Everyone must eat. Settled peoples get the majority of their sustenance from crops they grow.
Twelve bushels of grain and pulse (supplemented by animal products and foraged or garden vegetables) sustains a working or pregnant adult for a year. Ten bushels sustains a child or idler.
On up to two fewer bushels per year, or without supplemental foods, one must make a DC 15 roll or lose a random month of work to illness. For every six points the roll fails by, another month is lost.
Before launching into a long post about economics of the ancient world, let's put the exciting part at the top, the random treasure hoard generator. These are going to be significantly smaller than typical fantasy adventure hoards, but I've tried to callibrate them to generate the kidns of hoards people actually find from the bronze and iron ages:
Now, for the less flashy stuff. Before we can really talk about economics, let's establish some units of measurement. These are going to be largely based on historical units of mesopotamia and the eastern mediterannean in antiquity. My sources are kind of all over the place on these so I'm not going to be citing much, but the system I'm giving here hews pretty close to the coins and measures used in Talmudic literature.
A talent (kikar, if you prefer) weighs sixty pounds (maneh), each of which is fifty weights (shekel) of about eight and a half grams; this makes a pound of about 425 grams rather than the 453.59 of the avoirdupois pound, but that's close enough to use the familiar word in my book. A wet measure or dry measure are both a unit of capacity approximately equal to 144 medium-sized eggs (about nine quarts).
The basic unit of money is a weight of silver. Although actual prices vary by place and season, most people will say that a silverweight should buy:
