Clash of the Titans: The Economics of Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia Between Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Models

The scholarship on Bronze Age Mesopotamian economies has been split between the construction of broad theoretical narratives aimed at explaining macro-economic features and long-durée phenomena, and the development of models for making sense of micro-economic and utilitarian aspects of early urban life. The former traditionally relied on the top-down application of super-models borrowed from other social disciplines and on textual sources, whereas the latter mostly relied on excavated material culture for building bottom-up reconstructions. The paper aims at proposing a framework for integrating multiform empirical datasets and theoretical models for achieving a more complex vision of early Mesopotamian economies, following an interdisciplinary social science perspective. Considering the abundant evidence on the decision-making of institutional bodies for the study period, particular focus will be given to the concept of “political economy” and how it can be applied to the societies of Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia.