Mariah Hille

Anthropology 1030
5/3/16
Eportfolio Paper

Final
As with most classes of this nature we took this at a periodical rate. Starting at
the beginning and ending at the end, so to speak. Time is a hard thing to measure. In
this day and age we can measure things down to a millisecond. To ancient peoples
time could be many things, day vs night, migration seasons, harvesting seasons,
lifetimes, or even seasons of war. This concept is extremely interesting to keep in mind
while reading Graebers novel; Debt the first 5,000 years.
The topic that interested me the most from Graeber is the Mesopotamian people.
They were much more civilized than a lot of cultures discussed throughout the semester
and their ways and customs are fascinating to me. Many of the points he makes in the
novel he compares and contrasts them to this one people. Which is understandable
because of how they were technologically advanced.
In the first of the book he tells us that the threat of violence or even the act of
violence can turn human relationships into something rigid and calculated. It strips us of
our human nature. There are records of this in early Mesopotamian archeological sites.

Graeber tells that all of our senses of morality, and basically just having human nature
have been shaped by war.
There is also the concept of money. He is thorough in explaining that money to
these ancient people is not money as we know it today. Today it is a sort of credit
system, relying on the I owe U factor. In a Mesopotamian society there is maybe
traces of a currency but how are archeologists to know if they used a specific item for
money.
However, there were tablets found issued by temples of Mesopotamia that had
lists of debits, credits, rations, and rent owed. They were written up in specific amounts
of grain for example. This is an amazing find from this site. We can better understand
these people and the way their cultures thrived by seeing the written trading system.
Graeber compares sites from India, China, and Egypt to Mesopotamia. He tells
how our knowledge of all the other sites and histories is much smaller. The one that is
second most well known is Egypt. This simply is because of the keeping of written
record. Egypt had many written records that have been found and studied.
Mesopotamia had many written records, most of them were financial in nature. This is a
huge help to archeologists as well as anthropologists. It shows the archeologists what
was being traded and maybe even where. It shows anthropologists the significance of
objects and how they were being used.
One of the more specific examples is taxation. Taxing was not a commonly used
practice. Even among the conquered city states it was more just focused on tributes.
Similarly in Mesopotamia taxation was not used, even for its advanced economy.

The Mesopotamians lived in independent cities thriving off of their own economy.
The ancient Greeks viewed taxation and forced giving of money to hierarchys as
tyrannical and unjust. Which I think goes against popular belief of these ancient places.
At least for myself when I thought of ancient city states I saw something like Robinhood,
where the poor were robbed and higher thinking was not done often. Having read these
passages by Graeber and comparing them to the sites in class he provides much
insight into a world much simpler than our own. He gives the facts as well as an
amazing insights on these people and places he has such a passion for.