300 JOhN K. DAVIES
acknowledged to be necessary, they tended to be seen – at least by would-be
opinion-formers – more as a necessary evil than as a positive contribution
to the quality of life.
That picture conceals a two-level underlay of contrasting patterns and of
much wider geographical dimensions. The upper and more visible level is
sketched by the Greek geographers from Hecataeus to Strabo, who described
that same Mediterranean littoral and its hinterland with increasing accuracy
and detail. Similarly, the historians from Herodotus to Poseidonius made it
part of their business to report on distant peoples and their activities, just as
the scientific writers from the Hippocratics to Theophrastus set themselves to
describe systematically this or that component of their culture from plants and
medicaments to stones and agrarian techniques. Concomitantly, the evidence
of Athenian inscriptions and speech-writers shows us the grain, timber, and
other raw materials which her population and her fleet required and had to
bring in from abroad.^1 This upper-level underlay reveals to us by 500 BCE a far
wider geographical world in perpetual and purposive (although often violent)
motion, transporting persons and commodities as well as ideas and techniques,
and revealing connexions of unexpected kinds.
Yet there is a lower level still, of much greater antiquity and even greater
extent, which for the historian of Classical Greece has largely remained
hidden behind outmoded but powerful academic boundaries: that of the
long-distance – indeed sometimes transcontinental – movements of com-
modities across Eurasia and beyond which gained in intensity in the Late
Neolithic.^2 They had been enabled by human activity and outreach such as
the exploration of the Alpine valleys and passes which is so vividly docu-
mented by the death of ‘Oetzi’ in the thirty-third century BCE,^3 and they
survived whatever disruptions are now to be attributed to the post-1200 BCE
oikoumene^4 to give the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean world of the Early Iron
Age a skeleton framework of communication by land and sea. That frame-
work could therefore be exploited, directly or via intermediaries, by those –
Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Anatolians, Greeks, Celts, and others – who
had an interest, whether as principals or as persons acting on behalf of others,
in procuring or transmitting commodities, especially those that had few and
remote places of primary production. Random instances known to me include
the traffic in obsidian, whether from Eastern Turkey, Sardinia, or the Lipari
Islands, from even the tenth millennium BCE,^5 the traffic in lapis lazuli from
Badakhshan in Afghanistan and elsewhere to Assyria and beyond,^6 the wide
distribution within the British Isles of polished stone axes from Langdale dur-
ing the nineteenth century BCE,^7 the exchange of textiles and tin from (or
through) Ashur with silver and gold from (or rather through) Kanesh in central
Anatolia, also in the nineteenth century BCE,^8 the traffic in amber from the
Baltic coast via various routes and networks to the head of the Adriatic sea,^9