Page 29 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Cities 11

state may own nothing beyond their houses, their portable posses­
sions, and the tools of their trade. The land is temple property,
and the farmers either deliver a fixed proportion of their pro­
duce to the temple or else are direct temple employees. Crafts
such as weaving and brewing and metalworking, carpentry and
stonecutting and jewel setting, are carried on in temple work­
shops by temple employees for a fixed wage. The temple organ­
izes trading caravans, and stores in granaries and warehouses
the surplus wealth of the community, barley and wool and ses­
ame oil and dates. It pays wages in barley to the many direct
temple employees. The governor is directly responsible for the

defense of the state, keeps a small standing army, and can call
out the militia as required. The position of governor passes nor­
mally from father to son.
But just about 2000 b.c. all this is changing. What can
only be described as a capitalist revolution is taking place. Prob­
ably not simultaneously, of course, in all the twenty or so city-
states, but approximately at this time in them all. We suddenly
find in the temple archives records of independent groups of
merchants paying taxes on their imports and even financing pri­
vate ventures by loans from the temple. And we find that large
and small estates are being bought and sold in the open market.
The temples continue, and their premises are enlarged; the revo­
lution is apparently bloodless. Nevertheless, the whole economic
structure is changing to one based on private initiative and own­
ership of property.
The people of lower Mesopotamia must have been conscious
of this change—it was much too rapid to have been impercepti­
ble. And they undoubtedly knew, more clearly than we do, the
reasons behind the change. For the reasons lay in the course of

fairly recent history, in events beginning, admittedly, all of three
hundred years before, but culminating in the last two genera­
tions.

Throughout southern Mesopotamia there is at this time a
mixture of two nationalities, Sumerians and Semites. They mix
at all levels. If our farmers on the levee are clean-shaven, stocky,
and talking among themselves in a rather staccato tongue, they
are undoubtedly Sumerians. But they can equally well be taller,