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Money, Warfare and Power in the Ancient World offers twelve papers analysing the processes, consequences and problems involved in the monetization of warfare and its connection to political power in antiquity. The contributions explore not only how powerful men and states used money and coinage to achieve their aims, but how these aims and methods had often already been shaped by the medium of coined money – typically with unintended consequences. These complex relationships between money, warfare and political power – both personal and collective – are explored across different cultures and socio-political systems around the ancient Mediterranean, ranging from Pharaonic Egypt to Late Antique Europe. This volume is also a tribute to the life and impact of Professor Matthew Trundle, an inspiring teacher and scholar, who was devoted to promoting the discipline of Classics in New Zealand and beyond. At the time of his death, he was writing a book on the wider importance of money in the Greek world. A central piece of this research is incorporated into this volume, completed by one of his former students, Christopher De Lisle. Additionally, Trundle had situated himself at the centre of a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of money and power in antiquity. The contributions of scholars of ancient monetization in this volume bring together many of the threads of those conversions, further advancing a field which Matthew Trundle had worked so tirelessly to promote.
Money, Warfare and Power in the Ancient World offers twelve papers analysing the processes, consequences and problems involved in the monetization of warfare and its connection to political power in antiquity. The contributions explore not only how powerful men and states used money and coinage to achieve their aims, but how these aims and methods had often already been shaped by the medium of coined money – typically with unintended consequences. These complex relationships between money, warfare and political power – both personal and collective – are explored across different cultures and socio-political systems around the ancient Mediterranean, ranging from Pharaonic Egypt to Late Antique Europe. This volume is also a tribute to the life and impact of Professor Matthew Trundle, an inspiring teacher and scholar, who was devoted to promoting the discipline of Classics in New Zealand and beyond. At the time of his death, he was writing a book on the wider importance of money in the Greek world. A central piece of this research is incorporated into this volume, completed by one of his former students, Christopher De Lisle. Additionally, Trundle had situated himself at the centre of a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of money and power in antiquity. The contributions of scholars of ancient monetization in this volume bring together many of the threads of those conversions, further advancing a field which Matthew Trundle had worked so tirelessly to promote.
Like other volumes in this series, Ancient History from Coins demystifies a specialism, introducing students (from first year upwards) to the techniques, methods, problems and advantages of using coins to do ancient history. Coins are a fertile source of information for the ancient historian; yet too often historians are uneasy about using them as evidence because of the special problems attaching to their interpretation. The world of numismatics is not always easy for the non-specialist to penetrate or understand with confidence. Dr Howgego describes and anlyses the main contributions the study of coins can make to ancient history, showing shows through numerous examples how the character, patterns and behaviour of coinage bear on major historical themes. Topics range from state finance and economic policy to imperial domination and political propaganda through coins types. The period covered by the book is from the invention of coinage (ca 600BC) to AD 400.
A comprehensive analysis of the impact of money on the economy, society and culture of the Greek and Roman worlds.
Most people have some idea what Greeks and Romans coins looked like, but few know how complex Greek and Roman monetary systems eventually became. The contributors to this volume are numismatists, ancient historians, and economists intent on investigating how these systems worked and how they both did and did not resemble a modern monetary system. Why did people first start using coins? How did Greeks and Romans make payments, large or small? What does money mean in Greek tragedy? Was the Roman Empire an integrated economic system? This volume can serve as an introduction to such questions, but it also offers the specialist the results of original research.
The origins of the modern, Western concept of money can be traced back to the earliest electrum coins that were produced in Asia Minor in the seventh century BCE. While other forms of currency (shells, jewelry, silver ingots) were in widespread use long before this, the introduction of coinage aided and accelerated momentous economic, political, and social developments such as long-distance trade, wealth creation (and the social differentiation that followed from that), and the financing of military and political power. Coinage, though adopted inconsistently across different ancient societies, became a significant marker of identity and became embedded in practices of religion and superstition. And this period also witnessed the emergence of the problems of money - inflation, monetary instability, and the breakup of monetary unions - which have surfaced repeatedly in succeeding centuries. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in Antiquity presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
This volume forms the proceedings of the Fifth Annual Symposium of the Assyrian and Babylonian Intellectual Heritage Project held in Innsbruck in 2002. Twenty-nine specialist contributions focus on the economic aspects of the `diffusion and transformation of the cultural heritage of the ancient Near East'. Eight thematic sections discuss: Near Eastern economic theory; Mesopotamia in the third millenium BC; Mesopotamia and the Levant in the first half of the first millennium BC; Levant, Egypt and the Aegean world during the same time span; Greece and Achaemenids, Parthians, Sasanians and Rome; social aspects of this exchange, including its affects on religion, borders, education and cosmology. The scope of the papers is wide, with subjects including Babylonian twin towns and ethnic minorities, archaic Greek aristocrats, the Phoenicians and the birth of a Mediterranean society, slavery, Iron Age Cyprus, Seleucid coins, the `Silk Route', and Greek images of the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms. Sixteen papers in English, the rest in German.
Money, in whatever form you care to imagine it- silver, gold, paper, or Bitcoin-remains as it always has been, the basic underpinning of national power, as well as the crucial determinant of military success. Throughout history, power has not so much flowed out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao famously claimed, as it has derived from a nation's ability to amass sufficient funds to prosecute a conflict. One could be forgiven for not taking note of this fact in most historical narratives. This is a result of historians, despite 3,000 years of experience to draw on, still choosing to ignore the profound affect finance has on warfare. To some degree, this is understandable; after all, barely more than a generation has passed since battle and campaign narratives began taking note of the effects of logistics. If military historians find logistics boring, they find economics and finance positively "coma-inducing." In the ancient world, Greece, under Alexander, destroyed the mighty Persian Empire, partly as a result of Alexander's genius, partly because he commanded a superior military instrument, but mostly because Persia hoarded its silver and gold rather than deploying it for war. In another instance, Sparta beat Athens in the Peloponnesian War, not as a result of Athens' Syracusan disaster, but because it eventually managed to cut off Athens from its silver mines at Laurium. Likewise, Hannibal and Carthage did not lose the Second Punic War in Italy, or at Zama. Rather, the decision in that great contest was irrevocably made when Rome conquered Spain and took over her silver mines. In a large part, it was these same silver mines that financed Rome's later conquest of the Mediterranean, which drew to an end at the same time the Spanish silver mines were exhausted. The same basic tale holds true throughout the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and into the Pre-modern Era. But there is one vital twist. While having a large economic base is a vital element of national power, it is far from the most crucial. In fact, the size of an economy is not nearly as important as the ability to mobilize an economy in support of national interests. It was this factor that allowed England to punch far above its economic and population weight for centuries. England, though possessing a population and economic base a mere fraction the size of Frances' still, from the end of the Viking scourge through the Victorian era, employed a superior British administrative system to constantly humiliate its potentially far stronger neighbor. England's early advantage grew further with the advent of the Bank of England, which was based on earlier Dutch models of public finance. With the Bank behind it, the British government demonstrated how, for the first time, a state could easily convert shortterm debt into long-term debt, or in Britain's case, perpetual debt. As states now only had to pay the interest on the debt, rather than the entire principle, national debts could be turned into intergenerational affairs. In other words, wars could be fought in the present and paid for by the children and grandchildren of the participants. In fact, in Britain's case, the country was still paying interest on debts incurred to defeat Napoleon into the current decade. Every major state, with varying degrees of success, was soon emulating the British model. As such, huge amounts of capital were now available to fund huge increases in national armies, as well as bear the costs of arming their armies with the massive volumes of war materiel spewing forth from the factories of the Industrial Revolution. By the middle of the 20th century, the revolution in finance had progressed to the point where the United States was capable of financing not only its own global war effort, but also had sufficient financial resource left over to bear the brunt of the cost for its allies.
A History of Money looks at how money as we know it developed through time. Starting with the barter system, the basic function of exchanging goods evolved into a monetary system based on coins made up of precious metals and, from the 1500s onwards, financial systems were established through which money became intertwined with commerce and trade, to settle by the mid-1800s into a stable system based upon Gold. This book presents its closing argument that, since the collapse of the Gold Standard, the global monetary system has undergone constant crisis and evolution continuing into the present day.
The papers in this volume re-assess the role of coined money in the ancient Greek world. Using new approaches, the book makes the results of numismatic as well as historical research accessible to students and scholars of ancient history. The chapters provide a wide-ranging account of thepolitical, social, and economic contexts within which coined money was used. In Part One the book focuses on the theme of monetization and the politics of coinage, while Part Two provides a series of case studies relating to the production and use of coined money in different areas of theGreek-speaking world, including Asia Minor, Egypt, and Rhodes as well as Greece itself. The individual chapters cover a broad chronological range from Archaic Greece to Roman Egypt. The book as a whole offers fresh insights into an important aspect of the ancient Greek economy.