The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— The Babylonian economy in the first millennium BC —
dependants. 13 The highest echelons within the temple administrations were partly
royal officials – for all practical purposes, temples were subject to royal authority –
and partly recruited among the traditional leading families of the city. The same
families dominated the ranks of the numerous specialist professions employed in the
cult, especially for the preparation and presentation of the daily food offerings, the
central religious activity in a Babylonian temple. The offices of temple butchers,
bakers, brewers, singers, exorcists and so forth brought with them a regular income
related to the periods of service. These so-called temple prebends constituted a vital
economic link – in addition to religious/ideological factors – which bound the temple
to the city and (certain parts) of its population. It is no coincidence that in the
Hellenistic period, at a time when traditional Babylonian ways of life were gradually
disappearing, the sphere of the temples proved to be the most resilient and conservative
sector of Babylonian culture.
Below the level of the prestigious holders of temple prebends, there was a stratum
of ordinary craftsmen – smiths, weavers, potters, etc. – and menial workers, mostly
unfree serfs (sˇirkus, literally ‘oblates’) bound to the temple, but living in families.
Such workers were maintained primarily by regular salaries, originally paid in kind,
but from the sixth century onwards, increasingly in silver.
The latter point is particularly noteworthy. A regular payment of silver wages to
temple dependants does not fit the traditional model, which considers the Babylonian
temple economy to have been a classical redistributive system; the temples are considered
to have been economically more or less autarchic, or at least to have been
striving for economic independence. In fact they were nothing of the kind. To the
political, and partly also economic, dependence on the crown, one has to add the
effects of a permanent lack of workers, which made the temples rely on hiring independent
labour to a large extent (a similar phenomenon has been mentioned above
in the discussion of temple agriculture). Furthermore, the increasing monetisation of
economic life caused a certain degree of economic specialisation among the temples.
The Ebabbar temple in Sippar, for instance, intensified agricultural production by
specialising in date gardening even more than was the rule in northern Babylonia, at
the expense of the temple’s grain fields. Grain was bought with money made by the
sale of dates. For the Eanna temple in southern Uruk, the major cash crop was wool.
In some years this temple increased its agricultural income by as much as a third
through purchase of grain that was paid for with the proceeds of the wool trade. Thus,
money came to play an increasingly prominent role in the temple economy, explaining
the gradual replacement of the traditional ration system by money salaries.
THE URBAN BOURGEOISIE
This – deliberately anachronistic – term is used here faute de mieux for a certain sector
of the propertied upper class inhabiting Babylonian cities which has left a particularly
rich documentation. The so-called ‘prebendary’ families held prestigious temple offices
and lived to a large extent from these benefices. 14 While the social range encompassed
by this group was quite large – one finds extraordinarily rich families traditionally
holding high positions in the provincial government, as well as far more humble
artisanal families specialising in certain prebendary trades – there are several
characteristics typical for all members of this ‘class’. From a social perspective, their
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