Work without End: Informal Taxation and Forced Labor within Persian Southern Levantine Temple Economy and Society

How does human work structure the economy and society? Temples in the Southern Levant during the Persian Empire (c. 539–331 BCE) provide a vital, underutilized historical vista for such questions. Persian involvement with labor taxation, forced labor, and temple institutions makes temples cynosures for key ancient economic, social, and cultural practices of work. Focusing on taxation and labor, WORK-IT drags analysis from formal to informal taxation (from official to social structures) and from slavery to forced labor (from definition to wider social phenomena), seeking deeper social interrelations for both economic topics. Both interventions furnish new fruitful perspectives on the dialectical interrelations between economy and society. Bourdieu’s field theory brings powerful tools for wider socio-economic implications that integrates practices with
perceptions. WORK-IT will harness eight types of evidence for temple institutions—building, gifts, taxes, tithes, produce, welfare, priesthoods, and dependents—using sources from the Southern Levant, the Persian imperial heartland, and the wider Ancient Near East. Each source will be analyzed via informal taxation, forced labor, and Bourdieusian field analysis to understand taxation, labor, and their interrelations within ancient weak states (pre-industrial, pre-nation-state polities). These analyses will highlight flaws in modern socioeconomic assumptions that have hampered scholarly judgments of socio-economic relations in the Ancient Near East and thus in modern socio-economic narratives. WORK-IT will yield a more sophisticated understanding of the social impact of ancient temple institutions, the unintended consequences of local-imperial socio-economic interrelations, and a deeper historical perspective on pre-industrial societies. Ultimately, WORK-IT aims to re-integrate the Ancient Near East into socio-economic theory, forging a longer durée, pre-industrial perspective on society and economics.