Book Project Snippet III (11/15/2022)
Added 2022-11-15 21:30:49 +0000 UTCAnd the next book snippet!
This one should be especially fun if any of you have been wondering where all of my ancient farming rules of thumb seem to come from: it's this section! The key takeaway from this whole exercise is actually very simple: given the organization of the countryside in the ancient world, manpower was actually cheap but surplus was expensive and hard to get (I've included just the very beginning of the next section so you get a sense of that conclusion). But demonstrating that to the satisfaction of a critical reader is really quite involved, as you'll see.
More broadly, this fits into the first full chapter, 'Farming Foundations,' the aim of which is to really situate the war-making capabilities of ancient states - the subject of the whole rest of the book - in their agricultural fundamentals. After this current snippet, the argument moves to the ways that the limited rural surplus might be expanded and mobilized for war.
Comments
Love this snippet, thanks for sharing. Question on the modius-kg conversion rate: footnote 5 says a modius of wheat is 6.72 kg and barley 6.465 kg, while notes 36 and 40 estimate a modius of barley at 7.3 kg (and the latter has wheat at 6.75 kg, a much smaller discrepancy). Is this an inconsistency or am I misunderstanding?
Joel Havenstone
2023-03-05 00:11:07 +0000 UTCAnd a second comment, unconnected to the first set: I had realized that barley didn't have the same expected yields as wheat, but I didn't realize it was around a 60% expected caloric yield. That's a pretty hefty price to pay for 'insurance' of a single crop's failure. Subsistence farming is pretty awful.
Adam
2022-11-15 23:32:33 +0000 UTC
