Roman Palestine, 200-400: Money and prices (Bar-Ilan studies in Near Eastern languages and culture)

Who in our day and age does not know about inflation and devaluation? Well, there is nothing basically new in these phenomena. Already in Roman times people would shudder at the market prices. This was especially the case in the third century CE, a period of monetary devaluation and general economic decline. Politically and militarily it was a period of anarchic instability. The fourth century showed a marked improvement in all these fields, but with it came radical changes in the political, economic and social structure of the Empire. This volume attempts to bring new evidence to bear upon this period from the vast corpus of Rabbinic literature. Texts of economic significance have been analysed and fitted into a chronological framework, and bring a new dimension to this very crucial phase in Roman economic history. The second edition of this book is published in response to popular scholarly request, and includes additional material both on basic Rabbinic monetary texts and further socio-economic analysis.