It seems pretty clear how something like this comes about.
Merchants dealing in precious goods would travel with their own set of weights. Either party to a transaction would use their own weights, if the eyeball test suggested the other party was low or high balling the weight.
End result is that everyone in trading radius has standardized on the same size, within the precision of visual inspection and the beam balances in use at the time. Chunks of bronze and silver in that standard weight co-evolved to also be the medium of exchange.
So if someone wanted to buy 10 shekels of peppercorn, or was receiving 10 shekels of silver for a lamb, it's the same thing: if the weights/money look light you can check them against your reference set. Pressing them into disks with writing and a face came later.
The human drive toward standardized goods for exchange is truly ancient. Rare shells of a consistent size, with a hole for threading, have been used as money by many peoples well into historical times, and have been found as grave goods as much as 80,000 years ago.
The standardisation of medium of exchange is not only ancient, it's also universal. Shell currencies are found in isolated North American tribes and standardised silver ingots have been found in ancient Chinese digs. Fungible currency seems to be an absolute fundamental in any human economy.
Note the +/-5% variation spans 2,000 years of Bronze Age history, so explanation doesn't need an explicit mechanism for "let's change the weights". (Although debasement was also a thing -- at least it was in the Roman Empire, and presumably people thought of it long before that).
I'd speculate there was no tendency for foreign trading partners to reconcile unequal measure systems, since neither party had the flexibility to change the weights used in their local markets. Or the markets of different foreign counterparties they also trade with. So regional differences could persist permanently, and would be recognized as such.
On the other hand, if merchants went out of their way to harmonize their standards (i.e. "let's take the arithmetic mean of our two weights and use that"), something like a network consensus could emerge. Non-systemic drift would scale down as 1/sqrt{ size of trade network }. (I wonder if Bronze Age traders ever tried analysis of algorithms? They probably lots of time of to think about things, on their endless trade roads).
Couldn't it also be that a king intentionally sent unequal weights to different parts of their domain? It allows unequal taxing without an obvious bias, and exchanging between kingdoms could have been a part of diplomacy.
The weights only have an error of 5%, which is a standard deviation of about a gram at any particular point in time. Manufacturing error is a far more parsimonious explanation.
The article's argument is that a state run distribution would have eliminated those manufacturing errors, but they could have just used them to their advantage.
The principle of parsimony applies here. Explanations that don't require centralized bronze age kingdoms everywhere, formal standardization of weights, and thousands of years of no one conducting long distance trade are more parsimonious than those that do.
One of the issues with archaeology is that it's easy to come up with thousands of plausible explanations for any particular set of data. Parsimony and other tools are essential to winnowing things down a bit.
>Explanations that don't require centralized bronze age kingdoms everywhere, formal standardization of weights, and thousands of years of no one conducting long distance trade are more parsimonious than those that do.
We have ample evidence of all three of those existed to some degree, and that's why the idea that the measurements were decreed has been the predominant explanation for a while now. I think this one piece of evidence could be explained within the current hypothesis.
Sure, but as far as we know, there wasn't a king or emperor that ruled from Anatolia to Great Britain at the time but they have these weight samples from all over this area from c. 1000BC.
> But adoption of the metric system has stalled so clearly in the short term there are various competing forces
Presumably this is from an American perspective? Even here in Ye Olde Englande we mostly defer to metric, even if there are some deeply embedded imperial measures, such pints of ale and milk or miles on pathways... .
I believe the Egyptians also got the 12 sunlight periods and 12 dark periods from the Babylonians.
While sunrise-to-sunset (and its converse) were divided into equal twelfths each day the duration of those divisions varied each day as the amount of sunlight varies each day.
And the 60 minute hour did not originate with the Babylonians (though they used a sexagesimal counting system and inspired others) but be came de facto, with the invention of the mechanical clock (there was little need for such resolution before that point). The wikipedia does discuss some academic usage of that fraction, but its influence was presumably only conventional in regards to clockmaking. The more common divisions, which we still commonly use today, were "quarter past" or "half" which are of a viable resolution for a sundial.
There has, if you aren't in the US, Liberia, and Myanmar. Sure, you get a few small outliers (Canada and probably Great Britain still have a mix of measurements)... but mostly, the world uses Metric.
This winds up being in the background in the US. Medicine uses a lot of metric. Sciences generally use it to be standardized. Soda is sold in liter bottles.
But there hasn't ever really been a push to actually adopt metric, which basically needs to start from the government. Road signs do not list metric and standard distances or speeds: Food is still sold in pounds and gallons as no labeling law has been made. Weather reports don't mention celcius. Without a push from the government itself, I can't say there was ever really and adoption at all.
I’d switch to metric tomorrow but I’d still want mph and for a person’s weight pounds. The UK seems to be fine with 2 sets of measurements for certain things.
Interesting how closely this tracks the geographic dispersion of haplogroup R1b. It’s practically certain this innovation spread by migration and conquest, which implies a certain level of central authority.
Is it? R1b is also in Central Africa and Central Asia, while at the same time the weights were coming originally from Mesopotamia/Anatolia where haplogroups J and E are more common.
Also, Kings don't always bring their haplogroups, I come from a place where haplogroup E is crushingly dominant yet we were ruled by kings with groups J and R for over a millennia.
Why do you think that conclusion is 'practically certain'? R1b diffusion in most of continental Europe predates these dates by thousands of years and as the paper notes, there's no evidence of conquest or unified governance across this region in this time period.
How is the extirpation of the indigenous Y haplogroup by immigrant R1b people not evidence of conquest? We’re talking several millenia BP it’s not as though we’re going to find formal declarations of war.
As for the timing, it lines up just fine under the hypotheses based on Reich’s genetic data instead of inaccurate proxies like potsherds.
Are you perhaps mixing up events? "Extirpation of indigenous european haplogroups" is a phrase I'd associate with the WHG/EEF boundary. Clearly we're not talking about that. I don't think I need to point out that extirpation of EEF-associated populations didn't occur either and isn't particularly relevant since one of the main areas these weights were found was Sardinia.
The paper is also talking about a period that begins in the eastern Mediterranean around 3k BCE, moves through southern Europe, and eventually ends up in Northern Europe and Britain around ~1k BCE. It's clearly not associated with WSHs.
: The idea of the market standardizing itself “fits a little too well into our modern neoliberal discourse,” he says. “Should we really be using these terms to talk about societies which are so foreign to us?”
It's an example of an apparently self-organizing market, but we can't call it a self-organizing market because that might accidentally help someone they don't like politically?
Historians are completely right questioning using modern ideas on historical things. For a long time historians used the idea of nations to explain history even though that idea just originated in the 19th century. You can see this especially in how the views on the migration period are slowly changing.
Saying ancient people trading was free market capitalism is on the same level as saying ancient people living together without money was communism.
On the other hand, it makes no sense to pretend that ancient commerce was something totally different from modern commerce. People who were just like us took part in that, they had to fight the same problems of greed, fraud, uncertainty, force de majeure, safety of roads... the very word "market" is pretty old, probably one of the oldest in organized civilization. Markets were the killer feature of all ancient cities, at least from the citizen's point of view.
Communists actually do say that. Marx called it "primitive communism".
The trend in economic history has been the opposite of what you say. In the 70s it was fashionable to emphasize how different ancient economies were from modern. See for example Moses Finley's Ancient Economy. The trend of recent scholarship has been to show that things in the old days are more like today than we thought. It's made the Industrial Revolution harder to explain, because all of the institutional details that seemed like they were important get pushed further and further back in time.
Anyway, I thought the quote was odd because it was such a large worry for such a small point. It's interesting that standardized weights and measures didn't require a central government. I have trouble believing that this would radically change anyone's perception of the trade-offs between governments and markets, but the authors are clearly worried that their research is going to give ammunition to someone they don't like.
To me it read more like they were just acknowledging that a result that fit too neatly into their modern view of the world could be shaped by their own unconscious bias.
In general, I think it's safe to assume that social scientists speaking in a scientific context just literally mean "neo-liberal" when they say it, rather than any politically charged meaning.
Very little from the ancient or medieval markets fit into the current free-market discourse.
For example, it's a very common misconception to think that prices would be freely determined by supply and demand before modernity (price determination was very situational). Ancient societies had a very clear idea that inequality of bargaining power could lead to exploitation and destroy societies.
"just price " does not exist in modern economics, but it was essential for ancient societies, even before ancient Greeks mentioned it.
The quality of the product was an important determination for price. The seller could ask more if the product was fresh or well made. If the trader was seen exploiting scarcity to make excess profits was considered unethical and there were laws against it.
Common misconception among who? Certainly not free marketers -- the classical 19th century argument is that if prices don't equalize supply and demand, then you get unmet supply or unmet demand. Or, you get the state using force to compel supply or depress demand. Look at what happened after the Black Death. In Western Europe you get wage increases. In Eastern Europe, where the aristocracy thought this was unfair, you get serfdom. When John Stuart Mill (who first clearly articulated the idea of supply and demand) said that supply and demand should be allowed to determine labor supply in the West Indies, Thomas Carlyle declared that economics was "the dismal science", and called for bringing back slavery.
Look at Diocletian's "Edict on Maximum Prices", which set maximum prices in response to currency debasement. Did it work? The consensus seems to be "no".
The idea of inequality in bargaining power is Econ 101, which introduces a whole plethora of terms for the phenomenon -- monopoly, monopsony, oligopoly, oligopsony, market power, etc.
It's an example of globally optimal and locally optimal behavior being the same. There is no guarantee that this is always the case. It's exactly when the two differ (global vs local optimum) that the free market starts failing.
Merchants dealing in precious goods would travel with their own set of weights. Either party to a transaction would use their own weights, if the eyeball test suggested the other party was low or high balling the weight.
End result is that everyone in trading radius has standardized on the same size, within the precision of visual inspection and the beam balances in use at the time. Chunks of bronze and silver in that standard weight co-evolved to also be the medium of exchange.
So if someone wanted to buy 10 shekels of peppercorn, or was receiving 10 shekels of silver for a lamb, it's the same thing: if the weights/money look light you can check them against your reference set. Pressing them into disks with writing and a face came later.
The human drive toward standardized goods for exchange is truly ancient. Rare shells of a consistent size, with a hole for threading, have been used as money by many peoples well into historical times, and have been found as grave goods as much as 80,000 years ago.