quote:

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Fish of hemp posted:

I've wondered how it would have felt being a Italian farmer when suddenly some centurio rides in, hands you a club, tells you're an auxiliary now and next thing you know you're fighting an elephant. Biggest thing you have seen is a bull and you know how dangerous that is.

quote:

The complaint tablet to Ea-nasir (UET V 81) is a clay tablet from ancient Babylon written c. 1750 BC. It is a complaint to a merchant named Ea-nasir from a customer named Nanni. Written in Akkadian cuneiform, it is considered to be the oldest known written complaint. It is currently kept in the British Museum.

Ea-nasir travelled to the Persian Gulf to buy copper and returned to sell it in Mesopotamia. On one particular occasion, he had agreed to sell copper ingots to Nanni. Nanni sent his servant with the money to complete the transaction. The copper was sub-standard and not accepted. In response, Nanni created the cuneiform letter for delivery to Ea-nasir. Inscribed on it is a complaint to Ea-nasir about a copper delivery of the incorrect grade, and issues with another delivery; Nanni also complained that his servant (who handled the transaction) had been treated rudely. He stated that, at the time of writing, he had not accepted the copper, but had paid the money for it.

quote:

The tablet was translated by Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim in his out-of-print 1967 book, Letters From Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia, and reads as follows:

“Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:

When you came, you said to me as follows: ‘I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.’ You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: ‘If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!’

What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas.

How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full.

Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.”

twoday posted:

Inspector Hound posted:

Lmao

Real hurthling! posted:

happy to inspire you in the econ thread.

Centrist Committee posted:

lol I hope that memepost ends up in a museum 4000 years from now

twoday posted:

https://www.facebook.com/onaccountofthatonetriflingMinaofsilverthatIoweyou/videos/1743407212340433

masterpiece of a meme from 4 years ago

XMNN posted:

it's apparently 0.57 kg which seems like quite a lot of silver to me?

maybe nanni should have just paid what he owed and shut the gently caress up about it

Ghostlight posted:

There's an important distinction to be made between capital and capitalism - one does not beget the other - and also Marxist capital which is another thing entirely.

Capital has existed since pre-history because it's a basic concept of tool use. You chip some rocks to make a sharp rock for cutting and bang, that sharp rock is now your capital since it improves your productivity and therefore economic performance. That's all it is, a produced good that improves productivity. As economies become more and more complicated the core concept of capital diversifies into things like wells, carts, factories. On that latter example, we see it starting to get into the realm of what Marx calls the means of production - where the productivity of certain goods is no longer being increased but simply enabled; where the good being produced is now so complicated that it cannot be done at all without capital. Because capital is a kind of good itself, it is owned by the wealthy, and money starts to enter the system as a capital good because it can purchase goods for resale in other trading markets for more money.
This leads us into Marxist capital (politely referred to as financial capital just in case people think its communism) which is explicitly money being used to purchase goods for sale at a higher price. It is distinct from general capital because it only produces wealth without performing a function outside of its economic role. Like a capital good it increases economic power but unlike a capital good it does not produce goods.

Because we live in the End of History there is a tendency to mistake everyday items, such as coins, for markers of ideology. Many people look back at the past and see money, and trade, and markets, and wealthy and say "oh that was a kind of capitalism" but none of those things are unique to capitalism and it wasn't. Capitalism was expressly an ideology grown from the reigning idea of mercantilism which began with the age of sail and was the driving force for colonialism. Mercantilism, as a doctrine, stated that there were a certain number of resources in the world and the way a nation became rich was taking them from elsewhere. As natural resources poured in from the colonies they had to processed into goods, and this led to widespread industrialisation for the processing - the nascent capitalists realised that this was another way of generating wealth, by investment of capital into not just the structures of production but the structures of labour and land.

There we come to the key difference between "there has always been money and markets and capital" and "capitalism" - under capitalism it is not simply the use of money and markets and capital but the marriage of both the structures of production and the structures of society for the primary purpose of producing financial capital, and the resulting divorce of workers and capital goods.

Eox posted:

Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any probation from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the probations individually on my own rap sheet, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.

twoday posted:

(USER HAS BEEN SENT BACK EMPTY-HANDED, AND THAT THROUGH ENEMY TERRITORY FOR THIS POST)

frankenfreak posted:

No matter how often I am reminded of the Ea-Nasir story, I always need a second to remember if it's real history or something out of The Silmarillion.

quote:

Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.”

zegermans posted:

how do people argue that capitalism isn't an inherent trait of civilization when the first written thing was literally a complaint over a capitalist transaction

fabergay egg posted:

the central economic sphere of production and distribution in bronze age mesopotamia were the temple complexes. they made things, they employed people, and they sold things, and were the main economic entities that the majority of people would deal with. merchants would trade between cities and thus between temple economies, and the system of interlocking trade and tribute routes stretched across the entire mediterranean basin and at least as far as what is now iran. trade in copper (and tin), as ea-nasir and nanni are involved in, was essential to the whole economic system, which stayed pretty similar all the way up until it violently collapsed around 1200 bce.

these merchants were involved in trade for profit, but they were not capitalists, and the system was not capitalism. there was little or no practice of wage labor, and the means of production of goods were concentrated in the temples and not in the hands of the merchant class who carried out intercity and interstate trade. money in this system was a means of exchange and denomination of debts, the classic commodity-money-commodity cycle that marx described as distinct from the money-commodity-money system of capitalism.

e: michael hudson describes this system here, including how it was the origin of money itself.

Ghostlight posted:

Corvée workers are, by definition, not wage labourers because they do not labour for a wage. Their labour is not bought by an employer for purpose - it is owed by the labourer to the state. The 'payment' is not the purchase of the labour, it is maintenance of the workforce.

babypolis posted:

seems like a pretty irrelevant distinction tbh. the end result was the same, the worked had to labor for someone else to make a living

uber_stoat posted:

guess who's back in business?

https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1369309628119539714?s=20