Mortgage of Land Property and Freeing From It in Ugarit

A history of olive and grape cultivation in Southwest Asia using charcoal and seed remains

“…Additionally, of note is that Qatna, Lachish and Ebla all would have required irrigation for local olive cultivation. While the analysis of Bronze Age texts particularly stress the role of the palace in controlling and managing olive and grape revenues through taxation of the rural population [4,5] and the allocation of olive groves and vineyards to elite members [6,103], Monroe [104] recently highlighted that there is also textual evidence for grape production on royally owned land for the 13 th /12 th century BC (e.g. at Emar in Mesopotamia and Ugarit in the Levant), besides the much larger proportion mentioned to be in private hands, mostly paying taxes.…”

“…It has been long argued that olive and grape cultivation played an important role in the development of past societies and has been further implicated in socio-economic processes such as the consolidation of power and the formation of elites, urbanization, imperial taxation, and trade [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. However, no overview of the macrobotanical evidence for the region has been published, leaving many questions regarding connecting the domestication of olive and grape to their role in population changes and trade, and furthermore the extent of elites possibly driving these changes.…”

“…Wine and olive oil especially have been intensively discussed as important trade products in ancient Southwest Asia which played a role in elite formation [3,7,17,18]. The role of elites and the palace in the subsistence economy varied across this space and time and the extent to which elites/palaces were directly involved with fruit tree cultivation is often unclear [3,4]. Another important issue relates to the economic interests of rulers regarding olive and grape.…”

Script and Society: The Social Context of Writing Practices in Late Bronze Age Ugarit

“…49 Heltzer 1999, 423-431. These categories are cited to give a sense of the scope of the administrative documents relating to rural Ugarit, rather than to endorse Heltzer's specific reconstruction of how its economy was organised, which is a rather old-fashioned two-sector model proposing a dichotomy between royal dependents and 'free peasantry' and has been subject to criticism -see Heltzer 1976;Liverani 1989;and, for critiques, Schloen 2001, esp. ch.…”