditors are Phoenicians or other
foreigners such as the banker Pasion and his son Apollodorus
(Bogaert 1966 and 1968). Humphreys (1978:152) rightly emphasizes
the alien character of credit to the Greeks, above all
interest‑bearing debt: "Bankers, often ex‑slaves, stood outside
the social circle." No doubt the same could be said of Italy.
Historically, the extending of credit at interest has been charged
more by outsiders than by peers. This hardly should be surprising,
for bankers are basically money‑changers, and hence typically
foreigners or persons closely linked to them.

Tracing legal terms and
personal names throws some further light. Much financial
terminology has Phoenician roots. Finley (1952:81f.) observes that
"Among the Greeks, sales were cash sales. This rule found few
exceptions, notably when real property was the object of sale."
However, "earnest money" as a binding deposit — arrhabon or
arrha — was a common practice. To be sure, in the
millennium spanning Homer and the later Roman Empire there are
"less than a dozen references to the arrhabon." But "the
word itself, borrowed from a Semitic tongue despite the large
number of Greek terms available for the idea of 'deposit',"
highlight what seems to be a distinction between Near Eastern and
Greek practice. It also is noteworthy that the Greeks did not know
of mortgages or the acquisition of property at only a small
portion of its value, as characterized much debt foreclosure in
the Bronze Age Near East.

Bogaert (1966:146) notes that
"In the domain of maritime law, Greek law seems to have stemmed
from that of Phoenicia, especially in the concept of contrat
d'affrétement (insurance), a conception traceable back to the
Babylonians." Also with regard to the financing of sea borne
commerce, Humphreys (1978:151) observes that "The nautikon
daneion resembles the institution known to the Italians as the
commenda, a combination of loan and partnership in which
the lending partner contributed a larger share of the capital
and/or took a larger proportion of the risk, in return for the
other's services. This type of partnership was certainly known in
Babylonia in our period, and very probably in Phoenicia (its
existence in Palestine in the time of Christ is documented by the
Parable of the Talents)."

Bogaert (1966:156, 1968, etc.)
has traced how Greek deposit banking developed out of
money‑changing and as such was strongly influenced by Near Eastern
practices, as well as by the many Near Eastern trapezites who
settled throughout the Aegean and on the Greek mainland to make
their fortunes—‑ Pasion, Phormion, Pythodore and other bankers,
including Philostrates of Ascalon, trapezite for Delos. But the
private documents are few, and literary references prior to the
fourth century BC do not enable us to trace the relevant
developments with much clarity.

While Phoenician influence is
attested in the above ways, there is nothing as clear or datable
as the transmission of alphabetic writing. We hardly can take on
faith the conviction of ancient scholars such as L. Lydus (De
Mensibus I.9, cited in Bogaert 1966:147) that the Phoenicians
were the first usurers, the inventors of weights and measures, and
methods of earning money in general, while Pliny the Elder (VII,
57) accorded them the invention of money. Such oversimplifications
seem to have come more at the end of classical antiquity than at
the beginning. But it is clear that maritime commerce, in which
the Phoenicians played the major role, was the single most
important catalyst to Greek and Italian credit
practices.

We thus need to develop a
reasonable working hypothesis or scenario for how Mediterranean
trade with the Near East might have catalyzed commercial credit
and agrarian usury. Probably in the archaic centuries Phoenician
models were adopted by the Greeks and Italians to their local
circumstances, which almost invariably lacked the traditions of
centralized checks and balances which had spread from Bronze Age
Mesopotamia to the rest of the Near East. But beyond this general
observation the economic organization of archaic and early
classical Greece remains opaque. It seems clear that in the
seventh century popular revolts in Corinth, Olbia, Sikyon, Megara
and other cities replaced aristocratic regimes with leaders
("tyrants" or demagogues) who cancelled the debts and
redistributed at least some of the lands. But we are not told
exactly how these debts came into being, or even whether or not
they bore interest.

For many years the usual
assumption was that they represented the type of petty agrarian
usury found from the fourth century onwards, i.e. loans of
food or other resources to the needy. Even without interest
charges the burden of such agrarian debts must have been
oppressive. After all, the pound of flesh which forms the
centerpiece of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice was owed on
an interest‑free loan. Finley (1981:161) summarizes the usual
situation in antiquity: "A debtor had little chance. In fact, he
had little chance before he even became a debtor, because he was
poor and essentially defenseless, against bad harvests and famine,
against war and its depredations, against the one‑sidedness of the
law. When his luck was bad his only defense was to put himself
in fidem, in the power of the powerful." We know that in one
way or another, creditor‑patrons ended up with the lands
cultivated by their clients, whom they then began to sell outright
as debt‑slaves to foreign dealers in the late seventh century. The
question is, how at what point did this process begin to polarize
Greek and Italian communities?

One of the most intriguing
reports concerns the debt revolt at Megara, not far from Athens.
Plutarch's Greek Questions #18 (Moralia 295D,
supposedly based on an Aristotelian study of the city's
constitution) describes its great annual festival celebrating its
economic freedom from debt c. 540. This festival commemorated the
palintokia , literally "the return of interest which they
had chanced to have paid their creditors." The use of the term
tokos for interest is not otherwise found before the final
quarter of the fifth century. While Plutarch's statement would
imply that archaic agrarian debts were indeed interest‑bearing,
matters are complicated by the fact that another term for the
palintokia ("back interest") was prosagoresantes.
This suggests that what occurred may have been an outright debt
cancellation, which subsequently came to be commemorated as part
of the political program and party propaganda of populations
oppressed by usury. (See also Aristotle, Politics 1305a24
and Plato, Republic 562D.) Perhaps the palintokia
was a mythical fiction. All debts would have been construed as
bearing interest, implying that creditors already had got the
equivalent of their original principal back — an argument logical
enough to be rediscovered by today's Latin American and other
Third World debtors.

Figueira (1985:147f.)
interprets Megara's early debts as being in the character of
floating "anthropological" type client/patron obligations: "Loans
were usually in foodstuffs or in seed grain, provisions for life
itself. Borrowing was seldom a one‑time affair, as marginal farms
were repeatedly in need. In this atmosphere, loans were not
quantified (in this regard, the absence of coinage is significant)
and tended to become open‑ended. Thus, a form of bondage was
created with the obligations of the debtors being political,
religious, and/or fiscal. Political duties might have included
membership in the political following of the rich as in the case
of the regional parties in Attica." In sum, "To be a debtor was
not a contractual situation but entailed a caste‑like status. To
lend or borrow was a hereditary role." But when did this ambiguous
type of stratification develop?

The city whose debt history is
best attested is Athens, but even here there are many gaps. As
noted above, little epigraphic information exists prior to the
fifth century, while subsequent local histories tend to be in the
character of party pamphleteering. All that can be inferred is
that in the closing decades of the seventh century large
landholders let out their lands to sharecroppers for one sixth of
the crop or extended credit to small farmers for repayment of up
to a sixth, or perhaps more. Loans evidently were secured by the
debtor's personal freedom. It was these debts that Solon cancelled
in 594 when he freed the Athenian debt slaves, redeemed some who
had been sold abroad, and permanently banned debt slavery for
Athenian citizens. But as in the case of other Greek cities, we
are not told just how the status of the hektemoroi
("sixth‑parters") developed, or whether their debts were
essentially rental obligations or financial consumer debts. In
fact, neither Lewis (1941), von Fritz (1943), Fine (1951) or
Finley (1952 and elsewhere) have even ventured to guess whether
these debts bore interest or not! Neither Finley nor any other
economic historian has tried to describe how the practice of
charging interest first developed in archaic Greece. And as for
the Roman histories, they are quite late. It seems clear that Livy
and Plutarch are retrojecting the practices of their own times
onto the early secessions of the plebs and subsequent debt
crises.

A plausible
scenario

Having acknowledged the
paucity of historical evidence and the reticence of others to
speculate, here is my proposed scenario: The Greek and Italian
economies of the ninth and eighth centuries were not yet
monetized. Nearly all activity was on a subsistence basis.
Whatever surpluses were created tended to be consumed
conspicuously (often in burials, no doubt also in the form of gift
exchange) rather than invested to produce commercial gains.
Warlord chieftains carved out their own lands and built client
bases.

Enter the Phoenicians. It is
axiomatic that the exchange of commodities between an economically
sophisticated core and a less commercialized periphery involves
more than just the physical exchange of goods. It must ground
itself in the context of economic institutions and legal
traditions put into place on both sides. I suspect this is why
temples played so great a role in archaic trade, and indeed in all
types of contact with foreigners. Hence, we would expect the most
active traders to establish temple embassies and commercial cults
(see note 2) and also for these institutions to sponsor the
ligaments of credit necessary for commercial trade. It probably
was under such circumstances that the idea of interest was
introduced as a payment for time.

No doubt Dark Age Greece and
Villanovan Italy had debts of the "anthropological" type ‑‑
wergild fines, gift exchange and marriage obligations. The open
question concerns when and under what circumstances such
obligations were overlayered by economic debts specified in amount
and, ultimately, secured by the debtor's personal freedom or
land‑rights. Such debts and their interest bespeak a commercial
market mentality. How might so seemingly alien a mentality have
been introduced to archaic Mediterranean communities? What would
the lines of least resistance have been?

One way to start constructing
a reasonable scenario is to review what is known about the
diffusion of interest‑bearing debt in earlier contexts. The first
recorded example is found in the Assyrian trade colonies in
central Asia Minor, in Cappadocia. The trade colony of Kanesh
dates at least from the twentieth century BC, and may have been
established earlier by the Sargonids from Akkad or by other
southern Mesopotamians. Like the Dark Age Greeks, the archaic
Anatolians probably had little reason to develop any kinds of debt
except for the omnipresent wergild‑type obligations. But their
commerce with Mesopotamia exposed them to the ideas of commercial
debt and above all to the idea of paying interest. Also introduced
were various aspects of originally Mesopotamian religion, myth and
ritual, along with modes of social organization such as
contractual legal forms and oaths, weights and measures, and the
use of weighed pieces of silver as the cosmopolitan Middle Bronze
Age "money of the world."

Klaas Veenhof (1982:148f.) has
summarized how the Assyrians used trade credit among themselves
while providing goods to local Anatolians priced in silver in
amounts "ranging from ca. 10 shekels to ca.10 minas, occasionally
also for quantities of copper and cereals. This identifies [the
local Anatolians] either as customers of the Assyrians, buying on
credit or being in arrears, or as a kind of commission agents or
retail dealers, indebted for the value of the merchandise
entrusted to them for sale in local markets. . . . The list of
Anatolians indebted (and often in arrears) to Assyrians by far
exceeds that of Assyrians in debt to Anatolians." This probably
also would have been the case with the Phoenicians and Phoenicians
in Greece.

A further analogy between
Assyrian traders in Anatolia and Phoenician merchants in Greece
some twelve centuries later is suggested by the fact that local
"Anatolians normally have to pay a much higher rate of interest
[than did the Assyrian merchants among themselves], and have to
provide securities, frequently joint liability by a plurality of
debtors. The cooperation only rarely went beyond such elementary
and fairly risk-free transactions; more developed forms like
partnerships, agencies or investments are almost never
attested."

Also significant is the fact
that "Some of the better known Anatolians, represented in
exclusively native documents and in some Assyrian texts, function
primarily as local money‑lenders, active in loan operations and in
buying and selling (debt‑)slaves, at times also as suppliers of
cereals. They may have carried on their business on the fringe of
the large‑scale commercial activity of the Assyrians."

I suspect that something
similar occurred in the contacts between the Phoenician commercial
societies vis-à-vis Greece and Italy. Of course, times had changed
by the 8th century. The Bronze Age temples and palaces,
in which early commercial enterprise was set aside from the
subsistence‑based communal life at large, gave way to a
secularized and privatized enterprise in the hands of traders
increasingly independent from centralized overrides.

No doubt the first native
Greeks and Italians to owe debts to foreigners and extend
interest‑bearing loans to their local compatriots would have been
landed proprietors and chieftains. They alone were in an economic
position to trade with the Phoenicians, to shift away from
subsistence grain production to export crops, to establish
handicraft workshops to produce export goods, and to act as
patrons to cultivators who fell into various types of clientage
culminating in debt servitude. The virtual identity between landed
proprietors, exporters and importers and workshop owners (Bravo
1977b:65) would explain how the charging of interest spread from
the sphere of commercial exchange to agriculture. In neither
Greece nor Italy were commerce and agriculture compartmentalized
from each other, or from the proliferating use of credit. It is
true, as Sally Humphreys (1978:151f.) has pointed out, that "The
nautikon daneion and the mortgage of land . . . were
different institutions, transacted through different
relationships, and belonging to different systems of thought and
behavior, even though they could be described by the same general
word, hypotheke ." But they had a common nexus in the
emerging commercial/landed aristocracy. And if interest could be
charged in commerce, why not also in agriculture?

No doubt some catalyst was
necessary to help establish this trade and its associated
interest‑bearing debt. I suspect that the catalytic ingredient was
the temples, which were permanent corporate entities set up to
provide continuity and recourse among traders vis-à-vis
foreigners, above all to settle disputes among them. This would be
in keeping with earlier Near Eastern practice.

It would help to know more
about Phoenician debt institutions and commercial contracts, but
unfortunately, documentation is almost as sparse here as it is for
the Greeks and Italians. All we know are the broad outlines of the
Late Bronze Age societies whose collapse c. 1200 led to the Dark
Age in the eastern Mediterranean. We also know of the increasingly
commercialized city‑states that emerged in the seventh century.
But the intervening archaic period is opaque as far as historical
records are concerned. All we really know is that from the ninth
century onwards a wave of Near Eastern contacts with the Aegean
and western Mediterranean gained momentum, reaching from Italy and
Sardinia via North Africa all the way to Spain. Among the Near
Eastern innovations noted by contributors to the present volume
are the North Phoenician bronze cauldrons, conical stands and
related banquet utensils (Strǿm, above, 55), gold and silver
jewelry with granulation, filigree and punch work, and, by the
late 8th century, Phoenician metal jugs (Markoe,
63ff.).

If Phoenician traders indeed
brought credit practices with them, the next question concerns the
Greeks and Italians on the receiving end. How did they adopt these
practices within the context of their own social traditions? Apart
from the gold and silver booty they looted, the Greeks had little
money. Their production ability also was limited. To the extent
that olive oil and wine would be produced as export crops, it
would be by the large landed estates cited earlier — but these
still functioned largely on a self‑sufficient basis rather than as
part of the money economy. No doubt the major (if not the only)
customers of the Phoenicians were the chieftains and landed
proprietors, and perhaps some of the temples which probably played
a role in legitimizing this trade. It probably was with them that
the first credit arrangements took root, and via their mediating
influence that interest‑bearing debt was developed vis-à-vis their
own clients.

Greek temples for their part
were accustomed to receiving a tithe (dekate) of war booty
(Pritchett 1979). This was what historians of mathematics call a
unit‑fraction, that is, one‑tenth. The Roman duodecimal system's
equivalent was an uncia per as — a twelfth (8⅓%).
These fractions seem to have become a customary commercial tithing
or overplus that evolved into formal economic interest. In
addition to Phoenician merchants and local chieftains, the temples
would have played at least a catalytic role, if only by sponsoring
the sanctity of contracts and debts, of protecting commerce and
the safety of merchants on their travels.

In any event the landed
creditors would have been the same proprietors who produced export
goods and set up workshops. They would have found the new credit
practices — and ultimately the charging of interest on their
advances — to be an economic lever vis-à-vis less affluent
parties. In other words, the proprietors of large estates would
have bolstered their power by acting as patrons to rural clients
who may either have served as or become sharecroppers (such as the
hektemoroi) or simply needy debtors. Personal debts became
part of an evolving patron/client relationship, serving as levers
to reduce erstwhile free but poor individuals and their families
to a state of dependency. This no doubt is how oligarchies came to
build up their power in Corinth, Etruria and other
regions.

In my reading, debt practices
which began in the commercial interface between the Mediterranean
periphery and the Near Eastern core would have been applied
domestically in an increasingly agrarian context. Such credit did
not provide cultivators with resources to invest to generate a
surplus to repay their creditors, but was purely corrosive. Its
repayment, with or without interest, soon forced cultivators below
the break even level into irreversible indebtedness.

With this logic we can
re‑evaluate the anthropological evidence concerning debt in
archaic Greece and Rome. As noted above, there has long been a
tendency to believe that debt was an inherently Indo‑European
institution (if not indeed a universal one), simply because it is
found both in Italy and Greece, and thus seems to span the
documented gamut of classical Indo‑European speaking civilization.
But we know that Phoenician traders visited both Italy and Greece
by the middle of the eighth century. (David Ridgeway reviews the
joint Phoenician‑ Greek establishment of trade on the offshore
entrepét of Ischia/Pithecousi.) Thus the mere fact that interest
is found in both Italy and Greece by the sixth century is no
confirmation of an original native presence in these regions. It
can best be explained in terms of Phoenician‑Near Eastern
influence.

It is precisely the
foreign-ness of this influence that explains the rapidly
polarizing impact of interest‑bearing debt as it spread from
commercial credit to agrarian usury. This polarization had
occurred in the Mesopotamian homeland but was reversed by periodic
debt cancellations when rulers proclaimed "economic freedom" from
debt: Sumerian amargi, Akkadian andurarum,
Babylonian mi'arum, Hurrian —udutu, and Hebrew
deror. However, archaic Greece and Italy had no centralized
rulers to proclaim such debt cancellations — or, where kings
existed as in Rome, they were overthrown by aristocratic families
hardly eager to cancel their populations' debts. Financial
polarization in Greece and Italy thus occurred much more rapidly
and irreversibly than in Mesopotamia and its Near Eastern
periphery, and the deterioration from productive commercial debt
to unproductive agrarian usury was more pronounced.

In recognition of the
illustrious discussants at this conference, I would very much like
to get their views on some still unanswered questions, with the
caveat of course that there can be no definitive
answers.

To Chester Starr I would like
to ask whether he thinks that the debts owed by the Athenian
hektemoroi were interest‑bearing. Was their status related
to the flowering of trade during the eighth and seventh centuries?
What does he think of what Plutarch called the palintokia
at Megara? Was Plutarch or his sources anachronistic in calling it
a cancellation of back interest, and was it simply a debt
cancellation? Or could it have been a subsequent invention of a
tradition by politically partisan writers?

I note that Prof. Starr (1977)
has emphasized that the Greeks sailed to Al Mina, and that he
views them as being the active element in contact with Phoenicia.
Would there have been in either case a Phoenician influence, as
well as perhaps other Near eastern influences? Could commercial
interest‑bearing debts have been part of this
influence?

I want to emphasize once again
that 2000 years of prior Near Eastern experience shows that
coinage emphatically is not the key to the origins of debt,
although it certainly catalyzed debts from the Persian wars onward
as the economies of Greek cities became more stratified and
economically differentiated. The key question is how debts spread
before coinage catalyzed their proliferation.

To David Ridgeway and Glenn
Markoe I would like to ask whether the idea of charging interest
may have been introduced to Etruria by Phoenician and Greek
traders on Ischia in the eighth century. Can they help explain why
debt relations were more decontextualized and "naked" in Italy
than elsewhere in the Mediterranean, that is, taken out of their
more originally holistic Near Eastern context to become financial
dynamics in and of themselves? What other economic institutions
may the Ischia trade have introduced?

To Francois de Polignac and
Wolfgang Rollig I would like to ask what role temples and foreign
mercantile cults may have played in transmitting interest
practices and related economic institutions. Might the Phoenician
role at Delos, Delphi, Olympus, Samos and Argos have been
important in transmitting worldly economic institutions as part of
the general transfer of culture? More specifically, did
Mediterranean cults act as commercial embassies sponsoring
relations with outsiders and/or as creditors along the lines they
had done in third‑millennium Mesopotamian trade with Asia Minor,
and as late as the second century BC most notably in Delos? Might
the charging of interest, sponsorship of contractual dealings with
foreigners and indeed, depository institutions occur as early as
the tenth through eighth centuries?

Final
Comments

I have had a chance to speak
to a number of you about my attempt yesterday to all too briefly
summarize a long and complex social process. I would like to put a
more elaborate 700‑page background elaboration of my ideas into
the proceedings, but Prof. Kopcke tells me this may not be
practical.

With regard to Prof. Starr's
comment yesterday asking why Phoenician merchants would have been
willing to lend goods to Greeks and then hope (presumably in vain)
to collect them when they came back a year later, the answer is
twofold. Certainly there is always a problem of how to collect
obligations, above all when foreigners are involved. I think that
this is why temples played so important a role in archaic
exchange. They were a higher and more perpetual source of recourse
to traders. Unlike individual debtors (or creditors), they would
not go away. In effect, temple groups may have stood surety for
their commercial members.

Of course, merchants probably
did not lend money or provide goods on credit to many local
individuals. The Greeks for their part would have had to borrow
the idea of credit itself, and subsequently to apply it among
themselves. The very idea of commercial (rather than
"anthropological") credit is so formal that it requires a "higher"
and more abstract institution such as temples. Precisely because
the traders were private, they needed to form a collective
institution standing above their individual members to handle the
inevitable problems that arise between their trading groups. These
guild‑like organizations seem to have been established as temple
cults, as were those on Delos in Hellenistic times. Perhaps they
stood ready to redeem the commercial debts of their cult members.
Of course, this does not mean that temples directly financed the
trade or provided the products, as Prof. Rollig has rightly
emphasized. Rather, they served as intermediaries by virtue of
their traditional function of sponsoring contacts with alien
peoples, including traders and colonizers. (See de Polignac, this
vol., 122f.)

It thus is significant that
Strøm (46ff., 49) finds that Phoenician objects donated to Greek
sanctuaries appear primarily in the 8th century
(whereas evidence for the —first wave of Levantine expansion? in
the 10th century comes mainly from the less formalized
context of family tombs). Whoever it was that dedicated or
acquired utensils needed for libation rituals — foreigners,
natives, or overseers on behalf of the sanctuaries themselves
(Strøm, this vol., 49, 60) — the implication is that such vessels
were used for group meals which helped establish a formalized
community and equity among the diverse cult members. Temple
hierarchies would have served as commercial and diplomatic
embassies, being higher social entities than individual families,
and hence the most morally binding context for exchange in this
archaic period when legal formalities were still relatively loose
outside of the sacred sphere. The traditional role of temples in
protecting travelers (mainly merchants) and sponsoring the general
ethic of hospitality (especially at the pan-Hellenic shrines) also
is significant in this regard.

The group meals first attested
at these temples, using utensils dedicated by diverse members,
seem to have provided a take-off point for subsequent Greek
banquet formalities. The inspiration remained a ritual
signification of equal status for the diverse guests — in the
first instance, presumably, traders, family heads and other temple
sponsors or beneficiaries of the temple system.

As Strøm has emphasized, the
temples receiving Phoenician offerings are specifically those of
Apollo the sun-god of justice, and Hera, Artemis and Athena. These
are the counterparts to the Near Eastern deities such as Nanshe in
lagash and Nidaba in Umma sponsoring written record-keeping, fair
dealing, honest weights and measures, and commercial equity in
general. It was of course Apollo's temple at Delphi that long
coordinated Greek colonization and related commerce and diplomacy,
and likewise the Delos temple that subsequently developed into a
commercial entrepét on the basis of its archaic
traditions.

Bearing the above observations
in mind, it is significant that temples are history's first
documented creditors at interest, beginning in Sumer in the third
millennium. By charging interest and ground rent on their own
assets and property, temples helped legitimize the idea of
interest‑bearing debt and profit seeking in general. As recipients
of votive offerings, they helped legitimize the gains earned both
by foreign traders (who typically formed their own cults as
diplomatic embassies) and by well‑to‑do local wealthholders.
Temples often received a tithe of trade (after the model of war
booty), or at least votive offerings. The dekate may well
have become the prototype for interest and the 10 percent rate so
typical of Greek banking. A tenth certainly would not have been
too large a percentage for merchants to pay for ensuring security
of payment. Some portion of mercantile revenues certainly was
donated to the temples, much as soldiers and generals dedicated
military booty. While the temples no longer included the
handicraft workshops which characterized third‑millennium
Mesopotamia, in their embassy functions they legitimized
profit‑seeking trade, as well as by being a major
beneficiary.

Prof. Starr mentions
17th-century Europe often in his book on archaic
Greece. I find it significant that the English conducted their
business abroad via professional temple‑like organizations,
e.g. the Levant Company, the Russia Company, the East India
Company and so forth. William Scott's History of English
Corporations (1912) describes the early annual meetings of
crown corporations such as the East India Company as being
renowned for their great feasts. In these celebrations, and also
in their hierarchies of corporate offices — and indeed in the very
fact of their incorporation as autonomous bodies — the format and
organization of British trading companies may be traced back to
the Sumerian temples which literally were history's first
corporate entities. (I think of them as being something like
regulated public utilities.) Guilds were incorporated as
temples‑in‑miniature, as were almost all early corporations. I do
not mean this as just a parallel. The point is that the English
companies took their prototype the organization of temples
vis-à-vis their dependents and servants, with their own
hierarchies and calendrical rituals.

Prof. Réllig is, of course,
correct that while there were many temples in early
first‑millennium Greece and Italy, there was no temple economy to
anywhere near the extent found in Mesopotamia. What I tried to
establish was that temples were catalysts. It is a characteristic
of catalysts that they are not part of the reaction themselves.
While indeed there was no temple economy, the private economy took
over certain practices that were first innovated and legitimized
by temples, and subsequently were privatized.

Obviously, a problem with my
scenario is the lack of empirical evidence in the archaeological
and literary records, unlike the case in Mesopotamia with its
centralized financial record‑keeping. Despite this problem the
undeniable fact remains that somehow interest‑bearing debt did
indeed come to Greece and Italy, for it does not seem to have been
indigenous. As Oscar Muscarella said yesterday in another context,
"All we know is that it got there."

[ The problem is that while we
begin to hear of interest only in historical times — from the late
5th century onwards — we hear nothing of its having
been introduced as a sudden innovation. The implication is that
interest was there for some time. I suggest that it came along
with the first strictly arms‑length commercial debts, incorporated
into tradition by being sanctified by its association with the
temples which acted as economic embassies. Were Carians on Samos
doing something like this? Why were foreigners donating
proto‑money such as tripods to the Greek temples? Their role in
developing the earliest oboloi and drachmae has been
much discussed, but this economic dimension of archaic
Mediterranean temples still is not well elaborated.

[ The most plausible scenario
I have been able to come up with is one using temples and their
embassy cults as intermediaries. In serving this function they
received various forms of tithes — of commercial profits as well
as booty. In the process, they helped legitimize private trade and
domestic credit. Indeed, they did so in such a way as to also help
legitimize the agrarian interest‑bearing debt which subsequently
was responsible for many families being economically degraded to
the status of debt‑slaves. Just how this occurred may have turned
on the role of individuals or leading families in each area of
Greece and Italy. There would have been many possible ways to have
organized these credit operations.

[ If we are to say anything
more on the subject it must turn largely on the methodology we
use. And this is my final point. To the extent that archaeologists
remain strictly fact‑based, as Gunther Kopcke noted yesterday,
they let the limitations of their immediate material evidence
dictate the agenda of their thinking. Methodology thus determines
not only what content and information is recognized, but in many
respects what the findings of the research project will be. Any
progress to be made with regard to how debt was introduced to the
Aegean and western Mediterranean must follow from a methodology
that goes beyond the inadequate material data at hand.
Unfortunately, this artifactual evidence says too little about the
structure of the society that produced it. We still need to
develop a working hypothesis of the economic evolution of archaic
societies.

I note that scholars are
willing to make guesses about religion, myth and ritual, language
and art. Why not economics and finance? It almost seems as if the
more otherworldly or immaterial a phenomenon is, the more willing
people are to speculate about it. The more directly economic it
is, the less confident historians of antiquity feel about
venturing anything about contexts and structural change. Perhaps
this is partly because of the absence of economics in the
education of most Classicists, philologists and art historians. In
any event, the end result is that the public at large is left with
an anachronistic view of how Western civilization began in the
period we are discussing here.

[ Instead of developing de
novo from tribal‑type "anthropological" roots in a pristine
manner, the commercialization of Mediterranean economic life began
by being taken out of the context of the hitherto centralized Near
Eastern Bronze Age economies with their traditional checks and
balances, debt cancellations and related economic freedom
acts.

[ This decontextualization is
why the question of how debts developed in Greece and Italy — and
hence in modern Euro‑American civilization — is so important. For
as I noted at the beginning of my paper, when today's
market‑oriented economists choose to say anything about antiquity,
they tend to retroject their own ideology back onto early history,
much as Stoic historians did already in late antiquity. The
unchecked economic polarization stemming from antiquity's debt
problems, and which today threatens once again to polarize our own
world economy, are explained as having perfectly natural and
ancient Indo‑European roots and thus as being virtually a part of
human nature rather than subject to alleviation or political
change.

I like Chester Starr's
anecdote about how he never saw an excavation that said anything
about kinship systems. I doubt that any Mediterranean excavation
says much about financial systems and interest either. We have
ancient literary evidence, but there reason to doubt most of it as
being political propaganda or anachronistic retrojection, as in
the financial history of Athens. Whereas the archaeologists,
classicists and philologists most directly familiar with archaic
Greece and Etruria might be expected to take the lead in
suggesting scenarios for early financial relations in these
societies, and to explain how these changes shaped the framework
for the classical period to come, these unfortunately are just the
professions that have hesitated most to express their views in
print. And so the opportunity to suggest plausible economic
scenarios falls to comparative outsiders such as myself. No one
here has given me reason to withdraw my speculations.

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Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.).

Scott, William Robert (1912), The
Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish
Joint‑Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge, 3 vols.).

Starr, Chester G. (1977), The
Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece, 800‑500 BC (New
York).

Veenhof, Klaas R. (1982), "The Old
Assyrian Merchants and their Relations with the Native
Population of Anatolia," in Hans‑Jorg Nissen and Johannes
Renger, eds, Mesopotamien und Seine Nachbarn
(Berlin):147‑60.

Michael Ventris and John Chadwick
(1956).

Versnel, H. S . (1970), Triumphus: An
Inquiry into the Origin, Development  and Meaning of the
Roman Triumph (Leiden).

von Fritz, Kurt(1943), "Once more the
Hektemoroi," American Journal of Philology
64:24‑43.

* The meeting "Greece between
East and West, 10th ‑ 8th Century BC" was held at the Institute of
Fine Arts in New York in March of 1990. It was organized in the
expectation that archaeologists would speak as historians. A
majority of the ten participating contributors were
archaeologists. One works in Israel, one concentrates on the Near
East north of Palestine, and four specialize in Cyprus, Greece and
Italy. At first glance the four remaining participants might seem
to be a token representation to justify calling this meeting
interdisciplinary: a Semitic philologist, an economist, and two
historians (including de Polignac in this category). Yet the
composition of this panel was never seen as representative of all
aspects that logically should have been present on this occasion.
Given another framework, and more years experience to assimilate
new directions, the convener would have wished to invite still
more specialists and non‑archaeologists. For ultimately at issue
is the archaeologist's participation in the broad discussion of
history.

What is considered central to
this discussion as opposed to marginal depends on one's
perspective. To take an extreme example, the traditional
archaeologist or art historian may well be perplexed to hear Dr.
Hudson lecture on the "decontextualized" practice of charging
interest, and his contention that interest‑bearing debt was
brought to Greece by Phoenicians in the 8th century BC. No
document to confirm or contradict this will or can ever been found
in the field. Why then should this view — and an economist —
appear on this panel? The answer may be provided by what probably
is the single most famous art work of the 8th century BC — the
monumental amphora inv.# 804 in the Athens National Museum. This
gravemarker was commissioned at the death of a female member of a
leading Athenian family, whose fortunes were such that only the
very best and most original or "modern" would do for this
occasion. The painter imitated (though this may not be quite the
right expression) something that apparently was popular and
admired: the art of Phoenician figural decoration. The question of
"how this money was earned" and how this artistic masterpiece
relates to the economic realities of its day will interest some
people more than others, but those who do indeed think it relevant
will not that perhaps what is "orientalizing" in art corresponds
to other domains as well. Alone among the participants, Hudson
sounds the theme of Phoenicians on the one hand, Greeks and
westerners on the other as unequal partners, not so much in the
sense of rich and poor as of having different "systems" or ways of
acquiring wealth. The Phoenician way presumably was that of the
future. But where and when in Italy and Greece did this future
begin? To return to the amphora Athens 804: if certain significant
advances in art spell self‑confidence and success, how far and
wide should we look for the sources?

Along these lines Chester
Starr's paper addresses a contentious issue: the unwillingness of
archaeologists to speculate, that is, to go beyond merely
retrieving and ordering material evidence. Yet all that can be
retrieved is obstinately silent. It calls for exploration in terms
of thought process and human motivations. Some may shrug off this
kind of curiosity, or even condemn it as speculative. Starr cites
the kind of injunction that one often hears (and that in my view
ultimately does more harm than good) by ruling searching questions
out of bounds. Others call this reconstructive reasoning
"humanistic," "unscientific" or, less kindly, "nebulous." They may
deem it passe, insisting that rigorous "methodologies" be
followed. Applied science certainly has made immense
contributions, but in the process has it "marginalized"
traditional archaeology? Many traditional archaeologists may fear
the results. If a new Gordon Childe were to appear, he would have
to take in this information and elaborate on the grand scheme of
things in much greater detail. I believe that viscerally, all
traditional archaeologists know there is such an agenda. It is
pressing, and we ought to admit that the field has substantially
broadened beyond pottery classification and similar
endeavors.

The title "Greece between East
and West" has been chosen advisedly, and not merely as an
invitation to discuss "interconnections." Well documented
political and economic forces active in the early first millennium
seem likely to have affected Greece, calling for us to look beyond
"bric‑a‑brac," and even to set aside Homer's half‑hearted interest
in non‑Greeks from the Levant. Let us ask what naturally would
have transpired between individuals and groups in search of
opportunities, in the spirit of the impressive reports on traffic
in the Mediterranean and its environment in the 11th/12th
centuries and 14th to 18th centuries AD as rendered by E. Gothein
and F. Braudel. For the period under discussion at this conference
we have, for instance, Sir John Boardman's admirably articulate
surprise at the rise of Greece from seemingly hopeless depression.
We also see the respect paid by later Greeks to Phoenicians as
providers of their culture. For Greece, we have to explain big
innovations. Villages and families are drawing together to form
polities. They are designating central places of worship,
frequently placing extraordinary emphasis on the divinity's house.
They send settlers abroad as a matter of policy, to insure the
community's survival. All in all, what happens more or less
simultaneously in several places, in the span of just a few years
or decades in the 8th century, seems too much to be entirely
self‑generated. The meeting was designed to cautiously approach
the question whether and how we can form an idea of developments
that would involve East and West as mutual participants in an
unfolding continuum.

At first glance the 10th and
9th centuries might seem to have had little or nothing to
contribute. Yet it is clear from several papers, notably
Kochavi's, Ridgway's and my own, that long‑distance traffic of one
kind or another always existed. It is probable that earlier
contacts underlie 8th‑century consequences. In the 8th century,
conditions outside of Greece caused these contacts to flourish
anew. Those who engaged in these contacts had centuries ago ceased
to be strangers to the Greeks. Their encounters lowered linguistic
and other barriers. This aspect of matters needs to affect our
thinking. It is essential not to neglect the Bronze Age and its
aftermath which we now hesitate to call a dark age.

There has been a view (and it
may still be held by some) that Greek history should not be
allowed to begin before ca. 700 BC, because of the absence of
written documentation before that date. This literary gap has led
to a refusal to look at archaeology. The result was the Greek
"miracle." Today we are trying to put together a factual
explanation of this "miracle" or "mirage." It may not rest on as
firm a ground as if we had a Herodotus to tell us the story, but
at least it is reasonable enough to be entertained.

Needless to say, our meeting
highlights the sea and the opportunities it offered. But this is
by no means the only aspect able to shed light on the ascendancy
of early Greece. The 1988 congress held in Rome, "La transizione
dal Miceneo all'alto arcaismo. Dal palazzo all citta" (published
in 1991) touches closely on our subject, yet with perhaps one
exception the contributors saw no need to examine their subject in
the context we propose.

We are beginning to collect
ideas on a subject — the early history and background of classical
Greece — that many agree is ripe for a re‑evaluation. We still may
be far from linking various sections, to be sure. One friendly
critic took us to task for not reflecting Bernal's by now familiar
views on Greeks of mixed Semitic and African stock. But this is
one case in which I think the archaeologist's reluctance to
speculate is justified. At a certain critical point in his
argument Bernal himself has chosen to disavow, in rather strong
terms, the evidential value of archaeology. He evidently did so to
help his theory. That bias does not necessarily prove him wrong,
yet for the near future — and certainly until the volume
containing the testimonia for his linguistic claims has
appeared and been digested — there is little that non‑linguists
can do but stand back and wait for a verdict based on criteria
that Bernal himself deems relevant. Possible consequences of
racial affinity apart — reality or chimaera, who knows — if
Semitic and Egyptian roots in the Greek language are indeed as
numerous as Dr. Bernal claims, this could be ground for
speculating on an East‑West symbiosis. Yet this is another issue
that has been published with incendiary claims and phrases. Such
partisan issues never get settled until the furor dies
down.

The traditional archaeology of
pre‑literate periods can never deal with certainties when it comes
to making historical reconstructions. What is absent from the
material record is the role played by individuals and events, and
even that of political institutions, economies and beliefs. These
are never self‑evident. They must be derived from other sources,
and often are imposed upon the findings. For the traditional
archaeologist, this insufficiency makes for dependence, or at
least it opens him to instruction. This meeting is thus an
admission of a venerable discipline's shortcomings, but it claims
that other parties may help alleviate the impasse.

Gunter Kopcke

Michael Hudson (b. 1939) has
taught international economics at the Graduate Faculty of the New
School for Social Research, and has been economic adviser to the
United Nations Institute for Training and Research, as well as to
numerous government agencies and corporate clients. He is the
author of many books and monographs on international economics,
most recently Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1991).
As an economic historian he has been a Research Fellow at
Harvard's Peabody Museum specializing in Babylonian economic
relations, and Visiting Scholar in Bronze Age economic history in
the Economics and Classics Departments of New York University, as
well as at the Institute of Fine Arts. He is currently writing a
history of debt and debt cancellations from the Bronze Age Near
East to the present day.

Notes

These wergild payments are fines owed to
injured parties for manslaughter and lesser damages. A wergild
obligation is illustrated on the shield of Achilles,
Iliad IX.632ff. (for a reparation due in cattle), where
—the refusal of the penal gift . . . (marks Achilles) as a man
of unacceptable excesses.? Finley 1978:117f.

Certainly the southern Mesopotamian cities
organized their foreign trade through temple embassies. The
function of temples as —neutral zones? in peripheral regions
protected and sanctified above all their commercial
undertakings. We find such cults in Hellenistic Delos
(viz. esp. Rostovtzeff 1941, II:790f.).

Contact
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