Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 253

4. Food, Medicine, and the
Market

maic language of the Jews of Babylon and
of Palestine where the Jewish authorities
appointed agoranomes entitled to impose
their own prices on the market.
The prominent role played by the mar-
ket and its physical centrality in the Hel-
lenistic and Roman world induced the
state to take a keen interest in its work-
ings. Thus attention may be drawn to the
appearance, in Athens and elsewhere, of
colleges of agoranomes, entrusted with
supervision of the maintenance and good
order of the agora, but above all respon-
sible for checking the regularity of the
transactions conducted there. The func-
tion of agoranome seems to have disap-
peared from Greek institutions 300 years
before the Arab conquest. However, if a
solution based on chronological continu-
ity is to be rejected, the āmil alā al-sū , or
walī al-sū , or āib al-sū , who appeared
from the outset of Islam, in the time of
Muammad, may be associated with the
agoranomes of Palmyra of the 3rd cen-
tury, who had a more exalted municipal
function than simple market-policing and
whom a bilingual inscription also calls
rabb sū. While agoranomy disappeared
after the 3rd century, market inspectors
continued, however, to operate in the
adjacent world of Arabia. Regarding the
five centuries which followed the Muslim
conquest, there was a dispute between
Claude Cahen and Eliyahu Ashtor over
the question of the permanence of urban
institutions, including control of the mar-
kets, in the Arab Orient.
It is also important to recall the
importance of commercial activity for
pre-Islamic and Islamic civilisation. The
socio-economic structures of pre-Islamic
Arabia are still inadequately known and
have given rise to divergent interpre-
tations, but the importance accorded
there to the transport and exchange of
merchandise seems clear. According to

Market

1. In the traditional Arab
world
Sū (Ar.), market, is a loanword from
Aramaic ª ūā with the same meaning.
Like the French term marché and the
English market , the Arabic word sū has
acquired a double meaning: it denotes
both the commercial exchange of goods
or services and the place in which this
exchange is normally conducted. Analysis
of the sū is thus of interest to the eco-
nomic and social historian as well as to
the archaeologist and the urban topog-
rapher. The substantial textual docu-
mentation which is available has as yet
been analysed only very partially and the
phenomenon of the market, fundamental
to the understanding of mediaeval Arab
culture, has not, to the present writers'
knowledge, been subjected to a thorough
and comprehensive conceptual study.
Since the beginnings of urban civili-
sation in Mesopotamia and in Syria,
from the third millennium onwards,
the Middle East had seen the develop-
ment of commercial activities, local and
long distance. For Maxime Rodinson,
the Arabic sū could be associated with
an ancient Semitic term, the Akkadian
sūu , from a root evoking tightness (if sūu
< ūu ) and, in early Hebrew texts, with
the term ª ū , denoting streets and squares
and used to translate the Greek ἀγορἀ
and the Latin forum . Intermediate Jewish
sources between the 3rd and 6th-7th cen-
turies A.D. refer to various functionaries
supervising the market in the Talmudic
era. The function of market inspector had
been inaugurated in Mesopotamia, and
the Greek term had passed into the Ara-