The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models
Directors: Ian Morris and Joseph Manning

We have invited a dozen leading historians and archaeologists working in the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, Italy, and the west Mediterranean to discuss the kinds of evidence available in their region and period, how economic historians have written about their area in the last twenty-five years, and how the nature of the surviving evidence has shaped the ways historians have conceptualized basic analytical categories such as the market, class, or status, and the economy itself. This conference had its first meeting on the Stanford University campus in April, 1998.

We are calling this project The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models as a deliberate echo of the titles of two of Moses Finleys books, The Ancient Economy and Ancient History: Evidence and Models. Finley used Greek and Roman literary sources to construct a single model of the ancient economy in the Mediterranean world between about 700 B.C. and A.D. 300, dominated by non-market institutions. We hope to examine the legacy of Finleys work, but also to challenge it, specifically (1) by looking at the whole Mediterranean world, not just the areas of Greek and Roman culture to which Finley restricted the word ancient; (2) by explicitly examining change through time, and the possible emergence of Mediterranean-wide integrated markets; and (3) by moving beyond the literary sources on which Finley concentrated to incorporate documentary archives from Egypt and the Near East, and archaeological evidence. This project will result in an edited volume in 1999 published in the SSHI series of the Stanford University Press.

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