Mercenaries and Coinage?
Views from the East

Benjamin M. Sullivan (University of California, Irvine)

In this paper, I challenge a belief, widely held among historians who have treated the subject, about the nature of mercenaries in Archaic Greece. It has long been assumed that coinage was necessary for the payment of mercenaries (indeed that “real” mercenaries are not possible without coinage) and that mercenary service as such can only have begun after the spread of coinage from Lydia ca. 600 BCE. The growth and dissemination of this misconception originates in approaches that relied on a purely Greek perspective. A selection of Near Eastern precedents, many of great antiquity and all involving non-monetary payment to mercenaries, are adduced and analyzed. Especially revealing are the archives from the military establishment at Mari under the king Zimri Lim (1776-1761 BCE), wherein there is plentiful evidence for mercenaries recruited from desert nomads and Kassite and Elamite highlanders, all of whom received non-monetary compensation for their services. I then proceed to evidence for non-monetary payment to Archaic Greek mercenaries, not least of which is the donation of a “city” as a prize in the Pedon inscription (SEG 37.994; 39.1266) found near Priene in Ionia. From this inscription we learn that a certain Pedon, the son of Amphinneos, erected a small basalt statue of Egyptian manufacture and had cut into the statue a boustrophedon inscription in archaic Ionian lettering. The inscription states that the Egyptian king Psammetichus I (664-610 BCE) gave Pedon “a golden bracelet and a city as a prize for his valor.” There is good Homeric precedent for this transaction in the Odyssey (4.174ff.).