Wealth Inequality in the Ancient Near East: A Preliminary Assessment Using Gini Coefficients and Household Size

Abstract

Investigating how different forms of inequality arose and were sustained through time is key to understanding the emergence of complex social systems. Due to its long-term perspective, archaeology has much to contribute to this discussion. However, comparing inequality in different societies through time, especially in prehistory, is difficult because comparable metrics of value are not available. Here we use a recently developed technique which assumes a correlation between household size and household wealth to investigate inequality in the ancient Near East. If this assumption is correct, our results show that inequality increased from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, and we link this increase to changing forms of social and political organization. We see a step change in levels of inequality around the time of the emergence of urban sites at the beginning of the Bronze Age. However, urban and rural sites were similarly unequal, suggesting that outside the elite, the inhabitants of each encompassed a similar range of wealth levels. The situation changes during the Iron Age, when inequality in urban environments increases and rural sites become more equal.

Assessing Classic Maya multi-scalar household inequality in southern Belize

“…Our reliance on pedestrian surveys allows us to avoid potential biases present in excavation-based samples, which generally are small. Likewise, house size “provides an easily comparable unit of measurement, thus allowing cross-cultural analysis” [ 33 p2].…”

“…House size has been used to assess wealth inequality in archaeological contexts in the Maya region [ 4 , 30 , 34 , 35 , 37 , 42 , 43 ], other areas of prehispanic Mesoamerica [ 3 , 39 ], and more geographically dispersed regions including the NW Coast of North America [ 32 , 41 ], the US SW [ 31 , 44 – 48 ], the Mississippian heartland [ 49 ], Colombia [ 40 ], Europe [ 5 , 50 ], and Eurasia [ 33 , 50 , 51 ]. No other measure allows for regional and global cross-cultural comparisons of wealth inequality using a consistent metric: house size.…”

“…No other measure allows for regional and global cross-cultural comparisons of wealth inequality using a consistent metric: house size. As illustrated through prior comparative investigations [ 5 , 28 , 33 ], the extent of the wealth inequality between different samples of domestic units can be effectively assessed using the Gini coefficient, thereby providing a foundation for geographically-wide, cross-temporal comparisons [ 52 , 53 ]. We adhere to the assumption that house size is an appropriate proxy for household wealth, although, when possible, we supplement this metric with qualitative discussions of other indicators of wealth inequality.…”

Inequality Before the Bronze Age: The Case of Chalcolithic Cyprus

“…The Gini coefficient has been successfully used to analyse differences in inequality in (pre)historic societies by applying it to the distribution of house sizes (Price and Bar‐Yosef 2010; Kohler et al . 2017; Peterson and Drennan 2018; Basri and Lawrence 2020). These analyses seem to suggest that in Western Asia social inequality increased significantly with the rise of urbanism.…”

“…Various studies of large aggregate datasets arrived at similar conclusions, with Gini values generally well below 0.3 in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, and closer to 0.4 in the Bronze Age (Bogaard et al . 2018, 212; Stone 2018; Basri and Lawrence 2020, 698). This same pattern has also been observed more broadly for Eurasia (Kohler et al .…”