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Document Details : Title: Total prestation in Marhashi-Ur relations Author(s): POTTS, D.T. Journal: Iranica Antiqua Volume: 37 Date: 2002 Pages: 343-357 DOI: 10.2143/IA.37.0.128 Abstract : In Gorgias Plato wrote, ‘The wise say that what holds together heaven and earth and gods and men is koinōnia (community), friendship, kosmiōtēs (orderliness), moderation and justice’. In the ancient and modern world and in Western and nonWestern societies alike, gift-giving has been used since antiquity as one means of establishing and maintaining not just personal friendship but what Aristotle called ‘political friendship’. No student of anthropology will have gotten very far before reading Marcel Mauss’ classic essay on this subject and generations of economic anthropologists have refined and reshaped the way we approach this topic since Essai sur le don was first published in 1925. Studies of gift exchange in the ancient Near East have been concerned largely with the Late Bronze Age and much less so with earlier periods, but it is my intention here to examine briefly what Mauss called the system of total prestation in the relationship between Marhashi and Ur during the late 3rd millennium B.C. |
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