ABSTRACT
Crop cultivation and animal husbandry were the main subsistence activities. Landed property was the principal form of wealth. Merchants, too, eagerly invested their profits in land. There has been a long debate whether the ancient Near East experienced a market economy in which trade and price setting were subjected to a free exchange of goods and the law of supply and demand or an economic system in which the state rather determined all this. The economy of the Mesopotamian temple and palace domains was based on a similar redistribution system. In early dynastic Sumer the temple was the chief landowner. After the collapse of the Third Dynasty of Ur private land tenure became more widespread, but the palace and the temple nevertheless remained important landowners until the Parthian period. Especially in the first millennium the market became steadily more important.
