AEGEAN-LEVANTINE TRADE, 600–300 BCE 279
plate of Paphlagonian acorns – or, at least, aspiring to do so, whether urbanite
or not. Although few Greek communities were well enough endowed with
sufficient natural resources to allow them to be truly self-contained and still
be competitive, politically or economically, much of what they imported were
not the basics of life, but rather a way of life.
To date, unfortunately, no comprehensive study of the goods on offer inArchaic and Classical Greek markets and emporia has appeared, nor is likely to
appear in the near future. Such a study would necessarily be encyclopedic, and
would depend on evidence from the broadest range of literary and archaeo-
logical sources, from across the Mediterranean Basin and beyond, in order to
capture the hundreds, if not thousands of individual goods flowing into (and
out of) the Greek world. What I present here instead is an overview of items
appearing in only one segment of this broader array: those commodities that
flowed out of the East toward the Aegean, and those that flowed out of the
Aegean toward the East in return. This then is only a partial picture of the total
number of possible commodities in Mediterranean trade, and what proportion
of it we can only guess; as the lists in the comic poets remind us, Athenian
markets, those best documented, contained goods originating from both Attica
itself and the other side of the world. But even so, my list proves useful for
thinking about the problem of self-sufficiency vis-à-vis imports and consump-
tion. But before we turn to that, a few words about problems and methods.
Problems and Methods
As part of a larger project that sought to examine Levantine-Aegean commer-
cial activity following the Persian Wars of the early fifth century, I compiled
the commodities listed in Tables 12.1 and 12.2 from Greek and Semitic textual
sources and from archaeological evidence. My intent was to identify and then
define as specifically as possible – botanically, chemically, culturally – the goods
appearing in Levantine-Aegean long distance trade during the Persian period,
that is from time of the rise of the Persian Empire in the early sixth century
to its demise at the end of the fourth century. Each of the items noted here
is discussed at length in my thesis Pant’agatha (van Alfen 2002 ).^9 Readers will
immediately note there one of the key problems in studying ancient com-
modities in aggregate: the nature of our evidence, with the notable exception
of a few durable, manufactured goods like ceramics and coins, does not per-
mit much fine tuning. For most commodities we cannot trace chronologies,
volumes of trade, or even origins with any precision at all, which means it is
all but impossible to construct a solidly dynamic, diachronic picture of the ebb
and flow of individual goods and correlate this with others. What we are left
with is a rather more static, synchronic view from which we are able, at times,
to detect smaller and larger traces of movement of various types.