Steven Garfinkle - Commerce, Communication, and State Formation: Daily Life in an Ancient Mesopotamian City from a Merchant’s Perspective

source: Yale University     2016年12月5日
Steven Garfinkle - Commerce, Communication, and State Formation: Daily Life in an Ancient Mesopotamian City from a Merchant’s Perspective
Cities were the building blocks of civilization in early Mesopotamia. Literary texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh highlight the urban environment as the height of human development. The expansion of state power in these communities was often built around ensuring the productivity of commerce, both local and long distance, and protecting the accumulation of property. Much of this was an elite phenomenon, and these elites created the documentary record that we use to construct daily life. Commercial activity brought the communities of the ancient Near East together. This was true within communities as commerce supported the redistributive mechanisms within the early city-states and states of the region, and this was true across state boundaries as long distance trade networks arose to supply these communities with both staple and luxury goods unavailable in their local environments. The presentation will cover the mechanisms of exchange in early cities, the various goods and services that were exchanged, the ways in which communication was managed over long distances, and finally we will discuss how all of this activity shaped the development of states in early Mesopotamia.
Steven Garfinkle is Professor of History at Western Washington University, where he has been a faculty member since 2001. He teaches a broad range of courses on the ancient world. His research focuses on social and economic history in early Mesopotamia with an emphasis on the origins of commerce and state formation. Steven is a past recipient of a research fellowship rom the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received the outstanding Faculty Leadership Award at Western for 2015-16. He is a member of the board of directors for the International Association for Assyriology and the American Oriental Society, and he is the chair of the Committee on Mesopotamian Civilization for the American Schools of Oriental Research. Steven has authored and edited several books, including Entrepreneurs and Enterprise in Early Mesopotamia (2012), along with numerous articles. He is the editor of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History.
For more information, please visit: http://pier.macmillan.yale.edu/summer...