Debt and Credit: Entangling the Marginal and Liminal in the Non-monetary Economies of Bronze Age Ugarit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In a non-monetary economy, one of the main mechanisms for the storage of wealth is debt. For people living on the margins of the major urban societies of the Bronze Age Near East, debt and credit offered means of participating in larger aspects of economic life yet simultaneously allowed elites to gain access to their bodies, their family members, and their property as means of wealth storage. This paper seeks to explore how debt and credit were used to entangle marginal and liminal groups but also, perhaps, offered these same groups opportunities for resistance or for integration into larger polities. Textual evidence for debt and credit can allow us the opportunity to gain access to different information about the lives of marginal and liminal people. Using the Late Bronze Age Syrian city of Ugarit as a case study, this paper will explore some of the possible ways that the debt and credit mechanisms attested in the administrative record reflect practices through which marginal and liminal individuals became integrated into a larger Ugaritic society.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".