The chapter lays out how the most ancient aspects of political economy gradually transformed across multiple scriptural and theological traditions (Abrahamic, Vedic, etc.). Across all these traditions, the original pyramid schemes, which were enlarged to mitigate tribalism and blood feuds, facilitated systems of land ownership which is now recognizable as feudalism (which presupposed negligible economic growth). This chapter also traces the process by which bullionism became synonymous with what we now call mercantilism. Both of these terms derived from various legal systems which sought to socioeconomically limit access to ownership of the original finite resources (land and bullion). However, much economic historiography over the past several generations has erected various mythologies of feudalism and mercantilism: the myth that Roman laws and feudal laws were different, the myth that feudalism has been exclusive to Latin Christendom, and the myth that feudalism and mercantilism have been mutually exclusive economic systems. By dispelling these myths, the reader can see that dynastic regimes across time and space have always come to power by breaking laws—that there has never been either structural or legal difference between dynasties and mafias. This zero-sum political economy, which enshrined the logic of “conquer or be conquered,” has engendered two models of ancient imperial expansion—tellurocracy (land power) and thalassocracy (sea power), a state of affairs which combined both feudalism and mercantilism and continued up to the eighteenth century, until a new and increasingly successful form of political economy began to be pioneered: liberalism.