I'm currently reading a book about the finer points of sheep and shepherd administration in late-period Mesopotamian temples. And while it is quite boring, one thing that's steadily starting to interest me is just how different bureaucracy was back then.
For example: for decades now, scholars have been dealing with this problem where the legal contracts and accounting documents used by the temple of Eanna specified a per-sheep amount of wool that seemed impossibly high. This number was 1.5 mina or about (by my math, using the chart in Robson's Mathematics in Ancient Iraq) 3/4kg. Herdsmen were almost never capable of meeting this number, and according to scribal records, the average amount of wool obtained per-sheep was closer to 1.08 mina. This has lead many historians to assume that the economy was just in total disarray as society was chronically incapable of supplying basic goods like wool. However, on closer inspection, this doesn't seem to be the case, and at least a few historians have noted that the Eanna temple maintained considerable wool surpluses, and was able to sell and amass large quantities of wool. So, why did countless legal contracts and accounting documents use that number? Well, this is 600BCE, accounting, measuring, and inspecting are expensive and time-consuming. So it's easier to just have your shepherd agree to a contract of 1.5 minas per sheep of wool, and take whatever wool you get up to that amount, and call it a day. Any amount over 1.5 minas the shepherds keep, which means a few of them will turn a small profit. As the author states:
In short, the temple expected the herdsmen to fall short of the contractual stipulations as written, but the informal guideline remained that all the females and wool belonged to the Eanna. Indeed, more realistic expectations might have invited opportunities for shirking and dissembling. By claiming whole sets of animals and animal products, the temple then did away with the administrative problems that arose from apportioning.
I find this sort of thing just...wonderfully quaint. Now we live in a world where you have to piss in a bottle so you meet your Bezos Approved Packing Quotas, and you get written up if your break is 0.03 seconds too long, but in 630 BCE? Eh, we just make up a number, and whatever you got, you got.
