On the surface, such issues are amenable to study. Civilizations, unlike hunter-gatherers, leave remains. Through archaeology, we can recover the tools of workmen, inspect grain on the floors of abandoned storehouses, trace obsidian from Anatolia and copper in Afghanistan to specific quarries, chart the caravan paths from Ophar to Memphis. We have the weights a Harappan merchant used to portion out his goods, and the measuring cups of the Sumerians. We have the palace ledgers of the Cretans. All civilizations have writing to preserve their economic records-- or fell into the hands of literate invaders who preserved such oral accounts as they could. None the less, much remains incomprehensible.
The record is incomplete. We have clay tablets from a handful of cities in early Mesopotamia; those from before 2900 BC are barely decipherable. Fully half the tablets come from one small uniquely bureaucratic state-- Ur, the city which Abraham left, during the IIIrd dynasty, a period lasting little more than a century (2113 to 2006 BC). After 1600 BC the Babylonians put their writing on wood tablets covered with bee's wax, which could be scraped clean and reused; few remain. Egyptian records-- and Egyptian antiquarians-- at virtually all places and eras have been preoccupied by the funeral cult rather than economics. China has a 4000 year old tradition of literacy, but the earliest Chinese "documents" are inscribed tortoise shells used for fortune telling, found in tombs of the Shang and Chou periods; almost all writings from before 220 BC were burned at the command of the first Chin emperor and subsequently recreated from memory; moral tracts were salvaged but not statistics. The writings of the Indus Valley peoples remain untranslated, as does Linear A, the script of the original Cretans. None of the South American states ever developed writing. The Olmecs had no writing, nor the Zapotecs, and the stelas left by the Maya have been deciphered only in the last several decades; according to the translators, they are less-than-accurate propagandistic statements.
In short, there is room for error in our reading of the past, and much scope in this evil age for ideological mischief. "Much recent research has been leaning away from a focus on heavy state involvement in the economy to viewing the ancient economies in terms of freer market arrangements," our text notes. (Berdan 1989: 81) Which is to say, anthropological delirium has given way to hallucination. With that warning, let us now contemplate some realities of population, trade, tribute, capital, class and labor in the first states.
We have no accurate figures for population in the ancient world. For purposes of comparison, world population in 1750 is estimated at 728 million people, about one eighth the current figure. At the dawn of civilization, some 6000 years ago, there were probably no more than 200 million people in all the world, probably less.
The population of the Americas on the eve of Columbus's arrival may have been 8 million people or 50 million. Tang China, around 750 AD, had perhaps 50 million people. The Roman Empire at its greatest extent contained from 50 to 75 million people. Italy in the days of Julius Caesar was home for 3.5 million people; Gaul-- modern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands-- had then maybe 8 million; comparable figures today are 60 million and 80.
Basically they were younger people. Statistics do not exist for antiquity, so the comparison must be to 18th century European data; nonetheless, some information of interest emerges. At the moment, crude birth rates in industrialized nations are in the range of 15 to 25 births per 1000 total population; death rates on the order of 10 per 1000. Two centuries ago, both numbers would have been doubled. Infant mortality rates (deaths under one year) are about 10 to 20 per 1000 in the Western world even a century ago the figure was 150 to 200 per 1000. Life expectancy in modern societies is about 70 years; before 1875, near 40. (Morris and Irwin 1970: 873-881)
The productive labor of the world is done, by and large, by the young and middle aged. Those between the ages of 15 and 65 make up two thirds of most modern societies; two centuries ago they were closer to 60 percent. The wealth of the world is generally in the hands of the elderly: about ten percent of society today is over the age of 65; in the eighteenth century, the figure was 5 to 6 percent. Maybe one person in 4 in modern America is under the age of 14, or one in five; two centuries ago it was one in 3.1
To reduce this to the personal: in previous ages, most people worked very hard when they came of age, usually at a younger age than now. By and large, they worked till they dropped. There were significantly more children around than today-- in proportional terms, anyhow-- and those children often died before reaching puberty. In comparative terms, people who owned much in the way of property were rarer; these were also the people who gave orders and occupied positions of responsibility; they were often elderly. This is not to say younger people never owned property or exercised authority, but as a rule it was people in the upper classes who were more likely to reach an advanced age.
What sorts of jobs did people perform? Economists like to talk about the extractive and manufacturing sector of the economy and service industries, and point to the increases in the latter (teaching, for example, bank tellers, security guards, engineers) and the decline in the former (farmers, miners, factory workers). There's a pretense that the predominance of service industries is something new.
Looked at over millennia, the significant trends are the spread of agriculture beginning about 8000 BC; then the gradual appearance of artisans and clerical workers and professional soldiers, amounting to about ten percent of the population by 3000 BC, with another percent or two for clergy and rulers. This holds until around 1800 AD, when mechanization made it possible to reduce the farming work force, and dispossessed agricultural laborers started to migrate to the cities for manufacturing jobs. In the late 20th century, rising productivity made it possible to reduce manufacturing employment (in percentage terms anyhow). As a consequence-- but that's another tale.
The point is that throughout history and even before, once we got away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles, most people farmed-- 80 to 90 percent of them. By and large, they fed themselves. They wove cloth for their own clothes. To the extent their children were educated, they did the teaching themselves. Through taxes, social arrangement, or coercion a portion of their labor or its product became "surplus". The proportion varies with circumstances, but was typically on the order of 25 to 50 %. On the fraction, the rest of society subsisted and enjoyed its own (often higher) living standards.
After farming, man enjoys war as an occupation. A sick joke, a sicker fact. Most of the archaic states warred almost at yearly intervals; the more successful ones omitted the "almost."
Between 490 and 338 BC, Athens was at war two years out of three. No peace lasted for as long as a decade. Alexander's successors fought almost continually for fifty years, and warfare was endemic in the Hellenistic world for the next several centuries. The Romans closed the doors of the temple of Janus when they were at peace with all their neighbors; this happened only in 231-225 BC, and after 30 BC in the aftermath of Actium. In each year between 220 and 167 BC, more than ten percent of all adult Italian males were at war; in the wars of the first century BC the figure was one man in three. (Finley 1985: 67-68)
It is occasionally alleged that warfare was infrequent before the appearance of civilization, the inference being that civilizations breed men with deficient moral qualities. More likely, civilizations have simpler been larger than barbarian societies, more tempting targets for aggression, more apt to become embroiled in conflicts, and more likely to survive them. The earliest neolithic settlements of the Old World surrounded themselves with walls, surely as defense. Their residents made weapons as did the foraging peoples outside the walls. Even before writing, the record reveals mass graves, violent death, exchanges of weapons and other evidence of conflict. (Keeley 1996) Later, our sources show the early civilizations as islands in seas of semi-nomadic or migrant barbarians, whom they feared with cause.
Consider Mesopotamia: over time, Gutians defeated Akkadians (2159 BC); Elamites sacked Ur (2006 BC); Hittites devastated Babylon (1530 BC) which fell then to Kassites, then Assyrians (1325 BC), then Chaldeans (612 BC), then Persians (539 BC), then Greeks (332 BC). (Only the last few dates are really firm.)
The Greeks themselves were Indo-European migrants who entered Europe as barbarians beginning about 2200 BC; they imposed themselves upon the former residents, settled down under some degree of Cretan control, evidently revolted and conquered their island masters around 1400 BC, then took to the seas as raiders and pirates, attacking Egypt and destroying the ancient Anatolian city of Troy around 1200 BC. Successive waves of migration proved more than they could contend with; the Myceanean states or chiefdoms were toppled within a pair of generations and Greece fell into a Dark Age, from which it began to recover only about 800 BC; it contended with barbarians and semi-civilized peoples to its north for the next 500 years, and finally submitted to Macedonian domination in 338 BC.
Enough examples. The tale elsewhere provides no novelties. Barbarians appear and conquer, take on the trappings of civilization themselves, then fall to other barbarians. Early empires are too small and too poorly organized to hold for more than a century or so; later ones find their safety in great size, full time soldiers, and internal despotism, but they too are finally defeated.
Men can be motivated to fight by hopes of adventure, in defense of their own, or for booty in the form of loot, land, and rape. Wages are beyond the reach of barbarian societies, and for the most ancient states as well. Early warfare thus was driven by economics.
However, neither barbarians nor these early states had great quantities of material suitable for booty, except land and animals and slaves. Technologically, they were basically at a par. Civilizations could boast of superior capital improvements, but most of these were immune to seizure-- one can steal weapons and jewels but not a foundry nor bakeries. Considered as loot, the "wealth" of any society was its land and its people, who could be put to work to grow food and make luxuries for the elite or be formed into armies who might be able to take food and luxuries and people away from other societies. Such gains were immediate-- and visible.
Archaic societies grew rich through plunder, not investment. They resorted to war when they thought they might gain; they expected their neighbors to do the same; they claimed no higher moral ground for fighting or declining a fight. That such policies were amoral cannot be doubted, but our own practices are seldom more idealistic. Ancient peoples thought they handled their foreign policy judiciously and sanely; they did not see each other as having different psychologies.
I add that the notion that peace is a virtue has been a minority viewpoint down through the ages; ancient peoples, both civilized and barbarian, even when deploring war, thought soldiering produced men of good character. These opinions too have been sounded in our time.
The third great human occupation is textile making. The first "factories" in ancient Mesopotamia were temple-run enterprises where hundreds of women and children labored to make cloth and carpets. "Persian carpets" are still a stable of the luxury export business. The Chinese exported so much cloth than the caravan routes across central Asia became known as the Silk Road; trade dwindled when the Byzantines stole the secret of the silkworm and took up their own manufacture. Cloth making was a virtual preoccupation of the South American peoples before the Spanish arrived; the Incas went so far as to impose on their subjects a "tax" paid in cloth, and Bolivians and Peruvians still walk about with portable looms. Cheap dyed cloth was the first significant Indian export to Europe when the sea route was opened in the 17th century; it was one of the first industries to be suppressed when the British took control, with the intent of making India a market for British-made cloth. Women watching the guillotines while knitting became a symbol of the French Revolution. Spinning wheels were common furniture in American households at the time of our Revolution and even later; they were in England as well, until the Industrial Revolution; upper class women then turned to lace-making and generally pointless embroidery, while the lower class often became seamstresses working in sweatshops-- as is true to this very day.
Whether or not it was their nominal occupation, it's a safe bet that any females and most males in prior civilizations spent much of their "leisure time" spinning thread or weaving cloth.
Cloth making, by and large, is not an intellectual's occupation. It takes a certain amount of training, an ordinary intelligence, patience and nimble fingers. It can done by children, and frequently is. Many occupations are like that. Serving in a tavern, hauling sails on a ship, soldiering, digging ditches, simple carpentry, house cleaning, factory work... Until quite recently most jobs were of this nature-- routine, unskilled or semi-skilled labor. They took strong backs, or at least endurance, and a willingness to obey orders, but not education.
Fortunately, few people were educated. Education is costly-- doubly costly, for teaching is a skill, which must be paid for, and a student is not gainfully employed while in school or studying his lessons. Mass literacy is the product of affluent 20th century societies and less affluent but determined 19th century societies; elsewhere and at other times literacy has largely been restricted to the upper and middle classes. Members of the lower classes, with their limited income and short life span, could not afford an education and were placed in occupations that did not demand one. By and large they received on-the-job training in their parents's trades and took up the same occupations. This was the pattern for roughly 80 percent of humanity, from the beginning of civilization. A handful escaped as soldiers and whores.
Somewhat more than a handful became slaves.
Slavery in the ancient world is a complex issue, particularly for Americans who have their own history as a slave state to remember. To summarize, ancient societies had a variety of forms of employment, from straightforward working for wages to unconditional chattel slavery on lines familiar to Americans. There were also peonage, debt servitude, convict labor, and forms of servitude which left slaves retain some or all of their income. Most ancient societies had a mix of such practices. (As did Americans, but the fact is seldom remembered.) Slaves were also freed; different societies had different restrictions on the citizenship of those emancipated.
The difference between American and ancient slavery is that Americans bred their slaves and raised the children to be slaves. The general practice in antiquity was to capture slaves. The pirates who plagued the Mediterranean until Caesar's time sold the captives that could not be ransomed into slavery; one reason it was so difficult to act against them was the need for slaves (another was that Roman businessmen profited greatly as the middlemen).
It was a routine practice in wartime to enslave a defeated people. The Mesopotamians began their civilization by killing their battle captives and enslaving women and children; for a time "slave" meant "female slave", but about 3000 BC it became practice to blind male captives and use them as slaves as well; this tradition was still in place in the Persian Empire, about 2500 years later. The Chinese also took their battle captives into slavery, mostly for use as mass sacrifices. Aztecs did the same, and ate the sacrifices as well.
The Aztecs thought they were keeping the sun alive. Elsewhere, slave taking was simply good business. When Alexander the Great sacked Thebes in 335 BC, six thousand of its people were slain, and thirty thousand sold as slaves-- for 18 dollars a head, we are told (the dollar did go further back then). (Dodge 1890: 215) We're not told what the price was when he sacked Gaza and Tyre a few years later (ten thousand male captives were killed at Gaza, with unknown numbers of women and children sold off; the figures for Tyre are eight and thirty thousand.)
In 167 BC, in the aftermath of the Third Macedonian War, the Romans sought to punish the peoples of the island of Epirus who had sided with King Perseus of Macedon; Livy reports 150,000 men, women, and children from 70 "cities" were sold into slavery. During the course of his Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar is said to have sacked 800 "cities"; at least one provided 53,000 people to be sold as slaves.
Roman policy was to let victorious generals have the profit from selling slaves while other booty went to the soldiers and the state coffers. No man could regard himself as wealthy who could not support a legion on the interest from his investments, Caesar's friend Crassus observed; Caesar eventually maintained four out of his own pocket (he had ten legions at the time). (Gelzer 1968, Meier 1982)
This is frankly appalling, and yet slavery provided the material basis of Mediterranean culture up to the fall of the Western Empire. Did it bother anyone? In a word, No.
The literate people of antiquity despised "labor" in any form. The law was an honored profession-- it was virtually the only profession, aside from war, which was presumed to be a necessity of citizenship for virtually all men. Farming and income from land ownership were likewise acceptable, but "Trade" was generally viewed as servile and demeaning, incompatible with one's dignity (an attitude which lingered to the present century in both Germany and England). Artisans and self-employed individuals got middling levels of respect, but it was felt that only the lowest class of person would stoop to laboring for others for wages. People who needed employment could sell themselves into slavery, with the eventual hope of manumission and becoming a client of an affluent patron; it was a common practice in Roman times.
No great distinction was made between regular employee and slave; frequently we find the same word being used for both. Slaves and wage laborers often worked side by side, and might even live side by side in the tenements of the city; at some times the only difference in condition was the employee's right to vote in municipal elections.
Most enterprises were very small by present standards. Most institutions of any sort were small, partially because the population was low and there was no need for mass purveyors of goods, partially because most proprietors were undercapitalized, partially because overseeing a large work force required a literate managerial class and all the qualified people worked for the state or for temples. An urban entrepreneur might have a staff of ten making pottery or jewelry or copying manuscripts; in the countryside or away from the major cities, businesses were apt to be family affairs. Broadly speaking, this was true up through the 19th century. The closest the ancient world came to the modern corporation as a continuing entity were the associations of tax-farmers who milked the Roman provinces; there were no such organizations in any other line of business.
Farms were one of the few businesses which could profitably use large work forces; subjugated work forces, slaves or serfs, were common in antiquity, and again up to the 19th century. Kings employed thousands of workers, mostly as soldiers. Mesopotamian kings kept goldsmiths, doctors, engineers, entertainers and other specialists on hand, trading them back and forth like so many baseball players; it's not clear from the documents whether these people were free or slave; since their compensation was probably little more than food and housing, the people themselves might have been unclear on the topic. When large work forces were needed for erecting temples or dredging canals, courvee labor was used. Most communities maintained unpaid militias; since slaves continued to labor, troops could be mobilized without upsetting the economy. Municipalities also used slaves for essential labor-- and Athens kept 30,000 working in profitable silver mines.
Is it necessary to mention that slave labor is cheap? There were of course expensively trained slaves, as barbers, school masters, even policemen. But most slaves were household servants or farm workers; the former might be pampered-- particularly females, who functioned as concubines-- but the lives of the latter were generally dreadful. Slaves were "living tools" in the eyes of Classical civilization; sadistic abuse might be restricted, but they could be worked to death without the slightest pity. 2
Ancient civilization had few energy sources, other than burning wood. Coal was unknown. Animals could not be harnessed efficiently. Waterwheels were developed in the 1st century BC but they were only rarely used before the third or fourth century AD, and even then only for grinding grain. Even ships depended more on oars than sails. Production thus required human labor. Civilization rested on a "social surplus" which was screwed out of an exploited work force, whether of slaves or serfs, and people were quite conscious of the fact. Alternatives were unimaginable.3
Slave labor was apparently quite profitable, although we do not have numbers to prove the point in antiquity, or any discussion in classical texts. Evidently for ancient people the fact was so obvious it needed no discussion. It does seem that wherever Roman rule reached, slave agriculture replaced free.4
This profitability, however, was dependent on a steady supply of cheap slaves. After about 200 AD, Rome's empire stopped growing, and its wars stopped being so successful. The influx of slaves dried up, and historians speculate that the Empire began a period of economic decline, which was made even worse over the next two centuries by epidemics of bubonic plague and the incessant struggles of would-be emperors. It is also speculated that because of slavery the Romans never felt great need for technological innovations; superior military organization and constant drill gave them an edge against barbarians for some while, but when the army itself was largely made up of hired barbarians this advantage went away, and there was nothing else to fall back on. The late Romans faced the Sassinids and Moslems as equals, and got whomped. (Finley 1965; Ferrill 1986)
Needless to say, slave labor kept wage rates low, providing yet another incentive for most people to avoid employment and live on the classical equivalent of welfare.
It is one of the great peculiarities of antiquity, in modern eyes, that many states maintained some sort of public assistance, at what must have been an astonishing cost. It seems to have been regarded as an indisputable benefit of citizenship, and is perhaps an echo of the redistributive village economies which gave rise to the archaic states.
We do not have reliable numbers, and accordingly must resort to hand waving, but perhaps one third of the land of early Mesopotamian cities was held by temples (and one third for the ruler, and one third by private proprietors). Some of this was farmed by sharecroppers, who paid a fraction of their crops to the temple. Some was rented out for set payments, some was farmed by temple employees-- who might be hired workers or slaves. Presumably the ruler's lands were used the same way; we lack records, but it would seem that the first rulers began as priests, and kept a sacred role thereafter, so the lands of the temple and ensi were commingled.
In essence, the temple's take was a tax. It was used to feed the priests and temple dependents (and the gods who were provided sumptuous meals on the altars, which after some period of waiting were disposed of by attendants), to furnish the statues with elaborate finery, etc.
Part of the temple earnings were used for charitable ends: the destitute and the ill were fed and perhaps housed. At some point, the temples took to providing jobs, either as charity or exploitation. They began to run factories which employed women and children and lamed men, making cloth for export. Women slaves were used as weavers as well; it's not at all clear how much difference there was between the slaves and the merely poor. At a fairly early period, these enterprises employed hundreds of workers, who might labor upwards of a year to make the material for a single garment. The cloth or garments might be used within the temple; frequently it was exported in return for copper, building stone, and other luxuries desired for the temple. The kings were engaged in the same sort of business.
To what extent we are dealing with taxation or charity is murky, and it's probably a mistake to wonder. This is how Mesopotamians did things, that's all; citizens of a city belonged to the city's god or goddess; they had obligations to the god which they met by laboring for the god's earthly representatives, and in return the god had obligations back which his representatives would supply. Trying to divide matters into categories such as exploitation and statecraft shows our ways of managing affairs, which they would find utterly alien.
The Greek cities also maintained a dole for the destitute among their citizens; we have accounts to show they tried to limit the numbers, and apparently the charity did not extend to the non-citizens in their midst. The general belief in Athens seems to have been that working for a living prevented one from attending properly to public affairs, though in fact most people did work. About 350 BC, Xenophon put forth a proposal for supporting all Athenian citizens on the earnings of the city slaves; he was in exile and the Athenians chose to ignore him. Sparta is famous for a social order with a communitarian military elite resting on the labor of helots; something similar was practiced in Crete for a time.
Rome's lower class citizens were entitled to subsidized grain, provided by the state. This enriched the farmers-- many of them Senators and presumably "above" business matters-- who sold the grain to the state. In turn the public treasury was kept full by renting state land to large farmers, by "tribute" from conquered lands, and by other plunder. There were state holidays as well at which food was provided; Romans desirous of political office often supplemented the official offerings at their own ( heavy) expense. Most of the meat from animals sacrificed to the gods apparently was distributed to the populace; early Christians earned official enmity by refusing to taste such offerings, which were usually made with the partial purpose of ensuring the good fortune of the state and the emperor.
Peru maintained itself as both slave state and welfare state. The blessings of imperial rule presumably included protection against famine from storehouses near each community, kept high on the hillsides so the peasants working the fields would be reminded of the Inca's beneficence.5 Ordinary Indians were effectively slaves of the Inca; they could be relocated at his whim, their movement and daily life was regulated by the state, which took two thirds of their crops, required them to give labor and military service, and also taxed them to make garments for soldiers.
On the other hand, in a state without money, as Prescott muses, one could hardly become poor by dissolute living or market speculation. And the state was generous to those reduced to poverty by age or misfortune-- so much so that Europeans were horrified to discover that the ill and infirm were not dependent on their children and other kin; this was held ruinous to the Christian notions of charity and filial affection. (Prescott 1847 : I 65)
How was this all paid for? Our books are wont to refer to a rather bloodless entity known as "the tributary mode of production", a certain form of state finance rather like taxation, which nominally left the payers independent. Let us restore the abstraction to life with other names: Danegeld, Ransom, Extortion.
Of our early civilizations, only the earliest Sumerians did not exact tribute from an empire. This was merely because they had failed to think of the idea. They had of course looted and demanded reparations from each other as city-states warring for supremacy, but for some reason victors drew back from the notion of installing their own rulers in defeated cities. This changed with Sargon of Akkad, who put his own family members into governorships and chief priest positions in conquered lands about 2400 BC; afterward the Mesopotamians built conventional empires as avidly as anyone else.
The Egyptians collected tribute from time to time, but Pharaohs liked to have things in their own hands. Tribute requires an entity capable of paying. This lets out mobile barbarians, as a rule and requires at least sedentary peoples. Surrounded by less-civilized peoples, it was more convenient for the Egyptians to simply seize what they wanted. The policy provoked some twelve centuries of conflict with their Nubian and Ethiopian neighbors. The Chinese seem to have adopted similar practices under the Hsia, Shang and Chou dynasties.
The most "innovative" tribute system was that of the Incas, who copied it from elsewhere in South America: whole villages were built near the imperial capitals to house artisans carried off from the provinces to work full time to create luxury goods for their rulers. Young girls were taken into "convents" to weave tapestries and make other goods for the mausoleum temples of deceased Inca rulers; many became short term "wives" of the Inca or his officials, returning to their communities upon retirement, where they were supported in luxury. Each peasant family was expected to labor one day in three for their rulers and one day in three for the benefit of the temples; they were to provide additional labor or military service each year, and to make garments for the army.
The Incas attempted autarky. To the extent practical, communities were self-sufficient or reliant on supplies from imperial stocks. Luxury goods flowed upward from producers to the rulers of the state who distributed them to lesser nobility and foreign leaders. Markets were unknown, and trade across state boundaries limited. Effectively, tribute was the whole of the economy. (Earle and D'Altroy 1982)
The harshest tribute system was probably that of the Romans in the late Republican period. Since the state workforce was no larger than that needed for a single city until Imperial times, the tax system was "Thatcher-ized". The Romans called for bids each year, and farmed out the provinces beyond Italy to groups of equestrians who promised to return the most to the treasury. How these "businessmen" obtained the money was seldom examined.
On top of this extortion, the provinces had to bear the cost of their administration. Every Roman sent to govern a province, Cicero quipped, had to earn three fortunes: the first to reward the senators who had elected him to the post, the second to bribe jurors at his inevitable trial for malfeasance, and the third for himself. On paper, Rome did not resort to war except at the decision of the Senate, but the assorted governors, proconsuls, procurators, and their underlings scattered across the Empire did not hesitate to "rectify" boundaries at the expense of weaker neighbors, nor to fight and enslave tribes across the borders-- invariably described as "bandits" and "trouble makers"-- who chose inexplicably to dwell where silver mines and lush vineyards which ought to belong to Romans had been established. Julius Caesar's cold-blooded seizure of independent Gaul was a deliberate and long continued violation of Roman law, but except in scale, it was not unprecedented.
The ancient world was perilously short of capital in any modern sense. It had cheap unskilled laborers and expensive food, precious little material to work with, inadequate credit systems, and virtually no machinery.
People did not have a host of innovative ideas to put into practice, or even the idea that one might develop innovative ideas. (It's worth remembering that the wheel wasn't invented until about 4500 BC.) They did not have great quantities of metal until 3000 BC or so (and virtually no iron for 15 centuries after that).
They did not have high-yielding agricultural crops, nor lambs giving birth to twins on an annual basis. Until medieval times their fields lay fallow one year in two. Before maybe 2000 BC, they probably did not get milk from their cattle or make cheese. Any settled people had storage facilities but throughout this period rust and mold and rats and insects regularly disposed of a third of the stored grain. About one year in five, rains were inadequate and people starved. About one year in five, rains were disastrous and caused floods-- and people starved.
There was no currency until about 600 BC. People bartered, or weighed pieces of precious metal. They paid "taxes" in kind, with food or labor or cloth or precious goods for temples; only the last could be stored indefinitely.
There was little infrastructure in our terms. Canal building seems to have been an ad hoc thing more often than not, a matter for families or villages, with minimal state involvement and no apparent planning. The "public" buildings were residences for gods, not offices for state bureaucrats.
Let us consider the difficulties of transport. There were no paved roads for distributing goods before Romans got the idea; as late as 2000 BC, the Sumerians used sledges as often as wagons for transporting anything, and the harnesses of antiquity were better suited to strangling oxen than for efficient hauling. Neither the horse nor the ass nor the camel was domesticated until barbarians showed the way at maybe 1800 BC, so goods moved by water or on men's backs-- and as late as Roman times, no back pack existed. "Caravans" of asses probably moved no more than a few tons of goods.
True sailing ships were on the Nile by 4000 BC; several were buried by the pyramids of Old Empire pharaohs. Yet as late as Herodotus, Mesopotamians brought cargoes down the river in a coracles or rafts; they walked back upstream. Bear in mind, this was some 500 centuries after sea farers colonized Australia. For sea going the earliest, Mesopotamians tied bundles of reeds together to make leaky boats, a practice duplicated by Ecuadorian merchants and by California Indians up to the arrival of the Spanish (and one still used in Bolivia). Admittedly, they found boat building material scarce.Of
Almost to the time of Columbus, ships stayed within eyeshot of the land and anchored by the shore each night; few were as large as a modern yacht. Most relied on their oars for the art of sailing against the wind was unknown before the Arabs invented the Lateen sail around the time of Christ; it took seven centuries for this to become well known in Europe.
In construction, we find an emphasis on the simplest techniques. Earthen mounds, stone walls, megaliths, walls of pounded earth, sun-dried brick in Mesopotamia and "conical adobes" in South America. Greek architecture for all its splendor never got the post and lintel stage. Modern building techniques are essentially invisible before the Romans, who invented concrete. In general, stuff is simply heaped up. The outstanding characteristic of primitive monuments is not their architectural complexity, but the hours of labor that must have gone into creating them-- most of it simple mindless drudgery.
Mounds come first, even before civilization. Temples are second. They start small, and become dilapidated as the adobe crumbles. As population increases, the mounds are built wider and higher and larger temples erected; often the old temple is simply covered up. We see the process among the Maya, Aztecs, and Mesopotamians. Even the pyramids started off by placing buildings on top of one another.
Wood is building material, but good lumber was not available in Mesopotamia and had to be imported. In fact, only Egyptians, Greeks, and Etruscans seem to have built much with wood. Termites love it. Rain and snow destroy it if not tended carefully. It's strong enough for houses, but not enough for public buildings and tenements. The insurmountable obstacle to wood's use in construction, however, was its use as firewood. Most ancient communities wiped out the forests about them without a second thought, then imported word or learned to let coppices grow. Planting forests is a 20th century concept.
Tools were rudimentary. Stone was the primary substance used for shaping material probably even in Roman times. A "Copper Age" begins about 3000 BC; the metal was used from about 6500 BC, but as ornament rather than tool, and hammered into form rather than cast. Copper is too soft for good tools in its native form, but by chance or experiment the secret of alloying it with tin or arsenic to make bronze was found about 2500 BC. Methods of working iron emerged at 1400-1200 BC; it's a more plentiful element than copper, which explains its present dominance, but bronze has stayed in use down to the present.
Pottery is the first "man-made" material, appearing as clay statues in central Europe perhaps 28,000 years ago. The first pottery containers were made by the Jomon people of Japan, some time between 10 and 15,000 years ago. Pottery is heavy and easily broken, but is superior to basketry for storage. All our early civilizations had pottery, and many cultures who never reached civilization. A potter's wheel was not so widespread; it was limited to the Old World and appeared at perhaps 4500 BC.
The first ovens date to about 8000 BC. Users built a fire in the chamber, then cleaned out the ashes and used the heat retained in the walls for baking or drying grain. Ovens fueled from beneath come later, maybe around 6000 BC; until then pottery was baked in open fires. About 3500 BC, potters were mass producing pint sized "beveled rim bowls" by slopping clay into simple forms and baking them; we think they were used for dispensing rations to work crews. A slightly better grade of ration bowl was made on the wheel about 3000 BC.
Kilns can be made hot enough to melt copper, but we don't know when the idea appeared. We may have an outdoor foundry in Uruk at say 3000 BC-- a stone floor with depressions which the excavator explains as basins for smelting ore and channels for removing the meltoff. Early bronze castings are one-piece objects; techniques for welding bronze to bronze were devised by the Chinese about 1500 BC but did not reach the West for many centuries.
Neither the Chinese nor westerners wasted bronze on workman's tools or farm implements. It was used for swords, cups, incense burners, mirrors, and the like-- conspicuous consumption by the elite classes rather than ordinary mortals-- and it was comparatively scant until their civilizations were already hundreds of years old.
This is not a history of material culture. The point is the obverse to the often made one that technology has developed with blinding speed in recent history: at the dawn of history, innovation was painfully slow. Inventions were rarely made. New ideas were not sought. Notions of "increasing productivity" and "efficiency" were not unknown, but improvements seem to have been attempted on an ad hoc basis rather than systematically.
Accumulation-- economic development-- was immensely difficult.
By fair means or foul, each of these civilizations built hierarchical social systems reflecting both wealth and power. Generalization is unwise, but in each some degree of social mobility was possible for some portion of the population. If nothing else, one could hope to rise by ability within the army or temple ranks-- though the amount of rise might be limited by other class distinctions.
As today, occupations had different statuses. In Mesopotamia this was essentially formalized; a standard list of occupations arranged by status was used in training scribes for over a thousand years. Scribes, interestingly, did not rate very high in Mesopotamia. In China and Egypt, literate men might become state officials with the highest rank.7
Where clans were important, as in China, Mesopotamia, Mexico, and Peru, one might also hope to climb to leadership of one's lineage group. Some clans were of higher status than others, which was another source of distinction. Elsewhere, where kinship mattered less, status depended on wealth and state-maintained distinctions.
Greek city-states had social orders too varied to recount. In general, all drew distinctions between citizens and resident non-citizens (metics) who were stuck with higher taxes and fewer civil rights. Formal classes based on income also existed, with different political privileges. Many cities had "aristocrats," who claimed descent from the nobility in some previous age of royalty. As classical Greece emerges after 800 BC, we find democratic, aristocratic (even oligarchic), and tyrannical factions vying for power in most cities, a frequently bloody situation which continued until the Romans took full control in 149 BC.
Rome had its plebes and patricians; it also had its senatorial and equestrian orders as another form of prestige. While Rome claimed to be a republic after 509 BC, Senators were limited to the patrician class for some time; Senators were also expected to meet a property (actually income) requirement amounting to maybe 100,000 dollars a year in current terms. Membership in the equestrian ("knightly") order had a lower income requirement, but equestrians unlike senators were allowed to be in trade; though excluded from political power, many equestrians became immensely wealthy.
The Romans retained what the ancients described as a "mixed" constitution, which is to say the electoral system was rigged. Voting in elections was by "tribes" rather than by individuals; the urban tribes which included the poor were many times larger than those of the equestrian and senatorial orders, so the votes of the latter were worth considerably more. During the half millennium of the Republic struggles for power and representation by plebes against patricians, knights against senators, poor against wealthy, Latins against Romans and Italians against Latins was incessant. Once the wealth of the empire began to flow into the city-- an amazingly sudden business-- the upper class families competed among themselves for gain as well; this culminated in a bloody century of civil war, repression, and assassination ending in exhaustion with Augustus's establishment of the principiate.
This presents a less than complete picture, however. Archaic states could put heavy burdens on their elites. Roman and Greek landowners were expected to be soldiers when necessary, and to provide their own armor-- this at a time when metal was still very expensive. Landless Romans were excluded from military service until desperation made reforms necessary. Landless Athenians were hired as sailors during wartime; wealthier Athenians were ordered to pay the cost of constructing naval vessels.
In general, the rich were expected to be generous to their fellow citizens. Of their own will, affluent Romans gave roads, aqueducts, large statues and imposing public buildings to their cities; they paid for gladiatorial contests and races to amuse the public and footed the bills for feasts. Politically prominent individuals were expected to be especially profligate; many bankrupted themselves (but made it back through selling their vote and other corrupt acts). On occasion, when individuals appeared reluctant to perform their unwritten duty, the Senate might order them to donate some particular item. The practice was standard across the Empire.
Routinely, tribute was imposed on the upper classes of a city, either directly or indirectly by assigning them the task of obtaining the tribute monies. This worked for a long while, but began to breakdown in the strife-torn 3rd century AD when many noble families were impoverished. They retained their high rank but could not pay ever-increasing imperial taxes and took to extorting the money from lower status citizens. This generated resentment at all levels, and partially explains the reluctance of ordinary Romans to defend their cities. Being ruled by barbarians began to look desirable.
Concepts of private property seem to have developed slowly in Mesopotamia. Much land was owned by the state or by communities. Land might be allocated to individual clans or families on a year by year basis or reallocated after a death. Sometimes all land was officially the property of the state and could be reassigned at the whim of a king. Effectively, individuals could use land, but had no rights to sell it or change its function.
Over time, individuals or families obtained such rights. Land tenure might be secured by established residence, military service, or royal gift. Use of state land (personally or by sharecropper) without right of ownership had long been a form of compensation for palace officials. Sargon of Akkad had handed over land to his kin, and the habit of commingling personal and temple finances established; this continued after the fall of his empire. It was a short jump to giving land to clan heads or other leaders whose support might buttress the state, and by the time of Hammurapi (about 1700 BC) something rather like medieval feudalism was in place.
This is necessary vague; the first documentary evidence of land sales are stela set up about 2200 BC, and describe purchases by Akkadian kings from corporate groups which are thought to be clans. (The sellers are described as "owners of the field," "sons of the field", "brothers of the owners of the field," etc. They number as high as 600, and receive different amounts of the proceeds.) It is not clear whether these transfers are equitable and mutually agreed to, or whether the monarch is putting a veneer of legality over highly inequitable coerced sales. It is not clear whether land can be sold to anyone but a king. (Adams 1966: 84-85, Hudson nd)
Be that as it may, by Old Babylonian times (about 1700 BC), land owners in Mesopotamia had some ability to sell or sublet land. Where private property is allowed, the wealth of some will grow and that of others fall. Debtors soon appeared, creditors and landlords. Interest rates for loans were very high, on the order of 30 to 40 % (fields sold for 2 to 3 times the typical yield). People who could not pay off their loans had to forfeit their land or a portion of their crop. They might recoup by selling a family member into temporary or permanent slavery, or be reduced to sharecroppers. Ultimately, the numbers of impoverished families became noticeable.
The problem was heightened in Sumeria by a diversion of temple revenues from relief measures to private gain. The practice of selling temple prebends -- a right to revenues-- evidently began during the Ur III period (circa 2200 BC), and exploded during the lawless period that followed the downfall of that state. Prebends were perpetual. Unlike other property, they could be freely sold and subdivided. Hudson (nd) suggests many of these were not sold but given to barbarian leaders as bribes. In any event, by the first millennium BC, temples had virtually ceased to have a charitable role; they were "joint stock companies" paying dividends to various notables who had purchased or inherited their shares. Mesopotamian states thus staved off the risk of invasion, but at the cost of losing landowners who might otherwise have been on military rolls.
The consequence was that from the time of Hammurapi (and perhaps earlier) kings brought out debt forgiveness edicts: landlords were forced to disgorge the property they had seized, and slaves were returned to their families. Ultimately these "clean slate decrees" were issued routinely at the start of a new regime, or on significant anniversaries. Needless to say, they infuriated the debt holders, who eventually found end runs around the laws. One method was to be adopted by a debtor, receiving the property on his death; individuals are known who thus claimed to have over 40 "fathers." Another was royal assent to the notion that basic land allotments were restored by debt forgiveness but not other private property, such as houses and land within cities. Debtors also frequently tried to insert statements in contracts to the effect that debts would be honored despite future forgiveness edicts; their success varied from regime to regime.
Egyptian Pharaohs also are known to have forgiven debts, and the practice was enshrined in the Biblical book of Leviticus, which required debts to be annulled every seven years in ancient Israel (an echo survives in the form of sabbaticals for college professors).
In Peru and Aztec Mexico, ordinary land ownership rested in clans-- ayllu in Peru, calpulli in Mexico-- rather than individuals, and the issue of land loss could not arise (we are admittedly vague on tenure arrangements among the subject peoples of the Aztecs).
Land in pre-classical Greece may have been allotted by the community in similar fashion (Bury 1913, who may have been a little too swayed by Thrilling Tales of Early Indo-Europeans). By the 6th century BC, its ownership in Athens has come to the Babylonian form; among the reforms enacted by Solon was a "clean slate" law which restored debt slaves to their families (and forbade the practice in the future), and returned property to debtors.
In a sense, Athenians learned their lesson. In the 4th century BC, debts secured by land continued to be made but only to larger landowners, typically with 50 acres or more. The loans we know of seem to have been for endowering daughters, ransoming captives, or for purchase of expensive luxury items. Essentially they financed upper class consumption and no more. Small holders do not seem to have decreased in significant numbers and there appeared little subsequent need for debt relief measures.
The negative side of this is that loans were not available for purchasing property-- Greeks sold land only for cash, and even then rarely-- or for making improvements. There were no banks other than temple treasuries and virtually no "bankers." Most loans were made by individuals to other individuals in the presence of witnesses. Interest was on the order of 10 to 18 percent, with payment due in a year. The sums involved were at most 10,000 drachmas, or perhaps $40,000. Small loans at no interest were available to members of cult associations, but the cults did not use their funds to buy land themselves. Greeks did not speculate in land, they did not invest in it; they simply happened to own it. (Finley 1983: 62-76)
In Italy, the opposite situation occurred. Land was a socially approved investment-- one of the few open to the senatorial class, which was supposed to be wealthy, and Romans like Victorian Englishmen and Thomas Jefferson had sentimental feelings for yeoman farmers. There was a land rush when immense sections of Sicily became available for exploitation when that island was taken from the Carthegenians in 241 BC, and some individuals made immense profits. On a smaller scale this happened with other conquests, each of which increased the "public lands" that were rented out. There being no limit, much of this was rented the upper classes who could best afford it.
With perhaps the best of intentions, the Romans took to providing cheap grain imported from plantations on Sicily to their urban poor. Italian small holders lost their markets. Adding to their misery, property owners were expected to serve in the army, and Rome had embarked on a struggle which would make her master of the entire Mediterranean within two centuries; small farmers could not serve as soldiers and simultaneously tend their farms. Hundreds of thousands were wiped out and were forced to take refuge with their families in the cities where they joined the masses of urban poor; equestrians and senators bought their land at bargain prices. The situation did not begin to be redressed until the consul Gaius Marius created an army in 107 BC from landless men who were to be paid with land grants; the Senate resisted making the grants until 100 BC.
If possible, the situation only worsened for most of the next several centuries. The Roman army could not do its job without professional soldiers. They expected to be paid with land, and the Roman upper classes wanted land themselves and resisted giving it up. The upshot was that ex-soldiers were settled in the newly conquered provinces. Italy became depopulated; its cities were the homes of the well to do and hordes of unachieving poor "citizens"; the countryside was taken over by immense slave-run farms, prototypes of the manors of Medieval Europe.
Trade originates in the insecurities of primitive existence. Hunters and gatherers share, ethnographers report. Game is not a dependable resource, the bounty of the natural environment is limited, and all foragers are not equally skilled or equally lucky. Over time, most foragers will have good days and bad days; the path to survival is to average them out, by dealing with other foragers. Today the tribe eats my antelope; tomorrow I will have part of Wikwik's giraffe, or pull my belt tight and eat bark, along with everyone else. This is simple reciprocity.
It works, in ordinary circumstances. We had no better scheme to obtain our sustenance for four million years of hominid existence. It does not preserve us from periods of drought, however, or hundred year storms, or diseases that kill the game in range of our community. When neither I nor Wikwik can hope to hunt with success, we must fall back on more farflung connections. Among the !Kung, as Cashden discussed (1989:39), there is a tradition of hxaro, reciprocal trade with people of other communities. Hxaro partners are carefully chosen; they are often kin or come to be treated as such. The exchange is not a one time affair but a continuing one, and people may be in several such relationships. The goods exchanged are blankets and clothes and decorations: material objects which stay in existence and remind of the obligation to repay-- luxuries. Hxaro is not a purely economic transaction aimed at consumption, in other words. It creates social bonds, and makes allies who will offer refuge to each other in dire need. It's insurance.
Thus Botswana, and the heathen. Christians exchange Christmas gifts and reward birthdays and anniversaries. In Melanesia, the Trobriand Islanders under the eyes of Malinowski exchanged kula objects alongside their ordinary trading ventures. In Washington state, Franz Boas penetrated the Kwakiutl and misunderstood the potlatch. In Australia, like visiting Henny Youngmans, aborigine travelers exchange dances and entertaining skits-- one of which, anthropologists report, parodies anthropologists interviewing aborigines.
Moving into the past, Kent Flannery found obsidian in the remains of 4000 year old Oaxacan villages-- not in every house and not in equal quantity. Obsidian is utilitarian and decorative, but not an essential of life. Nor is it native to Oaxaca, so we can be sure it was brought in from outside-- traded. In the Middle East, lumps of copper and lapis luzuli show trade paths running from Anatolia to Afghanistan at 6000 AD.
30,000 years ago, French Aurignacians living beside the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts wore sea shells from each other's regions, which they presumably received through trade; Upper Paleolithic cultures in Russia obtained shells 500 miles away from the Black Sea.
That this was ritual and not commerce can be shown by another example: about 20,000 BC, in some late-period Aurignacian communities it became customary to make stone tools characteristic of other cultures. The typical example is a leaf-point blade, which occur in substantial numbers in the deposits-- this despite the fact that the culture in which the blade originated-- the Szeletian, of central Moravia-- had then been extinct for more than ten thousand years. (Soon after, of course, the Aurignacians were themselves extinct.)
We should not be surprised then that when the light of literacy was turned on some 5000 years ago that the functions of trade were as much political as commercial. Monarchs bragged of the resources they had brought into their kingdoms by conquest or trade. They sent gifts back and forth, addressing each other as kin. Trade agreements were akin to peace treaties, and merchants could be allowed or prohibited from trading as a display of royal sentiment.8
The role and freedom of early traders has been much disputed. The late Karl Polanyi was convinced that they were not "profit seekers" in a modern sense, and he convinced many sociologists and anthropologists of the same thing. Polanyi and his associates put forward this thesis in a remarkably influential book, Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, in 1957. According to these "substantavists," trade had existed in early antiquity but a true market-economy was a much later development. Instead of an institution transmitted from Mesopotamians to Ionian Greeks and thence to the rest of the Mediterranean world as classical civilization took form, the market was a Greek invention whose characteristics were still emerging at the time of Aristotle and which apparently began as simple food vending in the Athenian agora. (Polanyi 1957a)
What came before this were personal or tribal relationships involving reciprocity and redistribution, and then, as cities appeared, a species of trade in which accredited merchants transported goods and commodities purchased at set prices in one community to prearranged buyers in other communities, generally at legally prescribed "ports of trade," and again for predetermined prices. There was no unseemly "higgle-haggle" in this early trade, there was no speculation, there was virtually no risk (exempting bandits and natural disaster), and there was no animosity between clever sellers and gullible buyers. There was active government oversight, both to regulate the conduct of traders and to insure them against financial risk; in return, traders split their "profits" with the government and derived high status from their service to the state rather than from amassing personal wealth. The first merchants had been gentlemen in short, fit companions to associate with the highest nobility-- not "hucksters", money-grubbers, salesmen or other scum. (Polanyi 1957b, 1957c, Oppenheim 1957)
In other words, the invention of open market capitalism was not a step forward but regression, begun when well-to-do Greeks shed their honor and dignity for the more obnoxiously self-serving traits of the poor, and Western civilization has been sliding downhill ever since.
Discussion of this thesis would make a long paper longer. Let us settle for observing that the supporting evidence was weak in 1957 and impotent by 1997. (Berdan 1983
Trade either ran at a loss, in which case private individuals abandoned the field, or it made a profit. I have tried to suggest that material conditions imposed great difficulties on traders. Nonetheless, trade continued despite lawless conditions, weak economies, natural obstacles, political turmoil, and inadequate transport.
It follows that trade was profitable, or offered such chance of profit that traders were willing to bear the risk. Much of it was ignoble by our standards and Polanyi's-- slave traders never seem to have gone broke. Much of it was low paying but relatively risk free, involving grain shipments and the like.
A portion of it, at tremendous expense and risk, took men from one side of Eurasia to another. By the first century AD, Pliny the Elder was complaining that the Roman Empire "lost" 100 million sesterces per year in purchases of silk, almost transparent fabric, most of which bedecked urban prostitutes, and spices from the far east. Pliny did not ask nor care whether Romans had anything to gain from associating with the Chinese or knowing of their existence.
It is tempting to believe that in probing the economic basis of early states that we have penetrated to the core-- the essential beliefs and motivating issues of those societies. We should reconsider.
In the empire of the Incas, we are told by Prescott, the sovereign had 750 wives, a seraglio headed by his full sisters. He maintained as well 1500 "Virgins of the Sun" in a "convent" in Cuzco and thousands of others in provincial capitals. In the course of time, the most beautiful of the Virgins were brought to the emperor's bed and subsequently honored as wives; these numbered several thousand. Higher lords of the empire were also allowed to have 750 wives, and so on down in graduated scale to village chiefs with 20 wives and "Captains of 5 men" who were entitled to 3.
Ordinary males were expected to be monogamous, and faithful. The Incas disapproved of envy; adulterers were "thieves" and punished with death. But it is clear from these numbers that the "ordinary" male-- more than fifty percent of the men-- had no wife and could expect none unless he managed through sheer longevity to attain rank within his village or distinguished himself in the army. I doubt it was lack of employment that provided the primary concern for either men or women of the pre-Columbian Andes.
In 1532, the Incan empire was invaded by Francisco Pizarro and 260 Spanish soldiers; they captured and killed the emperor before fighting their first serious battle; the capital fell within months. In the end, very few archaic states were vanquished by overwhelming military force. More often than not, ordinary citizens simply decided they were not worth defending.
1. The difference between conditions now and then is attributable to modern medicine, better nutrition, improved sanitation, and higher standards for securing public health. Most of these are nineteenth and twentieth century innovations, so 18th century data probably gives a broad outline of the situation in earlier times.
2. And probably were. It seems a partial explanation for the Roman population slide in pre-Byzantine times.
3. This sounds bleak, and it was. But between war and disease, both slave and citizen lived in peril. Death was always near and perhaps since what cannot be avoided must be embraced, the ancient world overflowed with gratuitous displays of violence. Pharoahs were depicted swinging maces at the heads of war captives. Assyrian murals showed rows of prisoners having their throats cut. Persian emperors were sculpted in the act of blinding prisoners. Mongols and Aztecs left for display pyramids made from hundreds of thousands of human heads. The Etruscans invented gladitorial contests, and the Romans made them a popular institution throughout the Empire-- along with crucifixion. In the aftermath of Spartacus's revolt, the Roman general Crassus crucified 6000 prisoners along the Appian Way, as a reminder to slaves or casual Roman travelers. By such means ancient peoples were enculturated in death and violence.
Showing the complexity of such adjustments, crucifixion is still the dominant image in the founding legend of one of the world's great religions, and explicitly linked to the mysteries of life and death.
4. A few decades ago, two American historians, Fogel and Engleman, produced statistics to argue that pre-Civil War slavery had been profitable; it provoked controversy.
5. So go the stories compiled after the conquest by the descendents of the Incas. Only the most hardened cynic would suggest the storehouses might also have functioned to feed troops on the move.
6. This has been used as a key for translating variant forms of written Sumerian and Akkadian.
7. A rival career path in the Chinese bureaucracy was open to eunuchs.
8. None of this is unknown in our age; a few decades ago, when then President Richard Nixon made a summit visit to Moscow, a new fully equipped Cadillac was flown in as a gift from American taxpayers to Leonid Breshnev, a noted car collector.
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