Early Mesopotamia by Postgate Nicholas

Author:Postgate, Nicholas [Postgate, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781138170766
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

The merchants will also have profited, but their role is best illustrated by moving back in time about a century, and downstream to Larsa, shortly after its incorporation into the kingdom of Hammurapi. Texts, presumably from the palace archives, which must have been illicitly excavated at the site itself, continue to surface in museums, giving us increasingly fine detail of the organization, but already the broad outlines are clear. In Text 10:9, Ili-iqišam has a concession from the palace for a certain quantity of merchandise, and this has passed, in some way not made explicit, to four persons who now sell it to Ibni-Amurru. He pays them one-third of the face value of the goods, and receives the goods: that is to say, he physically receives the fish, dates and garlic, but the wool will not become available to him until the shearing, which takes place around the Babylonian New Year, in seven months’ time. In return, he is to pay the sum owed to the palace at the end of the fifth month, i.e. in eleven months’ time.331

Two features of this transaction favourable to the merchant are immediately apparent: he pays only two-thirds of the nominal value of the goods, and for one of those thirds there is a long delayed repayment date. As for the repayment date, this is only one possible arrangement; sometimes the contract specifies ‘at the payment of the “allocation”’ (ina šaqāl sūtim), in other cases it may simply say ‘when the palace requests it’, or ‘when the messenger (našpar) comes from the palace’. Amounts sometimes remained unpaid for more than one year: one contract from Samsu-iluna Year 3 Month VI, deals with amounts of dates from the first and second years of his reign.332

As for the difference between the sum actually paid by the merchant and the face value of the goods, in the Larsa texts the separate payments are regularly exactly one-third, and the transactions are sometimes quite explicitly described as ‘at a third’. The later Sippar texts do not give the same detail, but no doubt a similar arrangement was in force. Quite how advantageous this apparent 50 per cent profit was for the merchants is another question, which cannot be answered at present: for one thing they had the expenses of transport, storage and distribution to meet, and in the later texts at least it is clear that these were considerable, since the merchants were expected to come from Sippar to Babylon to take delivery of the merchandise (Text 10:10).333 Then of course we are not told the exact significance of the starting price, which I have called the ‘nominal value’, and which may have been known as the ‘palace price’ (kār ēkallim).334 Our texts do not usually specify the amounts of each commodity, merely the silver value, no doubt because they were tied to a known equivalent. Precisely for this reason, they seem unlikely to be prices current in the market situation where the merchants would be making their sales

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