Premodern Trade in World History - Richard L. Smith

By the period of the New Kingdom (1539– 1069 BCE) in the second mil- lenniumBCEshipwrights were using bronze tools to build much ...

baskets offish, and 500 rolls of papyrus. In some places, like Mycenaean Greece, the inferior party was now expected to outgive ...

much gold.”She was so impressed with his wisdom she gave him an addi- tional 120 talents of gold plus more precious stones and s ...

Both agree that Darius also played a role, but in Pliny, Darius just thought about it whereas in Strabo he had it near completio ...

craftsmen, they produced nothing but were thought to live off the labor of others. Where commerce was viewed as an unpleasant or ...

Most economically motivated wars resulted from the desire to take control over the means of production – land and people – or th ...

Chapter 5 Into the Aegean and out of the Bronze Age During the second millenniumBCE the maritime trading system of the eastern M ...

Exotic bric-a-brac is important in providing historians with an idea as to how far connections extended, but they do not represe ...

development of more complex social structures and ultimately the rise of states. The island of Crete, lying at the entrance to t ...

industries of the palace workshops turned out other high-quality goods in gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and precious stones fromf ...

motifs that included birds, octopi, and papyrus, became so popular as an item of exchange it is found today in places the Mycena ...

upheaval, famine from poor harvests, epidemics, and natural catastrophes– have all come in for a share of the blame. One factor ...

source of this wealth, in the standard interpretation, was trade. In one pro- posed scenario, Anatolian silver was shipped out o ...

toward trade was decidedly negative: it was something that unheroic people like the Phoenicians did. But theIliadand indeed the ...

produce anything special that anyone else wanted. The Minimalists see no evidence of an east–west trade route running across Ana ...

Chapter 6 Of purple men and oil merchants In the eleventh centuryBCEthe coastal Canaanites of the Levant arose from the debris o ...

they“invented observing the stars in sailing”and by using the Pole Star became thefirst to sail at night beyond the sight of lan ...

statuettes, and textiles. The nodes of this network were stations carefully selected as emporia, processing centers, and strongh ...

first, it was little more than a stopover for traffic en route to Spain, but its position at the narrowest point in the Mediterr ...

besieged Tyre for 13 years. Tyre survived but was exhausted. The Neo- Babylonians didn’t last long and soon were replaced by the ...