Money in Ancient Mesopotamia
By Marvin A. Powell
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1996)
Abstract: Although contemporary preconceptions about what money is or is not sometimes evoke doubt about the existence of money in ancient Mesopotamia, it seems clear that it did exist. Money was substance oriented, and coins, when they finally appear are weighed like any other valuable metal. The most common money substances were barley as cheap money and silver as the more expensive, but other substances were also used. As to the forms or shapes in which money circulated, a number of words in the ancient languages can be identified that probably refer to these forms, but their specific appearance remains, in most cases, unknown.
Introduction: Was there such a thing as “money” in Mesopotamia? One of my younger friends in Munich-a superb Assyriologist who has read lots of Mesopotamian texts of various kinds-asked me this question in the summer of 1995 when I told him I was about to give a lecture on this topic in Wien.
The question is a natural one. It is also a natural answer to another question: why is history always being rewritten? Not merely to incorporate “new evidence” but even more to explain the past to our contemporaries in words that they can comprehend. Most of us today think of “money” primarily as “paper money.” From the fifth century B.C. through the beginning of this century, coins would probably have been the most common answer one would have gotten, if one could have made a random sampling of public opinion-at least, among Europeans and their colonists-on the question: “What is money?” However, as “our” millennium draws to a close, one can well imagine, not so far in the future, a world in which people will ask: “do you mean that those things were ever used as money?”
It is also a natural question, because, even though most of us think we can recognize money when we see it, defining what is money and distinguishing that from what is not money is a rather complex problem. Aside from the difficulties inherent in the subject itself, money-like religion, politics, morality, and certain other things-lends itself to dispute. This was summed up well almost a century ago, in the twilight of a previous era in monetary history, by a well-known authority on the subject: “The difficult question as to the best definition of money has been complicated by the efforts of writers so to define the term as to give support to their particular theories.” We, perhaps, who step with trepidation in the ever changing river of time can take some comfort, small it’s true: some rivers remain – at least till now – much the same.
I do not discuss theory in this essay, though, of course, I recognize that all fact is theory. Moreover, I regretably have to say at the outset that, although it would delight me to be able to present a systematic overview of the history of money in ancient Mesopotamia, I cannot do so. There are no histories of money in Mesopotamia and very few reliable studies on which such an overview could be constructed. This is not because there is no evidence for money. Quite the contrary, there is a lot of evidence, both textual and archaeological, but putting this evidence together is not easy. I have had to content myself with a brief summary of the reasonably well attested functions of money and with a bit more detail about what we know concerning money substances and money forms.
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