It had all the details Mr. Eichholtz wanted.

To translate the sales into an index of prices over the years, Mr. Eichholtz turned to a method invented by Mr. Shiller and a colleague. The United States government uses the same process for its best-known measure of house prices, which is published every quarter by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the chief regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The beauty of the method is that it does a better job of capturing the experience of homeowners than a simple average of house prices does. That average can rise when a bunch of new McMansions get built, even if existing houses have become no more valuable. The Shiller index, by following the same set of houses over many years, tracks the actual financial return that houses produce for their owners.

On the Herengracht, those returns have often been fantastic for 25 or even 50 years at a time. Home prices soared in the first half of the 17th century, around the time of the tulip mania. But they came crashing down in the 1670's, when the prime minister was killed, and partially eaten, by a mob of angry Dutch, and the country nearly disintegrated. Prices lagged inflation during the Napoleonic wars but surged after William became king in 1814 and the country industrialized.

Again and again, the cycle repeats itself. But there is essentially no long-term trend, beyond a general rise in house prices that roughly matches gains in peoples' incomes. As Amsterdam became a global city and its population exploded, demand for homes increased -- but so, too, did supply.

PRICES have hardly become more stable over the last 400 years; in fact, they've jumped up and down more in the 20th century than they did during the 18th and 19th. Only the 17th century, that time of cannibalized prime ministers, was more volatile.

"A whole lot of the price increases you see in houses is imaginary, because it's just inflation," said Mr. Eichholtz, a professor at Maastricht University. "People say, 'I have a house. It protects me against the economic imbalances or misfortunes of the country.' The big lesson is that real estate does not give you the protection that people think it does."

A history of Norwegian house prices that Mr. Shiller has found shows the same pattern. As does his index of American house prices, until the blastoff of the last decade. In chart form, it looks eerily similar to the stock chart from his 2000 book.