Palace Economy - Origin of The Term

Origin of The Term

Most students of ancient economics have had something to say about redistribution economies of one sort or another. The thread leading to the current use of the terms came from the study of the palaces of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, which flourished in the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean region. The term palace economy began as a label for the economic activities of individual palaces. For example, Sir Arthur Evans would refer to the palace economy, meaning the economy of the palace of Knossos. Others followed suit, not yet grasping the abstract notion of what sort of economy that was.

In 1956 Ventris and Chadwick committed to publication an idea that they had been considering previously:

"Nor is there any evidence in the tablets of anything approaching currency. Every commodity is listed separately, and there is never any sign of equivalence between one unit and another."

Contemporaneously M. Finley had noticed the evidence of redistribution in the tablets and was struggling to understand how that could occur in those pre-currency times. In The World of Odysseus he noted that most distribution was internal:

"All the production work, the seeding and harvesting and milling and weaving, even the hunting and raiding, though carried on by individuals, was performed on behalf of the household as a whole ... and from the centre they were redistributed ...."

Finley further hypothesized that gift-giving, "the basic organizing mechanism among many primitive peoples," had been developed into a system of exchange, without prices, and dependent on the ad hoc valuation of the exchangers:

"The act of giving was ... always the first half af a reciprocal action, the other half of which was a counter-gift."

Finley's observations were immediately and almost universally accepted; however, some reservations developed over the decades since then. Mycenaean ships were sent out from the palace complexes laden with ceramics, oils, perfumes and other goods precisely as though they were exports for sale. Their disposition required a market, and markets imply money. Still, money is a dateable invention, and markets are more ancient than money. The goods were for sale, not for gift-giving, if sale is redefined to mean any agreed-upon exchange.

Ventris died in 1956. Like the other archaeologists of the time, he never envisioned the palace economy as anything more than the day-to-day economics of the palace, although Ventris and Chadwick did remark on the "similarities in the size and organization of the royal palaces" of Nuzi, Alalakh and Ugarit. Similarly, Finley in the late 1950s did not refer to his system as a palace economy. The status of the word had changed by 1960, when historical theorists had put the two together.

Exactly who was the first is unclear, but the best candidate is Karl Polanyi, the economic typologist, then toward the end of his life and at the peak of his career. He endorsed Finley's work and went further. In the 1960 compendium, City Invincible, written before 1958, he recalled Ventris stating that currency was absent from the tablets, but he phrased it in a different way: "Michael Ventris ... has asserted the absence of money in the palace economy of Mycenaean Greece." Ventris had done no such thing. He never stated that Mycenaean Greece had a palace economy; between 1956 and 1958 a new system had been defined and was being called a palace economy. Most of the theorists followed suit. Grahame Clark (1961) wrote of a "palace economy introduced from Crete ...." Chester Starr (1961) said "Artisans and peasants were largeley embraced in a palace economy under royal control, ...." Leonard Palmer (1963) referred to the "highly centralized 'palace economy'" of Knossos and Pylos. The word was never just the economic activities at a single site again.

By the time 1965 had arrived, the palace economy was being applied widely over all the Aegean and Near and Middle Eastern civilizations of the Late Bronze Age. It became such a fixture that subsequently it was applied to modern economic system types. There was, however, a notable abstention. Chadwick, who inherited the work and tradition of Ventris, in The Mycenaean World (1976), notably does not refer to a palace economy. Instead he implies questions, such as

"... it is not so clear how small a palace can be ... What we can infer from the palace buildings is that there are administrative centres ... each centre of administration implies an administrator, whether he be an independent monarch, a semi-autonomous prince, or a local baron ...."

This implying that the palace economy model might be simplistic foreshadowed the current trend. Halstead summarizes a forum begun by Nakassis and others as

"The term 'redistribution' has been used with a range of meanings in the context of the Aegean Bronze Age and so obscures rather than illuminates the emergence and functioning of political economies.