Work without End: Informal Taxation and Forced Labor within Persian Southern Levantine Temple Economy and Society

How does human work structure the economy and society?

Temples in the Southern Levant during the Persian Empire (c. 539331BCE) provide a vital, underutilized historical vista for such questions.

Persian involvement with labor taxation, forced labor, andtemple institutions makes temples cynosures for key ancient economic, social, and cultural practices of work.

Focusing on taxationand labor, WORK-IT drags analysis from formal to informal taxation (from official to social structures) and from slavery to forced labor(from definition to wider social phenomena), seeking deeper social interrelations for both economic topics. Both interventions furnishnew fruitful perspectives on the dialectical interrelations between economy and society.

Bourdieu's field theory brings powerful toolsfor wider socio-economic implications that integrates practices with perceptions.

WORK-IT will harness eight types of evidence fortemple institutionsbuilding, gifts, taxes, tithes, produce, welfare, priesthoods, and dependentsusing sources from the SouthernLevant, the Persian imperial heartland, and the wider Ancient Near East.

Each source will be analyzed via informal taxation, forcedlabor, and Bourdieusian field analysis to understand taxation, labor, and their interrelations within ancient weak states (pre-industrial,pre-nation-state polities).

These analyses will highlight flaws in modern socio-economic assumptions that have hampered scholarlyjudgments of socio-economic relations in the Ancient Near East and thus in modern socio-economic narratives.

WORK-IT will yield amore sophisticated understanding of the social impact of ancient temple institutions, the unintended consequences of local-imperialsocio-economic interrelations, and a deeper historical perspective on pre-industrial societies.

Ultimately, WORK-IT aims to re-integratethe Ancient Near East into socio-economic theory, forging a longer dure, pre-industrial perspective on society and economics.