the dynastic caliphates: the umayyads and the reforms 141routes between Syria and Egypt, Egypt and the North African coast,
Egypt and Arabia, Iraq and Syria, and Iraq and Arabia. It is also
interesting to note that merchants were of different religious per-
suasions: Muslims, Jews, Christians and Hindus, and business rela-
tionships between those of different religions were amicable. In the
Geniza letters, merchants of various religions address each other with
the same honouring and amicable epithets as the writer’s own brethren
(Goitein, 1963).
Generally, merchants consisted of various categories: producers
and dealers, retailers and wholesalers, travellers and the stationary,
and brokers and auctioneers. However, the line between each group
in the category, and sometimes between one category and another,
was not always clear-cut. For example, the producers of manufac-
tured goods, who were mainly artisans, sold not only their own prod-
ucts but also the products of others and the wholesaler in textiles
sold single pieces. Furthermore, the degree of diversification in the
traded commodities seemed to have been rather wide. The merchant
would deal in a wide range of commodities such as flax, silk and
other textiles, olive oil, oriental spices, dyeing materials, metals, books,
perfumes, jewelry, glass, corals, foodstuff, hides and leather, pitch,
and a wide variety of household goods (Goitein, 1967). This was
meant perhaps to reduce the level of business risk involved through
diversification. Specialisation, nevertheless, existed and some traders
became specialists in one type of goods. The cheese dealer, “al-gab-
bàn”, the milk dealer, “al-labbàn”, the perfume dealer, “al-attàr”, the
indigo dealer, “al-nìlì”, and the date dealer, “al-tammàr”, are exam-
ples of the cases where the family names of the dealers became asso-
ciated with the type of goods in which they traded (ibid.).
Cooperation between merchants in distant countries seemed to be
generally accepted as the “custom of the trade”. Two merchants in
different trading centres would buy and sell on behalf of each other
in a very informal way with no commission paid but mutual services
would be expected (Goitein, 1967). Besides selling and buying, the
services also included the supervision of collecting business debts in
the foreign country. The distant trade and the attempt of minimis-
ing costs made such cooperation worthwhile. In addition, a great
deal of trust between the two merchants was necessary for the suc-
cess of such cooperation. However, one would think that the infor-
mation obtained by the merchant about the distant market, no matter
how historical such information might be, would serve as a guideline