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Religious Associations and Economic History:

Source: www.princeton.edu
Topic: Economic History

Sort Desciption: The value of Demotic Egyptian documents for Hellenistic social and economic. history is often underestimated. 1. This is especially true for the rules and ...

Content Inside: 1 Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics The Ethics and Economics of Ptolemaic Religious Associations Version 1.0 November 2005 Andrew Monson Stanford University Abstract: This paper considers the economic status of the members in Ptolemaic religious associations and offers a model to explain why they participated. Drawing on Charles Tillys comparative study of trust networks I suggest that religious associations institutionalized informal ethical norms into formal rules that lowered the costs of transacting and facilitated cooperation among villagers. The rules related to legal disputes illustrate how associations exercised this power and even tried to prevent the Ptolemaic state from intruding in their network. Andrew Monson. amonson@stanford.edu 2 The value of Demotic Egyptian documents for Hellenistic social and economic history is often underestimated. 1 This is especially true for the rules and accounts of religious associations. Most of our examples come from the Fayyum and date to the Ptolemaic period. A large number of these papyri were excavated at Tebtunis by Grenfell and Hunt on behalf of the University of California-Berkeley. These Demotic texts were left for the Cairo Museum while the vast Greek collection came to Oxford and then to Berkeley. By analyzing these texts my goal is to understand who joined Egyptian religious associations and why. The first part investigates the economic status of the members. That means comparing membership fees with other data about prices and income. In the second part the rules are examined in more detail in search of economic incentives that might explain why people joined associations. However this economic approach provides only a partial explanation. In the third part a different approach is presented that tries to understand how the rules correspond to actual social relations. The model developed here borrows from Charles Tillys theory of trust networks. 2 This model provides a more com ...

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