some bureaucratic records on clay tablets. For the so-called
dark ages that followed, there are only archaeological re-
mains, mainly burials. Th e best evidence for the Classical Pe-
riod, the fi ft h and fourth centuries b.c.e., comes from Athens,
from the speeches of Athenian orators, the writings of such
philosophers as Xenophon and Aristotle, and the many in-
scriptions that the democratic Athenians erected to promul-
gate their public business. In the Hellenistic Period, aft er the
fourth century b.c.e., the best evidence comes from Egypt,
at that time ruled by Macedonian Greeks; the dry climate of
ancient Egypt preserved many remains of documents written
on papyrus and recording, in Greek, the day-to-day business
of a complex civil administration, ruling over Egyptians but
conducted mainly by Greeks and in the Greek language.
Th e English word economy derives from the Greek word
oikonomia, a compound of the word oikos, “household,” and
the word root nom-, which appears in many Greek words
having to do with custom, opinion, belief, order, law, and
regulation. We might translate oikonomia as “regulation of
the household.” Th is interpretation gives some insight into
the fundamentals of “economic” thinking among the ancient
Greeks, which diff ers in important ways from the ideas that
underlie modern economic institutions.
Th e vast majority of people in the ancient Greek world
were rural peasants, living in small households and aspiring,
at least, to be as self-suffi cient as possible. Th e oikos of oiko-
nomia does not refer to a structure but to the idea of a house-
hold; it includes all the people living together in a household,
nuclear and extended family, servants, and slaves, as well as
livestock, land, and any crops growing on the land. Th e most
basic economy appears in the oldest surviving examples of
texts written in the Greek, from the Bronze Age, and from
Homeric poetry, from the period aft erward.
EARLY EVIDENCE FROM THE BRONZE AGE
Th e oldest surviving examples of writing in the Greek lan-
guage are the so-called Linear B tablets. Th ese are clay tablets
from the Greek Bronze Age (3000–1100 b.c.e.), inscribed with
a script that predates the Greek alphabet. Deciphered in the
1950s, this script was revealed to be an early form of Greek,
and the tablets were found to deal largely in the business of
household management.
Th e tablets from the Bronze Age palace complex at Knos-
sos, on Crete—over 4,000 of which have been found—con-
tain mostly lists of material supplies. Stores of oil, wine, and
grain as well as numbers of sheep and cattle—the food sup-
ply for a large, well-regulated community—were recorded
and updated on clay. So certain tablets record the details of
fl ocks of sheep: which areas they inhabited, who was respon-
sible for them, their size, and what sort of sheep made up
each fl ock.
More complex economic transactions appear on these
tablets as well. One tablet, from Pylos in the Peloponnese
(the southern peninsula of the Greek mainland), seems to re-
cord a donation of “ship bronze” to the king, from offi cials
of various temples and other religious sanctuaries. Scholars
are uncertain as to what “ship bronze” may have been, but
one explanation may be that the king at Pylos demanded
contributions of metal from his outlying dominions to help
construct a navy. Other tablets record payments to workers,
such as a tablet, also from Pylos, that records the wages for
the “bath-pourers,” who seem to have been paid in rations of
wheat and fi gs.ECONOMICS IN THE HOMERIC WORLD
Homer’s Odyssey describes in some detail the economic
workings of the house of Odysseus. Th is hero left his estate on
Ithaca to fi ght in the Trojan War, to return only aft er 10 years
of fi ghting and another 10 years of wandering. While the
poem is fantastic, fi lled with monsters, divine intervention,
and mythological characters, the domestic world it describes
must refl ect, to a greater or lesser extent, the world familiar
to the poet and his audience, during the 10th through sev-
enth centuries b.c.e. It can thus provide some insight into the
economy of a lord’s estate.
Odysseus’s household consisted of himself, his wife (Pe-
nelope), their son (Telemachus), and various slaves. One of
these, the swineherd Eumaeus, recounts in the poem the ex-
tent of his master’s wealth. Th is wealth is described entirely
in terms of livestock: “For surely his wealth was great beyond
telling.... he has twelve herds of cows on the mainland, the
same number of fl ocks of sheep, the same number of pigs,
and the same number of wide-roaming herds of goats, which
are in the care of shepherds or pastured by strangers. Here,
on Ithaca, he has eleven herds of goats grazing off in the dis-
tance, looked aft er by brave men.”
Several kinds of economic exchanges existed in the Ho-
meric world. Th e most straightforward of these, the kind
most purely “economic,” are trading and its more rough-
edged cousin, piracy. When Odysseus arrives at various
places on his wanderings, the people he meets invariably ask
him, “Are you here for trade, or are you a pirate?” Th is ques-
tion seems to refl ect a new reality in the Greek world aft er
the fall of the Bronze Age civilizations: increased economic
activity across the Mediterranean, some of which was for
mutual benefi t (trade) and some of which was for more uni-
lateral benefi t (piracy).
Th e other kinds of exchange are less purely economic and
are much more bound up in the social fabric. In the world de-
scribed by Homer powerful people exchange gift s continually.
A stranger coming to the house of Odysseus would be enter-
t a i ne d a nd , up on h i s de pa r t u re , off ered gift s of material objects,
such as silver bowls, shields, and gold cups. Such exchange es-
tablishes a social bond between guest and host, and the history
of each gift -object was remembered and recalled forever. It was
the mark of a wealthy and powerful person to give and receive
such gift s. Giving precious gift s proved the wealth and status of
the giver and put the receiver under an obligation.
Similar exchanges of valuable property attended mar-
riages. Th e Odyssey suggests that a marriage involved both aeconomy: Greece 363