The Ancient Economy
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The Ancient Economy
''The Ancient Economy'' is a book about the economic system of classical antiquity written by the classicist Moses I. Finley. It was originally published in 1973. Finley interprets the economy from 1000 BC to 500 AD sociologically, instead of using economic models (like for example Michael Rostovtzeff). Finley attempted to prove that the ancient economy was largely a byproduct of status. In other words, economic systems were not interdependent, they were embedded in status positions. The analysis owes some debt to sociologists such as Max Weber and Karl Polanyi. Summary Finley represented the side of the "primitivists" where he argued that the economies of Ancient Greece and Rome differed wildly from how the economies of the Western world function today. The modernists, on the contrary, believed that the ancient economy resembles in many ways the way it functions in modern Western democratic states, where economic laws such as supply and demand functioned in the same ways then as ...
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Moses I
Moses hbo, מֹשֶׁה, Mōše; also known as Moshe or Moshe Rabbeinu (Mishnaic Hebrew: מֹשֶׁה רַבֵּינוּ, ); syr, ܡܘܫܐ, Mūše; ar, موسى, Mūsā; grc, Mωϋσῆς, Mōÿsēs () is considered the most important prophet in Judaism and one of the most important prophets in Christianity, Islam, the Druze faith, the Baháʼí Faith and other Abrahamic religions. According to both the Bible and the Quran, Moses was the leader of the Israelites and lawgiver to whom the authorship, or "acquisition from heaven", of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) is attributed. According to the Book of Exodus, Moses was born in a time when his people, the Israelites, an enslaved minority, were increasing in population and, as a result, the Pharaohs in the Bible#In the Book of Exodus, Egyptian Pharaoh worried that they might ally themselves with Egypt's enemies. Moses' Hebrews, Hebrew mother, Jochebed, secretly hid him when Pharaoh ordered all newborn Hebrew ...
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University Of California Press
The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868, and has been officially headquartered at the university's flagship campus in Berkeley, California, since its inception. As the non-profit publishing arm of the University of California system, the UC Press is fully subsidized by the university and the State of California. A third of its authors are faculty members of the university. The press publishes over 250 new books and almost four dozen multi-issue journals annually, in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and maintains approximately 4,000 book titles in print. It is also the digital publisher of Collabra and Luminos open access (OA) initiatives. The University of California Press publishes in ...
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Classical Antiquity
Classical antiquity (also the classical era, classical period or classical age) is the period of cultural history between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD centred on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome known as the Greco-Roman world. It is the period in which both Greek and Roman societies flourished and wielded huge influence throughout much of Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. Conventionally, it is taken to begin with the earliest-recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer (8th–7th-century BC), and continues through the emergence of Christianity (1st century AD) and the fall of the Western Roman Empire (5th-century AD). It ends with the decline of classical culture during late antiquity (250–750), a period overlapping with the Early Middle Ages (600–1000). Such a wide span of history and territory covers many disparate cultures and periods. ''Classical antiquity'' may also refer to an idealized v ...
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Michael Rostovtzeff
Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff, or Rostovtsev (russian: Михаи́л Ива́нович Росто́вцев; – October 20, 1952), was a Russian historian whose career straddled the 19th and 20th centuries and who produced important works on ancient Roman and Greek history. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Science. Career Rostovtzeff was the son of a Latin teacher. Upon completing his studies at the universities of Kiev and , Rostovtsev served as an assistant and then as a full Professor of Latin at the 1898–1918. In 1918, following the Russian Revolution, he emigrated first to Sweden, then to England, and finally in 1920 to the United States. There he accepted a chair at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before moving to Yale University in 1925 where he taught until his retirement in 1944. He oversaw all archaeological activities of the latter institution in general and the excavations of Dura-Europos in particular. He is believed to have coined the term "ca ...
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Max Weber
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (; ; 21 April 186414 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist and political economist, who is regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society. His ideas profoundly influence social theory and research. While Weber did not see himself as a sociologist, he is recognized as one of the fathers of sociology along with Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim. Unlike Durkheim, Weber did not believe in monocausal explanations, proposing instead that for any outcome there can be multiple causes. Also unlike Durkheim, Weber was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive rather than purely empiricist methods, based on a subjective understanding of the meanings that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber's main intellectual concern was in understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and the ensuing sense of "disenchan ...
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Karl Polanyi
Karl Paul Polanyi (; hu, Polányi Károly ; 25 October 1886 – 23 April 1964),''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2003) vol 9. p. 554 was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist and politician, best known for his book '' The Great Transformation,'' which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets. In his writings, Polanyi advances the concept of the Double Movement, which refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push for social protection against that marketization. He argues that market-based societies in modern Europe were not inevitable but historically contingent. Polanyi is remembered best as the originator of substantivism, a cultural version of economics, which emphasizes the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This opinion is counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science. Polanyi's approach to the ancient ec ...
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Walter Scheidel
Walter Scheidel (born 9 July 1966) is an Austrian historian who teaches ancient history at Stanford University, California. Scheidel's main research interests are ancient social and economic history, pre-modern historical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to world history. Biography From 1984 to 1993, Scheidel studied Ancient History and numismatics at the University of Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate in 1993. In 1998, he completed his habilitation at the University of Graz. From 1990 until 1994, he worked as an administrative and research assistant at the University of Vienna. As an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow of the Austrian Research Council, he spent 1995 as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. From 1996 to 1999, he was Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge. During this period, he also served as visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales ...
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Sitta Von Reden
Sitta von Reden (born 1962 in Hannover) is a German ancient historian and Professor of Ancient History at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg. She is particularly known for her research on ancient economics, and the social and cultural history of the Graeco-Roman world. Education and career Von Reden studied economics and history at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg (graduating in 1987), and then studied Classical Philology and History at the Free University Berlin and the University of Cambridge. Von Reden received her doctorate in Ancient History at the University of Cambridge. She was Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen's College, Oxford. The dissertation, completed in 1993, was awarded by the Hellenic Foundation in Oxford. Following several years of teaching and research at various British universities, von Reden habilitated in 2005 at the University of Augsburg with the thesis ''Monetization in 3rd -century BC Egypt'' and she subsequently taught Ancient ...
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Ancient Economic Thought
In the history of economic thought, ancient economic thought refers to the ideas from people before the Middle Ages. Economics in the classical age is defined in the modern analysis as a factor of ethics and politics, only becoming an object of study as a separate discipline during the 18th century. Ancient Near East Economic organization in the earliest civilizations of the fertile crescent was driven by the need to efficiently grow crops in river basins. The Euphrates and Nile valleys were homes to earliest examples of codified measurements written in base 60 and Egyptian fractions. Egyptian keepers of royal granaries, and absentee Egyptian landowners are reported in the Heqanakht papyri. Historians of this period note that the major tool of accounting for agrarian societies, the scales used to measure grain inventory, reflected dual religious and ethical symbolic meanings. The Erlenmeyer tablets give a picture of Sumerian production in the Euphrates Valley around 22 ...
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Books About Economic History
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ...
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University Of California Press Books
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the designation is reserved for colleges that have a graduate school. The word ''university'' is derived from the Latin ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". The first universities were created in Europe by Catholic Church monks. The University of Bologna (''Università di Bologna''), founded in 1088, is the first university in the sense of: *Being a high degree-awarding institute. *Having independence from the ecclesiastic schools, although conducted by both clergy and non-clergy. *Using the word ''universitas'' (which was coined at its foundation). *Issuing secular and non-secular degrees: grammar, rhetoric, logic, theology, canon law, notarial law.Hunt Janin: "The university in ...
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