Market equilibrium, price, and arbitrage

If an ancient price or wage does not behave the way a modern market would predict, that mismatch is itself a finding, not just background colour. This page gathers conjectures that treat a price, a wage, or a loan from the pre-print past as a number that has to make the same economic sense a modern market number would. Competing workers doing interchangeable work should end up paid about the same; a price ceiling set below the going rate should make goods vanish from view rather than simply get cheaper; a premium charged for taking on risk should roughly match how often the bad outcome actually happened. Where an ancient number and the physical record it is supposed to predict are genuinely independent readings of the same event, forcing them to agree is a real test.

Gresham's phase transition and Sticky wages in Sumer both test whether ancient currency and labour markets obey textbook price and wage behaviour -- a currency debasement following a predictable phase transition, wages in early Mesopotamia resisting a cut the way modern "sticky wages" do. Bottomry break-even reads a Roman bottomry loan, a maritime loan forgiven if the ship was lost, as a priced bet that should mathematically match the real shipwreck rate, and Chola CPI builds a price index for early medieval South India out of temple-inscribed transactions, treating inscriptions as a substitute for a modern consumer price survey.