Age Of Empires 3 Datap Bar Download
Edelira Longinotti
We present an approach comparing wealth inequality between c. 3000 BCE and 224 CE in the Near East using house sizes and urban area from 1060 houses in 98 archaeological sites. We divide this dataset into two chronological phases, firstly c. 3000-800 BCE and secondly 800 BCE - 224 CE. The first phase is characterised by small, relatively weak states, while the second phase is characterised by major empires and large states, termed as the Age of Empire (AoE). For these two periods, inequality is measured using house size in relation to settlement scaling, and applying, in addition, the Gini and Atkinson indices on house sizes. Results demonstrate that pre-AoE houses have a lower scaling metric (β) that measures house size relative to site size (0.24), while for the AoE the value is higher (0.41). This indicates more rapid median house size expansion during the AoE as cities grew larger. For the pre-AoE, Gini and Atkinson inequality measures result in 0.45 and 0.16, respectively, while the AoE demonstrates 0.54 and 0.24 for the same measures, respectively. This demonstrates greater house size inequality in the AoE. Overall, we see that wealth inequality is not only greater in the AoE, but that increased wealth inequality has a likely power law relationship to increased settlement area. Alternative metrics to minimise data biases affecting results, including median house size and bootstrap sampling, are applied to strengthen these results and overall conclusions.
While wealth and the economy have been major themes of studies on empires in the Near East, ways in which the specific organisational structures and socio-economic conditions of imperial scale polities shaped wealth inequality have been less studied. The study of wealth inequality trends and the related analysis of the unequal distribution of resources and assets in a given society has attracted much attention in socio-economic studies focusing on contemporary societies. This has also stimulated a number of studies on wealth inequality in ancient societies around the globe, intended to investigate how and when wealth inequality originated in human history, how it persisted and how variations could be accounted for (Kintigh et al. 2014; Kohler et al. 2017; Kohler and Smith 2018; Milanovic et al. 2007; Scheidel 2016). In archaeology, wealth can be observed through correlations with material forms, which often translates into correlations of wealth with physical parameters such as house size, land size and the variety of portable objects owned by individuals or households (Smith 1987), with the analysis approached by means of quantitative methods, such as Gini coefficient (Ames 2008; Smith et al. 2014; Windler and Thiele 2013; Wright 2014). This is a type of wealth that derives from accessibility to resources and services that would allow someone to accumulate specific forms of physical wealth (see also below). Wealth, archaeologically, is seen as a form of accumulated goods that are ascribed to individuals or social units and made evident through material culture. Consequently, wealth in the archaeological record is not equal to income, which is used in most studies focusing on contemporary societies as a measure of wealth; in archaeology, wealth represents the product of socio-economic and political forces that shaped the material world.
Before presenting the methods and results of this work, it is worth giving a definition of the AoE and clarifying what distinguishes it from the previous historical period (pre-AoE). The study area, shown in Fig. 1, encompasses the Levant, Mesopotamia and south-west Iran. This is the area where we observe the emergence of the first urban societies in the 4th millennium BCE and their spread across the region by the Bronze Age (c. 3000 - 1200 BCE). Moreover, this is the core area of the large territorial empires that developed in the AoE.
The study of wealth inequality trends in ancient societies has been the focus of much archaeological research in recent years, covering different cultural milieus across the globe and implementing both qualitative and quantitative methods (Basri and Lawrence 2020; Flannery and Joyce 2012; Kohler et al. 2017; Kohler and Smith 2018; Mattison et al. 2016; Scheidel 2016; Smith et al. 2014). As mentioned above, since archaeology is mainly concerned with material culture remains, wealth is seen as the abundance of material possessions accumulated by an individual or a group. Such wealth can materialise and become available for investigation in various categories of archaeological contexts such as burials, royal palaces, public buildings, religious buildings, or private houses (Kohler and Smith 2018). Here, we focus on private houses, or dwellings, as these contexts pose certain advantages to the study of wealth distribution. As pointed out by Smith (1987), in ancient agrarian societies, such as those concerned here, houses are the basic cells for economic production and consumption; they are impacted by socio-economic and political decisions taken by state administrations and they can reflect various economic groups across society. This gives the researcher the possibility to measure wealth accumulation across a large portion of the population. Furthermore, houses offer the possibility of a quantitative approach to material wealth analysis since some of their properties can be effectively measured, such as size as in this paper. Smith (1987) further indicates that house size has a positive relation to wealth for two main reasons: the larger the house the more material and labour is needed for construction and maintenance, thus reflecting the capability of the dwellers to mobilise increasing human and material resources; moreover, a larger house can be used to display and broadcast wealth. Although house architecture can be affected by several factors, such as the availability of resources, terrain morphology, cultural traditions and family structure, house size can broadly reflect levels of wealth accumulated by the dwellers. This connection between house size and accumulated wealth allows us to quantitatively investigate wealth distribution trends during the pre-AoE period and compare with the AoE.
Two more considerations need to be mentioned. First, we are not concerned with tracing a direct connection between houses and households. While the former can be identified in the archaeological record as coherent architectural units intended for dwelling and all connected activities, the latter are concerned not only with the material space but also with the family structure, the number of people living in a house and their biological and economic connections (Wilk and Rathje 1982). Even though there are connections between house materiality, including size, and household structure, the investigation of such a connection needs to be tested in detail, case by case, using textual evidence in addition to archaeological remains (Baker 2014). House size could relate to the number of individuals living in the unit, but as we compare house sizes through time, we are making the assumption that the number of household dwellers should stay somewhat constant, given that we see no socio-historical reason to believe the number of individuals found in ancient houses should change markedly. Provided this, the focus on the material evidence for wealth as expressed by house size is justifiable. Secondly, in this study we targeted buildings interpreted by the excavators as private houses, which are structures not intended for administrative and representative purposes connected to the state or empire (see also below). This helps us to distinguish broader societal wealth, where houses of private individuals are likely to be more representative of this measure.
Urban scaling analysis attempts to understand how nonlinear properties found in cities, as demonstrated through infrastructure or wealth, adjust relative to urban size or population, where change in urban features develop in a sub-linear, linear or superlinear manner relative to population (Bettencourt et al. 2020). Growth and relationships between urban features and size could be irregular, but often power law relationships could be evident across wider urban systems. As explained in detail below, urban scaling offers certain advantages compared to the use of house size alone. This method is based on numerous observations conducted by urban geographers on modern cities which have allowed researchers to establish formal mathematical relationships between urban parameters such as area, population, infrastructure features and socio-economic phenomena, such as economic growth, innovation, health care and social inequality (Bettencourt et al. 2007; Bettencourt et al. 2020; Lobo et al. 2013). In fact, Bettencourt et al. (2007) demonstrate a power law, superlinear relationship between many larger cities and multiple wealth and/or income indicators; this aspect can be tested here for the pre-AoE and AoE. In the application of this method to ancient settlements in the Americas, the Mediterranean and the Near East, power law relationships between infrastructure and urban population have been demonstrated (Altaweel and Palmisano 2019; Hanson et al. 2019; Lobo et al. 2020), though more work is needed to ascertain to what extent modern and ancient cities behave similarly. Nevertheless, previous urban scaling work, with more details given below, has shown not only that a formal relationship can be expected between a city's infrastructure and the total urban area, but it has also shown that this relationship can be ultimately connected to broader socio-economic phenomena, including wealth distribution (Ortman et al. 2015; Ortman et al. 2016). Larger cities may, for instance, enable and sustain a larger number of social interactions, where these interactions grow in given measured time. The AoE empires concerned in this paper greatly affected the Near Eastern urban landscape. Some areas experienced the emergence of very large cities such as Nineveh, Babylon, Seleucia on the Tigris, while other areas became populated by relatively small sites dispersed across the landscape (Altaweel and Squitieri 2018; Lawrence et al. 2016; Wilkinson et al. 2005). By using urban or settlement scaling, we will test the expected relationship between site size and house size, and, by comparing the pre-AoE with the AoE, we will offer results that take into account changes to both house size and site size together, providing a more robust and complete picture of the changes in wealth inequality across time. Our expected relationship is that house size, as a proxy for wealth, should have a power law relationship to site size, as demonstrated for more recent societies (Bettencourt et al. 2007; Bettencourt and Lobo 2016). The use of scaling will demonstrate if house size has a relationship to the site area and what that relationship is. As this paper covers a broad area and a long period, we are mainly interested in overall statistical trends that emerge in the analysis. As mentioned above, the imperial legacy that empires in the analysis inherited and transmitted from one to another and which emerged in recurrent imperial strategies strengthens the validity of this approach.
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