The Ancient Greek Economy. Markets, Households and City-States

A GENERAL MODEL Of LONG-DISTANCE TRADE 301

or the trans-Saharan salt-trade of Herodotus’ time which the domestication of

the camel had made possible.^10

Examples can undoubtedly be multiplied. To list them and others is not to

impute stability, still less an incremental growth, for all such traffics were vul-

nerable to disruption or to shifts in supply or demand, several in the preced-

ing list enduring for less than a century. Rather, it is to claim that throughout

the period within the purview of the present volume a shifting range of such

long-distance traffics will have been functioning, mostly below the political

radar of the poleis and therefore better documented by physical survivals than

by written sources (although the Assyrian trade with Kanesh is an exception).

For understandable reasons such traffics – whether carried by land or by sea –

tended to be of commodities which had a high value: weight ratio, and were

likely to have been transported in stages through a sequence of handlers rather

than directly from origin to consumer. They cannot be assumed to reflect

any one pattern of exchange, but they do share the key characteristic that the

area of production lies well outside any political or patronal or military ‘reach’

which the consuming parties or regions might have been able to deploy: some

mechanism other than force has therefore to be invoked or hypothesised in

order to account for the traffic.

This chapter^11 reviews the evidence – from Greece only  – for one such

long-distance traffic, that of aromatics from Yemen to the Mediterranean, as

a case study. Its format requires a word of explanation. Much of the scholarly

study of the subject has used the literary and archaeological evidence for the

Nabataeans as the basic framework of description.^12 That choice is wholly

intelligible in the light of the weight of information about them as carri-

ers as well as of the romantic attractiveness of Petra as the Nabataean capital.

However, the choice is misleading, for the Nabataeans were late-comers to a

traffic that had begun centuries previously and had already involved Egyptians,

Assyrians, Edomites, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Minaeans, and Sabaeans if not

others. In any case, any study of it has to begin from the basic moving force

of the traffic, the effective demand for aromatics from all over the Old World,

so that what matters most is to identify that demand and to describe how

that traffic worked in response. Unfortunately, to fulfil that task satisfactorily

entails crossing boundaries which are as much scholarly as they are geograph-

ical. Apart from the physical evidence of sites and artefacts (a fractured uni-

verse in itself), our written information comes in clusters which are divided

by interest (botanical, geographical, politico-military, ethnographic), by lan-

guage (Egyptian, Greek, South Arabian, Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin),

and by chronological period from the Bronze Age to the sixth century CE.

Rare indeed is the scholar who has direct access to all:^13 I am very far from

doing so, and acknowledge my deficiencies. What follows here will therefore

be a derivative sketch, will mainly focus on the (in Greek terms) Archaic and