Private Versus Official? New Hypotheses for the Reconstruction of Bronze Age Upper Mesopotamian Economic System

Ancient economic systems from Southern and Central Mesopotamia are quite well known when Northern Mesopotamia ones remain less known. If we already know that, during Bronze Age, households played a deciding role in several kinds of production, their degree of dependence or independence to the State still has to be clarified . The archaeological data clearly show that private workshops, set up in private houses, could be very efficient and specialized. Furthermore, these economic entities could be assimilated to private enterprises, which were able to handle their own administrative duties. On the other hand, we know from the texts that the Palace and the temples were also a main element of ancient economic systems. If public administrations should, in some cases, have supplied raw materials, hired workforce, and dealt with the distribution of produced goods, it seems that the production didn’t take place in the palace itself. Dealing both with archaeological and textual data could help to better define the role and the importance of both public and private components in early Mesopotamian economic systems.