Thomas R. Blanton, Agnes Choi and Jinyu Liu
The present volume examines two related issues concerning the economies of Rome and two of its provinces, Judea, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt. The volume addresses issues of taxation—how taxes were collected, how they served not only economic but also ideological functions by labeling (and thus constructing) and hierarchizing subject populations, and how they were understood by provincials—as well as the economic effects of imperial pacification in the province of Judea, and more specifically in its northern region, the Galilee. This interdisciplinary volume assesses data provided by well-known Greek and Latin texts (e.g., Thucydides, Aelius Aristides), Egyptian and Arabian census and other taxation documents, and recent archaeological excavations in the Galilee. Recent archaeological work offers an excellent opportunity not only to see how local provincial economies generally fared under Roman rule but also to permit a degree of specificity that is rarely encountered in studies of the Roman economy: Galilean archaeological surveys allow us to compare economic conditions both before and after an unsuccessful revolt against an imperial power. In what follows, we contextualize the present volume both within the ongoing work of the Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy project and within recent studies of Roman taxation; summarize the contexts of the essays collected in the volume; and—to mark the historic circumstances we are living in—offer some brief comments on publishing in a time of pandemic.
The present volume is the second produced under the auspices of the Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy (ECAE) program unit of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).1 The first volume, The Extramercantile Economies of Greek and Roman Cities: New Perspectives on the Economic History of Classical Antiquity, argued that although recent studies of the “ancient economy” influenced by New Institutional Economics (NIE) tend to focus on economic activity directly connected with markets, much of the production and transmission of goods and services in antiquity occurred outside of market exchanges; for example, euergetism, personal benefaction, and activities taking place in associative contexts, such as communal meals.2 Thus, a robust account of the “ancient economy” must integrate these and other extramercantile aspects into its framework. A programmatic essay by Thomas Blanton and David Hollander (2019) in the Extramercantile Economies volume assessed various theoretical frameworks for examining ancient Mediterranean economies, including NIE, economic anthropology, and régulation theory, to propose ways in which that goal might be accomplished. Stemming from the same ECAE project, the present volume both presupposes and extends those earlier discussions. In his Epilogue to the present volume, Jürgen Zangenberg correctly points out that the volume does not include a stand-alone contribution on theory and method in the study of ancient economies. The editors note, however, that this volume occurs within the context of a larger project in which pertinent methodological issues have already been addressed. Moreover, in the following section, we briefly situate the current volume both within the broader ECAE project and within recent studies of taxation.
To add to the methodological issues previously discussed in the Extramercantile Economies volume, we briefly indicate how the issue of taxation falls within the broader purview of the study of the Roman economy. Although, as Hollander points out in the present volume, it is difficult to assess the amount of total taxes (and tribute, we may add) collected in the Roman Empire, much less to give a year-by-year account of the value of such contributions; nonetheless, as Peter Bang (2012: 201; see also Bang, 2007) has argued, “Redistribution of wealth and economic resources [through plunder, confiscation of agricultural lands, and taxation] was staggering and must easily have been the single most significant and dynamic factor shaping economic developments.” In his study of the “sacred economy” of ancient Israel, Roland Boer (2015) characterizes the economies of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia as “regimes of plunder,” in which military forces directly extracted wealth in the form of booty, and indirectly extracted it in the form of tribute; in the latter case, only the threat of military force, and not its actual implementation, provided the incentive. Regions that were militarily pacified or that simply capitulated were induced to pay taxes to their conquerors. Rome’s economy can be characterized along similar lines, as Bang’s comment, cited above, already suggests.
Classicists have studied the fiscal impact that Rome’s collection of taxes and tributes has had from the Roman perspective; that is, by showing how such sources of wealth served to swell imperial coffers. However, the question is less frequently reversed to ask how the provinces themselves fared as the result of Roman economic depredation. We may thus diagnose a strongly Rome-centered perspective in classics. Although this is perhaps to be expected, given that elite literature in Latin (and Greek) forms part of the basis of classical studies, the ECAE project—and indeed the contributions in this volume—holds that the economies of the provinces themselves are to be understood as component parts of the Roman imperial economy. Thus, rather than attempting to assess the value of the wealth that the province of Judea contributed to Rome, the essays in Part 2 of this volume address economic questions from the provincial perspective: What effect did the destruction and expropriation of resources in the Galilee have on local and regional microlevel economies around the time of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in 66/67 to 70 CE; for example, in Shikhin, Yodefat, and Khirbet Qana? And how did provincials, both local and regional administrators and the populace at large, perceive and react to Roman demands for the payment of taxes—the question addressed in Part 1 of the present volume?
The essays in the present volume thus contribute to a shift in perspective from one centered on Rome’s benefit from practices of imperial extraction and expropriation to one that also evaluates the costs to the provinces of those same practices. Thus we seek to supplement a Rome-centered perspective with what might be described as a “view from the provinces.” The provincial picture that emerges from the essays in this volume is complex: although some Galilean towns (Yodefat and Gamla) were destroyed, resulting in a total loss of their resources and productive capacities, others potentially benefitted from increased possibilities for trade as Roman roads were built in the region (see the contributions of Mordechai Aviam and C. Thomas McCollough herein).
Although Boer’s (2015: 187–8) generalization that market activity in antiquity is “a by-product of government needs” (esp., provisioning armies) is overstated, he is certainly correct to point out the close relation between markets and economic predation conducted by states. Philip Kay (2014) has argued convincingly that predation provided Rome with wealth that subsequently stimulated markets. Money and resources expropriated from conquered states provided Rome with a steady income in the form of war indemnities (phoros or stipendium), manubiae (“plunder” or “booty”), and natural resources (e.g., mines). Rome also benefitted from the imposition of taxes in the form of fixed sums (vectigalia), agricultural tithes (decumae), and portoria, or “customs dues” assessed on items transported for sale on the market (see further Agnes Choi’s article herein). Mercantile and extramercantile aspects of ancient Mediterranean economies were often intertwined.
“Taxation has always been a central issue in political economy because it is one of the main activities of all states and a necessary condition for everything else states do. It is the core feature of state capacity” (Kiser and Karceski, 2017: 76). Not surprisingly, taxation has featured prominently in the study of the state and economy in premodern states, including the Roman Empire (e.g., Rathbone, 1996; Lo Cascio, 2007; Monson and Scheidel, 2015; Bowman, 2018: 27–52). In terms of the structural and institutional determinants of tax revenue in the Roman Empire, scholars have arrived at different evaluations of the overall tax rates, with some arguing for a relatively low level of taxation (Hopkins, 1980; Scheidel and Friesen, 2009: 61–91; Scheidel, 2015: 229–57), and others insisting on a relatively high level of taxation (Duncan-Jones, 1994; MacMullen, 1987: 737–54; Bowman, 2018; see further the article of Hollander herein). Due to the competition between taxation and rents, the different assessments of tax pressure have resulted in divergent assessments of how many resources were left at the local level, which would have a direct impact on urban prosperity.
The diverse scholarly opinions concerning the tax burden in the Roman Empire can partly be accounted for by the lack of systematic and continuous data, but they are also rooted in the complexity and even the “messiness” of taxation in the Roman Empire. The sources that we have do not give rise to a neat or streamlined picture of Roman taxation (Günther, 2016). Nor do they allow us to say that the purpose of Roman taxation was exclusively about generating revenue. For example, the fiscus Iudaicus, imposed in the aftermath of the First Revolt against Rome, seems to have served a penal function by redirecting a tax formerly paid by Judeans to the Jerusalem Temple toward the new purpose of providing funds for the renovation of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome: revenue was thus generated in a manner that humiliated the vanquished party (Josephus, B.J. 7.218). Furthermore, while the power disparity between the state and the taxpayers and the predatory nature of taxation have been repeatedly emphasized and elaborated (Bang, 2012 and 2015; similarly, Boer, 2015), the realities of tax collection might have been more tortuous. In the context of studying violence in Roman Egypt, for example, Ari Z. Bryen has documented papyri that have preserved petitions against reckless and abusive behaviors of the tax collectors (e.g., SB VI 9458 from Tebtynis, second century CE; Bryen, 2013: 246) as well as petitions from tax collectors complaining about physical violence and/or threats directed at them (Bryen, 2013: 106). In his study of public finance in the Republican period, James Tan has connected taxation with bargaining power on the part of the tax payers, whose bargaining power also became curtailed and compromised when they were exempted from taxation (Tan, 2015; 2017).
All of these insights point to the necessity of more investigation into the realities of taxation on the ground to enable a thorough unfolding of the dynamic interactions between the political, social, financial, and psychological dimensions of taxation. That can to a great extent characterize the direction of the newly published edited volume entitled Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective (Valk and Soto Marín, 2021), which provides case studies concerning the challenges of taxation, especially with respect to extractive practices from diverse states and societies across the ancient world. The present volume further contributes to enriching our understanding of the complexities and realities of ancient taxation through a series of case studies focusing on various empirical facets of taxation (organization, delivery, compliance, resistance, evasion, its “routinizing” function, and so on) and involving nonmarket aspects of the ancient economies of Rome, Judea, and Egypt.
The essays herein consist of revised and enlarged versions of papers first presented at two sessions of the Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy program unit at the 2018 and 2019 Annual Meetings of the SBL. The sessions included invited papers on taxation in the Roman Empire and the economies of Judea and the Galilee before and after the First Jewish Revolt against Rome by leading archaeologists, classicists, and scholars of early Christianity. Because researchers were invited to address specific topics in the meetings—issues of taxation in the Hellenistic and Roman periods at the 2019 meeting, and the economy of the Galilee before and after the First Jewish Revolt against Rome at the 2018 meeting; represented in Parts 1 and 2 of this volume, respectively—we believe that the essays herein are better integrated than one might otherwise expect in a volume of papers that were first delivered at conferences. Moreover, the two parts of the present volume can clearly be seen as extending the focus on “extramercantile economies” already begun in the project’s earlier publication, The Extramercantile Economies of Greek and Roman Cities. Whereas the former volume focused on issues of euergetism and associative practices, the present volume moves to consider issues of expropriation and property destruction in the provinces, particularly in the region of the Galilee in Roman Judea, but also in Egypt and Arabia.
Pursuing in greater detail issues raised in the previous volume produced by the Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy program unit, the present volume breaks new ground and aims to reshape current discussions of the economies of Mediterranean antiquity by introducing into the discussion extramercantile factors such as refugeeism, property destruction, and banditry that, although generally overlooked in studies of ancient economies, nonetheless constituted significant factors affecting the production and allocation of resources in ancient Galilee and Judea. Moreover, the volume suggests new approaches to better conceptualize regional economies as interrelated systems that exert mutual, although frequently asymmetric, influence upon each other and upon other regions within the system. Thus, it is not enough simply to study, for example, taxation in relation to the amount of wealth it contributed to imperial coffers; rather, it must be studied from an integrative perspective that takes into account both the revenue generated by those who collected taxes and the concomitant expenditures of those who paid them. That is, the “view from Rome” needs now to be supplemented by a “view from the provinces and on the ground,” a process of supplementation to which the present volume contributes.
Part I of the present volume concerns taxation, both in Egypt and in the broader Roman Empire. In Chapter 1, John T. Fitzgerald makes an analytical distinction between taxation, imposed upon those who understand themselves to belong within the state that levies the tax; and tribute, imposed upon the inhabitants of external or “foreign” states. Surveying the imposition of tribute by states from third-century BCE Mesopotamia to mid-first century BCE Persia, and subsequently Greece and Rome, Fitzgerald charts a range of responses to the economic practice, ranging from its denunciation by subject states to its wholesale ideological legitimation by Thucydides, for example, who views it as a corollary of what he takes to be a veritable law of nature: the rule of the weak by the powerful. During the Roman period, Aelius Aristides opines that although the imposition of tribute contravenes the principles of equality, fairness, and justice, it is nonetheless justified in practice by a more compelling principle, the “law of superior power.” The chapter thus illustrates the ideological mechanisms used to justify a more or less systematically imposed form of extraction that was utilized widely by the “superior powers” of Mediterranean antiquity. As the exponents of both NIE and régulation theory point out, ideological factors are not incidental, but structural components of economic systems.3
In Chapter 2, Agnes Choi describes the mechanics of tax assessment and tax collection in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, based on a close analysis of tax documents from the Tebtynis (and other) papyri that detail the ownership, size, status (as royal, sacred, or cleruchic land), condition, and crop yield of fields such as those in the village of Kerkeosiris in the southwest Fayum circa 120 to 110 BCE, as well as the collection, storage, and delivery of in-kind taxes from those fields, eventually to be delivered to regional centers. Choi points to the interaction of scribal officials representing various regional and local levels, including the nome, district, and village, in a highly organized system of taxation and rent collection that involved significant urban-rural interaction and mobility, at least for those tasked with recording, collecting, storing, and transporting foodstuffs in payment of in-kind taxes.
In Chapter 3, David B. Hollander outlines recent discussions about rates of taxation and GDP in the Roman Empire, noting that numerous elements of the Roman fiscal system are very difficult to quantify, including proceeds derived from rents on public land, liturgies, state-owned mines, and booty. Taxes and tax rates, moreover, were inconsistent; they could be imposed, cancelled, changed, or avoided. In contrast to the problems this variability entails for quantitative studies of taxation in the Roman Empire, Hollander makes three observations of a nonquantitative sort: taxes were “routinely opaque,” that is, not easily determined with exactness by the general populace, which facilitated malfeasance on the part of local collectors; they were inconsistent; and they were unfair, sometimes appearing even to serve a penal function (e.g., the fiscus Iudaicus). The chapter points to aspects of taxation that are often elided in studies that focus more narrowly on imperial tax revenue that could be used, for example, to provision Rome’s massive army.
In Chapter 4, G. Anthony Keddie expands on what Hollander describes as the “unfair” taxation policies of Rome, arguing that Roman censuses collected information that went beyond the minimum needed to facilitate the collection of capitation and land taxes; the information was used to generate lists of persons and groups subject to particular forms of taxation, liturgies, or tax discounts, in practices that normalized the structure of the patriarchal household and constructions of ethnicity, the imposition of the special tax on Judeans after the First Jewish Revolt being a case in point. Moreover, in contrast to a common assumption in New Testament studies, the imposition of Roman taxes in the provinces did not always raise the tax burden; in many cases, it likely remained the same or even decreased relative to previous regimes of taxation, as is evident in Egypt. Keddie’s chapter indicates that taxation served both to routinize and to construct sociopolitical differences and to allocate both privileged and marginal status.
Part II of the present volume considers the economies of Judea and the Galilee before and after the First Jewish Revolt, examining the differential effects of Roman imperialism on local economies in a series of case studies. Chapter 5, by Mordechai Aviam, focuses on the economies of Judea and the Galilee. Based on the results of archaeological surveys, some of which he conducted, Aviam compares the evidence for the economic prosperity of four sites in the Galilee before and after the First Revolt: Yodefat, Gamla, Magdala, and Tel Rekhesh. All four sites showed signs of prosperity and economic surplus prior to the First Revolt, including a mansion at Yodefat, a large synagogue at Gamla, an elaborate synagogue with frescoes painted in the Second Pompeian Style at Magdala, and a farmstead, perhaps with its own small synagogue, at Tel Rekhesh. Both Yodefat and Gamla were destroyed by the Roman army and never rebuilt. Magdala’s northern quarter, a commercial sector, suffered a rapid decline in the first century CE that Aviam indicates was a result of the war, but otherwise the fishing town continued to exist into the second century. Similarly, the farmstead at Tel Rehkesh survived into the first decades of the second century. The results of the Second Jewish Revolt circa 132 to 136 CE were more severe: “all Judean villages were destroyed and abandoned.”
In Chapter 6, C. Thomas McCollough surveys the changes evident in the archaeological record of the village Khirbet Qana (or Cana), some 7 kilometers north-northeast of Sepphoris. In the early first century CE, Cana was a modest village with no public structures, connected to surrounding villages by footpaths, and apparently dominated by subsistence agriculture. In the late first and early second centuries CE, the number and size of houses increased, a synagogue was built, and the conversion of water cisterns for use in grain storage provides evidence for a shift to the marketing of grain. These changes seem to be spurred both by the building of a Roman road in the vicinity and an influx of people and wealth from Judea in the aftermath of the First Revolt. Alongside these changes is some evidence for resistance to Roman cultural influence, including an apparent avoidance of Roman coinage and imported fine wares such as Eastern Terra Sigillata A, and an absence of pig bones. Thus, the presence of roadways, refugeeism (a topic taken up in James Riley Strange’s contribution; see below), religio-ethnic identification, and the presence of markets and regional trade were all factors shaping Cana’s village economy, which, in stark contrast to Yodefat and Gamla, received a significant stimulus as the result of Roman imperialism.
In Chapter 7, David A. Fiensy takes issue with a prominent strand of New Testament scholarship that views banditry as a product of economic crisis (e.g., oppressive taxation, loss of land, and indebtedness) and social disruption (e.g., through foreign conquest and ineffective government) that resulted in part from the Roman occupation of Judea. (As we have already noted, the essays by Hollander and Keddie deal with the issue of taxation in greater detail, with Keddie suggesting that under Roman imperial rule, taxes in Egypt were assessed at rates that were relatively continuous with or even slightly less than those assessed during the late Ptolemaic period.) Fiensy argues against an idealized view of bandits as Robin Hood figures who robbed from the rich to give to the poor; rather, they robbed indiscriminately, sometimes employing violence, to enrich themselves. Moreover, a 2011 study by economists Olaf de Groot, Anja Shortland, and Matthew Rablen indicates that contemporary piracy (banditry at sea) is not associated with regions where governance is either very efficient or very inefficient, but instead occurs somewhere in between; in a sort of governmental “sweet spot” that is both lax enough for crime to take place and stable enough to allow pirates to transport and sell their stolen goods through the agency of intermediaries. If there was a rise in banditry in first-century Judea, Fiensy argues, this suggests a “weakly effective” government, neither wholly dysfunctional nor highly effective in keeping order. Fiensy’s discussion points to an area of the ancient economy that exists outside the market in the sense that bandits take by force and without payment, and on the margins of the market (i.e., in the “underground economy”) in the sense that they sell the goods they acquire to intermediaries who then make their own profits by reselling the same goods within other, “legitimate” or quasi-legitimate markets.
Chapter 8, by James Riley Strange, develops a theme that was adumbrated by McCollough’s essay, refugeeism. Strange plausibly postulates that as the result of large numbers of casualties, mass enslavement, the destruction of Jerusalem, and Vespasian’s confiscation of land in Judea in the aftermath of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, some Judeans might have moved north to the Galilee in search of a safer and more secure environment, even as others returned to their Judean villages. Strange notes that evidence of refugeeism is difficult to detect archaeologically, particularly when refugees move into a region whose material culture is very similar, as is the case with Judea and the Galilee, and when the number of refugees is not large. Strange notes that lamp-making capacity at Shikhin, a village near Sepphoris, increased during the late first century CE. More importantly, during the same period, craftsmen at Shikhin began producing the so-called Northern Darom lamp, itself based on the Darom (“Southern”)-type lamp that Varda Sussman proposes originated in Judea. Strange posits that the apparent spread of the lamp form from south to north could be explained by the movement of refugees who took their craft with them as they migrated northward in the wake of the First Revolt, noting, however, that the hypothesis is tentative and needs to be corroborated by additional lines of evidence.
Finally, the volume is rounded out by an Epilogue in which Jürgen K. Zangenberg critically assesses the collected essays and raises issues for further research.
On March 24, 2020, the editors of the present volume received an email from Amy Davis-Poynter, Commissioning Editor in Classics, Archaeology, and Biblical Studies at Routledge. The email, labeled with the heading, “COVID-19 update for Routledge contracted authors,” noted that many authors worldwide were experiencing “difficulties … with library closures, childcare issues, switching to online teaching, and the whole host of other issues that have arisen from the pandemic.” Although it is nothing new to publishers to receive manuscripts after the contracted due date, it is highly unusual for publishers to send out mass emails to their authors offering to extend publication deadlines. But unusual times call for unusual measures; and indeed, the present volume was itself submitted approximately eighteen months after the initial due date. Thus, the editors agree that some brief comments ought to be included concerning the unusual circumstances under which the present volume was produced. COVID-19 constitutes a pandemic of historic proportions, and this, we feel, should be marked here. As of November 9, 2021, the COVID-19 Dashboard published online by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University registered a total of 250,640,822 cases and 5,060,994 deaths globally from the pandemic.4 This is likely to be an undercount since it relies on diagnosed cases; many cases, particularly those that do not require hospitalization, go unreported. Fortunately, several highly effective vaccines have been developed against the disease, although global distribution is highly uneven, and political polarization and misinformation hamper the implementation of vaccination policies.5
The pandemic brought library closures and the concomitant need to access academic resources online, parents’ difficulties in obtaining childcare, school closures and “work from home” policies, and a sudden, massive shift toward online teaching. All of these changes made academic research more difficult. Researchers, however, were in many cases able to devise work-arounds to facilitate their projects, including resorting increasingly to online databases and repositories of texts, writing to other researchers working on similar topics to request copies of their most pertinent published articles in portable document format (PDF), the sharing of available resources among close colleagues, and purchasing books in lieu of borrowing the physical copies from university libraries. Scholars have strived to continue with their work, develop new skills in accessing resources online, and maintain collaboration. Yet, due to the disparity of access to resources and technology, the impact of the pandemic on different institutions or individuals as well as different regions of the world has also been unequal.
But COVID-19 was not the only notable global issue as this volume was in preparation: climate change brought unprecedented flooding to many parts of the globe, fueled wetter and slower-moving hurricanes, and contributed to hotter- and longer-burning wildfires.6 Moreover, the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer on May 25, 2020, an incident that was video-recorded on a witness’s cellphone and subsequently widely viewed on YouTube, sparked marches in protest against structural racial inequality in the United States, with participants united under the motto “Black lives matter.”7 An estimated 15 million to 26 million people participated in marches across the United States in June 2020, making Black Lives Matter perhaps the largest movement in US history (Buchanan, Bui, and Patel, 2020). Sympathetic marches were held internationally in Kyoto, Mexico City, Bogota, Berlin, Rome, and Helsinki, to name only a few of the locations.8 Although the conviction of the officer who killed Floyd on counts of murder and manslaughter was widely viewed as a positive step toward racial justice, many of the structural issues of which the murder was a symptom remain firmly in place in the United States (Eligon et al., 2021; O’Grady, Pannett, and Hassan, 2021).
It is perhaps fitting, then, that this volume, which foregrounds the mechanisms of power and resistance in the area of political economy, has emerged at this time. Its value also lies in the fact that it compels us to consider the macro with the micro. Just as the global pandemic (macro) is related to local vaccine availability (micro), and global warming (macro) is related to hurricanes in one city or a heat dome in another (micro), so too, the Roman Empire’s taxation policy (macro) was related to the microlevel economy of a particular location, whether that be Kerkeosiris, Gamla, or Khirbet Qana, for instance.9
Although the business of producing academic monographs was carried on successfully during the years of 2019 to 2022, when the present volume was in preparation, it was hardly “business as usual.” Thus, the editors are grateful to the contributors for their labor and perseverance during these extraordinary times, and to Amy Davis-Poynter and the staff at Routledge for working with us with great patience. Lastly, we invite the reader to reap the fruits of our contributors’ collective labors.