Most of today’s approaches to growth are expressed in terms related to goods, innovations, savings, technology, etc., and all are related to modern thought and recent historical developments. From the standpoint of technology and production, the economic historian Robert C. Allen has demonstrated that the route to the economies of the 20^th century AD was determined by what happened in Britain in the 18^th and 19^th centuries AD. In this sense, one can point out that the context of the Industrial Revolution dominates thought about economic growth. By contrast, from the standpoint of finance, it can be suggested that the route to the 21^st century AD began in Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium BC. The issue of the difference stands at the centre of what causes economic growth – and that is the principal concern of the discussions in this volume, the outcome of the workshop Economic Growth in Antiquity, held in Berlin in 2016.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Contributors and Abstracts
• Introduction
  David A. Warburton
• Approaching the Beginnings. Transformations from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in Greece: A Model of a Household in an Egalitarian Neolithic Village
  Donald W. Jones
• Economic Growth and Development in the Ancient Near East
  Giacomo Benati
• Examples from the Earliest Developed Economies. The Golden Interval of Old Assyrian Trade (2000-1700 BC)
  Jan Gerrit Dercksen
• Silver, Markets and Growth in Pharaonic Egypt
  Juan Carlos Moreno García
• The Political Economy of Foreign Labour in Pharaonic Egypt, 2700-1069 BCE: An Assessment of Impacts on Northeast African and Southwest Asian Societies
  Christian Langer
• Economic Growth in Third Millennium Mesopotamia. Some Thoughts on Economic Progress, Innovation and Growth in Southern Mesopotamia
  Johannes Renger
• Economic Growth in Early Mesopotamia: General Considerations and Some Specific Examples
  Piotr Steinkeller
• Epilogue
• Postface: A Perspective on the Theory and History of Economic Growth
  David A. Warburton