DePauw Classical Studies Kairos Lectures 2015 by Professor Gojko Barjamovic

 

 

Professor Gojko Barjamovic

(Harvard University)

Life and Death (and Gods and Money): A   Walk through the Bronze Age 7 - 8:30pm, March 16 (Monday) Peeler Art Center Auditorium

 

 

DePauw University The Department of Classical Studies Presents The 2015 Kairos Lectures  

   

The Rise of Globalization: LongDistance Trade and State Development 3000 – 500 BCE   - 5:30pm, March 17 (Tuesday) 4:15   Peeler Art Center Auditorium  

 

 

Life and Death (and Gods and Money): A Walk through the Bronze Age

 

Almost four thousand years ago, merchants from the ancient city of Assur, in present-day Iraq, were running a commercial network of trading colonies, caravans and agents, which stretched almost a thousand miles across. Today, we can study their life in great detail through thousands of letters and business records inscribed in cuneiform script on durable clay tablets that are currently being unearthed from the ruined houses of one such merchant settlement at the archaeological site of Kültepe in modern-day Turkey. Almost every year a new house with an archive belonging to a merchant family sees the light of day for the first time since the town was destroyed in a fire c. 1838 bce. No other corpus of ancient texts allows us to study a group of people of non-royal birth as closely as these Assyrian commercial archives. In some cases they contain several hundred letters written by a single individual, and an exceptionally high degree of literacy within the trading community means that we also have texts authored by members of society who tend to remain invisible in other ancient settings: women, children and slaves. ‘Life and Death (and Gods and Money)’ makes use of this unique historical material to invite you along for a journey through the remarkable world of the Assyrian traders. We will follow a 15-year old boy who he is about to set out to the colonies to work for his father’s business. Through illustrations, maps and quotes drawn from the ancient texts, we will track his voyage and experience the landscapes, cities and people that he encounters on his way. Through his eyes we explore how people lived, worked and ate, what their art was like, and how they perceived issues of justice, gender, wealth, moral and the divine.

 

The Rise of Globalization: LongDistance Trade and State Development 3000 – 500 BCE   Trade is a fiercely disputed topic in the study of ancient history. One finds reactions against the simplicity of many ‘modernizing’ accounts, as well as challenges to the emphasis on the ‘primitive’ aspects of the economy. The only well-documented ancient trade-system known to us from textual sources is a corpus of some twenty-three thousand Assyrian commercial records (dated c. 18951865 bce) coming from the archaeological site of Kültepe in modern-day Turkey. Those texts, whose closest typological parallels are found in the medieval archives of the North Italian city-states and the Cairo Genizah, draw a picture of an enterprise based on private initiative, riskbased and profit-seeking behavior, free-floating capital, joint-stock enterprises, bearer’s checks, and similar ‘modern’ features. But the question is to what extent one can extrapolate from this example and posit that the Assyrian records must serve as a model for interpreting all long-distance trade in the ancient world. This talk explores the relation between trade and state as reflected in the Assyrian texts, and traces the ways in which it transformed production economy, physical and financial infrastructure across a large geographical area. It concludes that the Assyrian commercial system cannot possibly represent historical fluke – even if it was the result of a particular historical reality – and uses the example to discuss how trade affected state development more broadly, both in periods of territorial fragmentation, and during large-scale imperial integration.