OrEcon – The Rise of Political Institutions in Early Mesopotamia

Despite the overwhelming evidence on the relevance of the state's capacity to provide public goods and properly protect private property, we still lack a unified account of the origins and impact of these institutions. Inspired by a growing literature on the economic incentives behind institutional variations, we illustrate the construction and content of a novel dataset on the first large-scale human experience of state-building recorded in “Greater Mesopotamia" during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. Initially organized as “states of nature" lacking political, fiscal and legal orders, these polities witnessed dramatically different institutional trajectories that can be credibly related to the geographic environment given the simplicity of their farming and trading economies. Such a unique institutional variation makes ancient Mesopotamia an appealing laboratory for analyzing the formation of the state's institutional capacity, and this endeavor is simplified by the abundance of the evidence already accumulated. Not only have the thousands of archaeological campaigns, conducted in the last two centuries, generated an enormous flow of non-written evidence especially useful in describing the functioning of the state, but the cuneiform record is also the best-preserved corpus of ancient writing because of the use of clay tablets. To illustrate, we have selected for the availability of relevant primary and secondary sources a panel of 44 major Mesopotamian polities spanning each half-century between 3050 and 1750 BCE and obtained both measures of political and property rights and proxies for the economic incentives that have determined their rise and evolution. Accordingly, we created several measures of the inclusiveness of political institutions and protection of property rights, different proxies for economic incentives as determined by the profitability and opacity of farming and a group of key measures of economic outcomes. Overall, the key goals of our endeavor are two. First, we wish to provide to the entire community of social scientists, practitioners and bureaucrats a formal framework useful to properly analyze the rise and impact of the state's institutional capacity building on the first and most heavily documented historical case. Second, we want to draw the attention of economists, jurists and political scientists to ancient societies and that of archaeologists, Assyriologists and historians to economic theories. By allowing all these scholars to work side-by-side, inter and trans-disciplinary research will not only produce data sets that would not be feasible otherwise but will also enable a level of insight otherwise unattainable.