Prices & wages

This page gathers the surviving direct evidence of what things actually cost and what people were actually paid in the pre-print world: the Roman Edict on Maximum Prices under Diocletian, the thousands of price references embedded in the merchant letters of the Cairo Geniza -- a synagogue storeroom whose discarded documents happened to survive intact -- and pawnbroker, probate, and tax-assessment (taxatio) series that record valuations book by book and good by good.

Price and wage data is one of the few kinds of ancient evidence that comes with a real number already attached, which makes it unusually good for testing economic reasoning directly rather than by analogy. The paper elasticity of prose and The cutting-stock codex both treat the cost of writing materials and labour as a real market signal -- an elastic response in how prose was produced, an optimization problem in how parchment was cut. The Edict's missing markets goes further and asks what the Diocletian Edict's silences -- the goods and services it never lists a price for -- reveal about which markets had already collapsed by the time it was issued.