Sumerian Temple-Based Distributive Accounting

Discussion

Izabella Kaminska on "The Priests, the Temples and the Blockchain Clearing Systems":

"Whilst by no means an entirely undisputed theory, ancient historians generally believe that the emergence of civilised states such as Sumer was closely connected to the centralised role temples played in standardising, clearing and redistributing value in their societies.

Temple authorities, the theory states, kept account of the assets and liabilities of each individual, meaning citizens could only claim as many goods from the temple storage as the records permitted — something based on the amount of provable work they had done. Tangible money was consequently unnecessary. The accounting system was ubiquitous in society and dependable.

As Benjamin Foster, a Yale Assyriologist, has noted before, historians have speculated that the religious complex was essential for spurring the sort of non-rivalrous collaboration that allowed for the cultivation and settlement of land in the first place.

To construct and maintain the necessary irrigation works, labor of the entire population was needed. Land could be exploited efficiently only if it was considered property of the gods, rather than of individuals or families. In the last quarter of the third millennium B.C., secularizing tendencies caused the Sumerian theocratic order to disintegrate.

It’s tempting, as a consequence, to describe the Sumerian system as an industrial-religious accounting complex, kept in check by the all-seeing supervisory system of the Sumerian pantheon of gods (the ultimate financial supervisory panopticon).

The military (protective) layer meanwhile was housed separately in adjacent palace structures and overseen by kings. It was the kings who authorised and oversaw the collection of bala payments (taxes) from the provinces — evoking in some way today’s practice of separating church and state, and even that of segregating the bank clearing system from political authority. But it was also the states which provided the key source of funds — usually in the form of sacrificial animals — to the temple system and, in particular, the temple shrine complex of Nippur (the Vatican of its day).

Some suggest, as a consequence, that humans only gave up their nomadic/predatory/hunter-gatherer existence when they were provided with a neutral territory and common religious purpose, something which in turn gave them an excuse to “opt into” a mutually beneficial subsidisation platform of their own accord and without the costly need of state coercion. It was, so to speak, an amphictyony, an association of neighbouring collective systems forged together to defend a common religious centre.

Furthermore, since surpluses were provided to the temple on a sacrificial basis, the added beauty of the system was that whilst there was always an expectation the gods would reciprocate favourably, there was never a guarantee that they would. The risk of non-performance by the gods, in other words, was borne entirely by the contributing agent, on a loss absorbing basis. So too was the cost of supporting the temple system, which included the cost of feeding, clothing and defending its administrators, priests and other social-welfare dependents — including widows, orphans etc. Performance, meanwhile, was entirely linked to chance (good weather, bumper crops, military victory etc).

Over time parts of this theory became known as the “temple-state hypothesis”, though these days it’s strongly disputed that the territories feeding capital into the temple system were ever explicitly owned by the gods. To the contrary, archaeologists believe a combination of private, institutional and common lands made up the Sumerian territories. If people subscribed to the central distributive bala centres they did so as private entities who believed they would get entitlements in return, and also because the ultimate remaining surplus fed back to a temple system, which offered the chance of godly outsized profits. The cultic element, in other words, provided an essential loss absorbing capital layer to the system, without which an administrative redistributive state could not have balanced its payments as precisely.

Given the sacrificial capital layer’s exposure to risk, it’s hardly surprising perhaps that in later eras such amphictyonies, especially those of the Delphic system of ancient Greece, became closely associated with oracles, prophecy and forecasting — but also with mystery, opacity, public festivals and behavioural codes which often encouraged moderation, productivity and fertility.

If for some reason a tragedy or a black-swan event occurred, the accounts didn’t balance and the supporting city complexes became famished, it wasn’t the priests who got blamed for misallocating resources or calling for the wrong level of sacrifice; the rationale instead was that the gods had been unhappy with the amount of sacrifice offered. To wit, more sacrifices were called upon immediately and an effective recapitalisation of the temple-based clearing system was achieved." (http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/04/26/2160110/the-priests-the-temples-and-the-blockchain-clearing-systems/)