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

A GENERAL MODEL Of LONG-DISTANCE TRADE 303

and sailed away. They also reported another thing which they said they

had been told, that the myrrh and frankincense from everywhere were

deposited in the Temple of the Sun. This temple was by far the most

sacred possession of the Sabaioi of the region, and was guarded by certain

armed Arabs. When they bring it in, each man piles up his own produce

of frankincense and myrrh, and leaves it with those on guard. On the pile

he puts a tablet with a statement of the number of measures and of the

price at which each measure should be sold, and when the merchants

come, they look at the tablets, measure out the price of whichever pile

pleases them, and leave the payment at the place whence they have taken

the goods. Then the priest comes, takes one third of the price for the god,

and leaves the rest safe for the proprietors when they come to collect it.^20

The account was therefore already second-hand when it reached Theophrastus,

and might be thought to echo Herodotus’ account (4.196) of Phoenician silent

trade on the West African coast too tidily for comfort. Yet its components are

plausible – the multiplicity of producers; the designation of a central place as

an entrepôt or exchange-hub; the use of a temple as that central place, thereby

placing the goods under the protection of a god; the addition of a human

guard in case the god’s protection was ineffective; the cut of the paid price

taken by the priest for that use; the total disjunction between producers and

merchants; and the basic literacy required by both contracting parties.

The second panel of this late fourth-century triptych can be given the

precise dramatic date of 312 BCE, for in that year Antigonus Monophthalmus

launched a campaign against the Nabataeans, who thus appear for the first

time in Greek sources.^21 By then, on the evidence of Diodorus’ source

Hieronymus of Cardia, they were clearly well-established in southern

Jordan and the Negev, and had a centre of annual assembly at or near ‘a cer-

tain rock’, which may or may not be the later site of Petra itself^22 but can-

not be very remote from it. The campaign itself, conducted by Athenaeus,

one of Antigonus’ generals, was a failure,^23 as also was a follow-up con-

ducted soon after by Antigonus’ son Demetrius (Diod. Sic. 19.96.1–98.1),

but Hieronymus took the historiographical opportunity to describe the

region, its products, and its people. He described them as nomads (Diod. Sic.

19.96.2), whose ‘custom is neither to plant grain, set out any fruit-bearing

tree, use wine, or construct any house; and if anyone is found acting con-

trary to this, death is the penalty’ (Diod. Sic. 94.3), the explanation given

being that to do so involves subordination to the powerful (i.e., by hav-

ing to pay tithes or rents) (Diod. Sic. 94. 4 and 97.4).^24 He mentions sheep

and camels and a diet of meat and milk and uncultivated plants as well as

pepper and ‘the so-called wild honey from trees’,^25 and he also describes

in some detail their expertise in making waterproof cisterns (19.94.6-7).

Briefer, but for the present exposition more pertinent, is his description of