[pram]

"Trade practices show a similar pattern. Indus seals, used for business and administration, turned up in common homes across the city. Archaeologists did not find evidence showing rulers controlled access to these objects. Standardized weights and measures spread throughout the region as well, helping create consistent trade practices."

I've done a lot of reading on this particular subject and I think the "stateless utopia" conclusion so many researchers seem to be fishing for (Graeber etc) is more nonsensical than they let on. They didn't have monumental temples or palaces, that seems to be it.

Yet there is tons of documentary evidence "Meluhha" was engaged in a pretty sophisticated scale of commodity production (artisanal carnelian beads) and export trade with Dilmun and Sumer. Their standardized weight system was used for this trade, and they're found elsewhere in large numbers as the article says. They even had expats living in Sumer who were noted as translators (of the Indus valley seals??) This trade is where a lot of their obvious wealth probably came from, since they'd have copious silver revenue from Dilmun.

"Archaeologists did not find evidence showing rulers controlled access to these objects."

Like really, think about it. These weights were very precise. And they had to be, because "weight" was basically equivalent to "money." So there had to be a standard, and that standard had to be enforced when the weights were produced. And the weights had to remain trustworthy as they were distributed elsewhere for use in the trade. Someone was obviously "in charge" lol

[dwb]

> Someone was obviously "in charge" lol

I don’t find that obvious from what you’ve described. Agreeing on weights and measures is well within plausibility of a society where power was pretty evenly distributed. I don’t remember Graeber and Wengrow describing it as a stateless utopia, they were a lot more academic than their detractors suggest in the usual caricatures. Is there any more evidence you’ve read about that supports this conclusion?

[vintermann]

From what I remember nothing Graeber wrote suggests there wasn't a government. On the contrary, he wrote a lot of the temple being in charge of distribution.

Maybe there was a high priest in charge of weights and measures and punishing people who cheated with them, who knows - but we do know that for a very long time, that power if so wasn't leveraged into better living quarters, or better access to luxury goods that we know of. That's pretty remarkable.

So you can basically believe one of two things, or maybe some combination: that power was fairly evenly distributed, OR, those with power didn't appreciably privilege themselves. I find the latter harder to believe than the former.

[p1necone]

I don't think use of consistent weights and measures implies someone being in charge of those weights and measures.

I also don't think someone being in charge of weights and measures implies that same person/group being in charge of anything else.

The latter feels fairly obvious, for the former I imagine some generally agreed upon method for creating new weights and measures given some existing ones for calibration plus some base level of suspicion of new craftsmen/merchants until they are proven trustworthy by a subset of the existing trustworthy people who have their own weights/measures would do.

Also, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread anyone buying large amounts of whatever you're selling is going to have their own set of weights and measures, so your avenues for stiffing people without getting caught are pretty narrow.

[pram]

Not in this case, the "Indus" weights were notably used in the Dilmun trade even by Sumerian buyers.

The Meluhha->Dilmun trade weights were in fact found across Mesopotamia in general. They've been measured to be extremely accurate. The Meluhhan expat communities in Sumer were probably part of this infrastructure, if I were to guess.

[readthenotes1]

Ah, a town with no greed. Everyone voluntarily did the right thing.

[pegasus]

No greed whatsoever? Unlikely. But less? Possibly, why not? There's no reason to believe greed cannot fluctuate across societies. Quite the opposite, I'd expect fluctuations along any given dimension by default.

[Ar-Curunir]

A: Weights had to remain trustworthy as they were distributed elsewhere for use in the trade.

B: Someone was obviously "in charge" lol

B can imply A, but A does not imply B.

[bilbo0s]

I did some work for Halliburton in a past life.

Most of the people selling LNG for instance, do not have any control over the definition of a "cubic meter". Even so, none of them cheat, because the US for example, very much does have its own definition of a cubic meter and it isn't going to pay you a penny more, nor a penny less, than what that cubic meter is worth.

All that to say, you could probably try to cheat the system, but I'd imagine the people in Sumer and Akkad had what they considered to be a precise unit of weight with which to measure your delivery. It doesn't matter what someone in Mohenjo-daro said, you were only going to get a certain amount in trade for your freight in Sumer. So I could see a centralized authority for weights, (the customer), at the same time as having no one in charge of that unit of weight in Mohenjo-daro.

I could see people agreeing to it essentially because that's all you're getting paid for. Because I saw the same behavior long ago at work with Halliburton.

[pram]

The trade actually involved different measurements. The shekel (silver, commodity-money) was weighed by the Sumerian purchaser and then given to the trader in Dilmun (he would literally have a bag full of weights and silver)

The Meluhha commodities themselves were measured seemingly with the Meluhhan weights. So the units went from Indus -> Dilmun in Indus quantities, and were purchased and verified that way. The Sumerian guy was buying an "Indus quantity" and paying in a weight "Sumerian silver." So there wasn't a disconnection between Dilmun and Mohenjo-daro like you're implying.

[bilbo0s]

This is exactly what I was saying.

It doesn't matter if you measure LNG in litres, gallons, or cubic inches. The market is going to pay you the precise amount for whatever you delivered measured in cubic meters. So what you measure in is irrelevant. Or more precisely, only relevant insofar as you want to have some idea how much you are going to be paid when you reach the market. And even then, it's only relevant to you. The market doesn't care what you measure in, because the market measures what you deliver in cubic meters. And the market has its own definition of "cubic meter".

So market participants, no matter where they may be, are incentivized to ensure whatever unit they're measuring out for delivery in will relate to the "cubic meter" as defined by the customer in a precise and verifiable way. If not, they could lose money. Thus, every freight measurement standard, would, again, effectively be set by the customer. Because no matter what units you deliver in, s/he is only paying you for the amount measured in his/her own measurement standard. So your standard has to conform to that standard in a fashion that is well defined, consistent, and well understood by you.

In ancient terms, this means the trader in Mohenjo-daro would have calculated that conversion factor out in a precise fashion. So they would walk around Mohendro-daro with a standard weight for measurement that was based on what they would expect to happen in Sumer. All the other traders in Mohendro-daro would eventually discover the same conversion factor. So everyone lands on the same weight for measurement, but no one collaborated. Because everyone, (every trader anyway), only cares what they can get for that weight in Sumer. It's not that everyone uses Sumer's units. It's that Sumer's units define what everyone's understanding of their own unit is through trade.

[fakedang]

> Like really, think about it. These weights were very precise. And they had to be, because "weight" was basically equivalent to "money." So there had to be a standard, and that standard had to be enforced when the weights were produced. And the weights had to remain trustworthy as they were distributed elsewhere for use in the trade. Someone was obviously "in charge" lol

Not really - a trust based system would still function very well. The same reason why hawala networks and Hofläden still persist today.

Cheaters are punished by societal ostracization. Very common in Asia even today.

[komali2]

> Like really, think about it. These weights were very precise. And they had to be, because "weight" was basically equivalent to "money." So there had to be a standard, and that standard had to be enforced when the weights were produced. And the weights had to remain trustworthy as they were distributed elsewhere for use in the trade. Someone was obviously "in charge" lol

I disagree. You seem to imply that the standards existing means there must be a State? Or are you saying, literally, at one point someone said the weight of a thing is this, and people agreed? The latter is a MUCH softer point and completely compatible with the anarchism that Graeber describes.

What's the connection between the IETF and the State? No State mandates that everyone uses TCP/IP, every ISP, device maker etc just follows the standard because that's the consensus. It's self enforcing - you don't get to participate if you don't interop. Doesn't that make IETF in charge? What if the IETF suddenly came out as a Nazi organization and released RFCs with white supremacist words inserted absurdly into standards as requirements? Do you think consensus would just go along with what they said? No? That's the difference between consensus and what you seem to be implying by someone "Being in Charge."

Another good example of this is language itself. Everyone speaks the same language, but nobody's actually in charge of what goes into it or how it's spoken.

[mcmoor]

It's exactly the opposite. With languages/standards, both parties has incentives to have mutual understanding so they don't need anyone else to enforce symbol equality. But with these weights, or money in general, there's huge incentive to deceive each other, so someone has to enforce the equality. That someone can be the parties themselves, but if one party lack the ability, it necessitated the creation of third-party enforcer, which can grow to be a state.

Even then, with languages, whenever there's incentive to deceive it also immediately unravels. See: exaggeration, and necessity to create whole new language of legalese for contracts.

[komali2]

You're talking about a time pre-capitalism. "Incentives" don't map to a stable cross-community market. We should talk about "reasons," not "incentives." A great reason not to try to deceive about weights is it would make nobody wants to trade with you when it gets out that you're dishonest. It may have also been considered deeply unethical in their society to do so, there doesn't need to be any enforcement mechanism beyond that for it to manifest across the entire society in an archaeological record.

[soco]

Then there's this theory that legalese was created to enforce the need for legalese, to justify it and feed it forward.

[specialist]

> huge incentive to deceive each other

Disagree.

Iterated prisoner's dilemma leads to cooperation.

[mcmoor]

There's so many variants of prisoner's dilemma at this point which have their own winner I give up tracking. I've heard the most "realistic" one have titfortat as winner, but I've also heard that in certain population mixture, the one who defect more wins.

[komali2]

Sure, it's a bit of an absurdity eventually, but when we talk about what we're actually trying to talk about with prisoner's dilemma, which is interpersonal and intergroup interaction, publicly announcing intent to collaborate and then consistently following through on that promise, seems to yield the most desirable results.

[pram]

I'm saying some kind of institution was in charge of the manufacture and certification. Much like the weights produced by Sumer, which was uncontroversially a "state"