"'A Hand Anything but Hidden:' Institutions and Markets in First Millennium BCE Mesopotamia," In Traders in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Timothy Howe, 73-100.. Publication of the Associations of Ancient Historians, 11. (original) (raw)
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EXPLORING THE MESOPOTAMIAN TRADE (C.6000-539 BCE): TYPES, ORGANIZATION, AND EXPANSION
Palarch Journal of Egyptology, 2023
Archaeological and literary sources recovered from the extant of Ancient Mesopotamia and beyond its confines revealed that the empire has enjoyed a well-established internal as well as international trade (like with Egypt and probably east Africa towards westwards and Afghanistan, Indus valley, Persian Gulf and Arabian towards east) since Neolithic times i.e., c. 6000 BCE. Archaeologists and scholars have contributed specifically to distinguished aspects and themes of Mesopotamian trade due to availability of versatile records from different sites of different periods. Present study has examined the conducted works on specific aspects of ancient Mesopotamian trade i.e., types (inter-city, intra-city and international along with transport sources), organization (mechanism, control, regulation, local merchants, foreign merchants, legal issues, and diplomacy), imports and exports (quality and quantity), transaction system (barter and currency). With the help of these works, a general picture of trade from its emergence to its invasion in hands of Achaeminians, has been made by following analytical methodology.
A. Lassen, E. Frahm and K. Wagensonner (eds) Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks. Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection. New Haven, CT: Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, pp. 82-95, 2019
Trade in some form is as old as humankind. The exchange of objects and services is universal, and currency or "money-stuff" is known in all settled societies. The earliest documented case of long-distance exchange in western Asia is in evidence long before the first systems of writing were developed. The introduction of agriculture almost twelve thousand years ago was associated with the domestication of plants and animals, the development of new tools, and the building of permanent architecture (Schmidt 2012). With settled life came ideas of property, value, and ownership, and the conceptual and physical tools to mark them.
Dynamics of Trade in the Ancient Mesopotamian "World System
American Anthropologist, 1992
Maritime trade in the Arabian Gulf connected Mesopotamia u d h societies in the Gulfand with the Indus d u r i q the Bronze Age. This article explores the Gulftrade in light of shifiing consumption patterns and of various political forces at work within and between regions, in order to define the socioeconomic place of the trade in center-periphery relations. Through time the consumption ofcertain commodities, notably copper andgrain, became deepb embedded in the changing political economies oJ'Mesopotamian and Gulfsocieties, and the trade formed a basic economic dimension of center-periphery relations in western Asia. A t the same time, other,forces-polilical, military, and cullural-conjgured center-periphery relations in western Asia as deepb as the economic ones, and provided the context within which lhe trade occurred. Using lhe Gulftrade as an example, the article ofleers a framework for considerin<g the political and cultural, as well as economic, characler ofancienl center-periphery qstems.
Merchants, Measures and Money: Understanding Technologies of Early Trade in a Comparative Perspective , 2021
is second volume in the series collects papers from two workshops held at the University of Göttingen in 2019 and 2020. e international meetings tackled questions related to merchants and money in a comparative perspective, with examples spanning from the Bronze Age to the early Modern period and embracing Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia and East Africa. e rst part of this volume presents historical case studies of how merchants planned and carried out commercial expeditions; how risk, cost, and potential pro t was calculated; and how the value of goods was calculated and converted. e papers in the second part address current theories and methods on the development and function of money before and a er the invention of coinage. e introduction of balance scales around 3000 BCE enabled the formation of overarching indexes of value and the calculation of the commercial value of goods and services. It also allowed for a selected set of commodities to take on the role of currency. Around 650 BCE, this led to the invention of coinage in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Long-distance trade in Neo-babylonian Mesopotamia
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Inria, 2016
The Neo-Babylonian period in Mesopotamia is characterized by important developments, of such importance that historians are led to analyse it as a time of organization of a new kind of economy. This paper focuses on the way those developments may have influenced the exchanges of goods imported from outside Mesopotamia. We first It will firstly describe these exchanges, and the actors who are in charge of them. Second, wely, it will focus on how the transformations which thoroughly changed the institutional and geographical background during the period may have influenced the overall organization of long distance trade. We will especially try to explain the puzzling fact that Neo-Babylonian actors, who were so often involved in long-distance trade in former times, seems to withdraw nearly entirely from this activity, at the very time when new and lucrativ camel-transport trade appears in the Near-East. As usual in assyriology, this research is heavily reliant upon ancient evidence, which, for our subject, comes mainly from institutional sources. Neo-Babylonian age is one of the best documented period of ancient mesopotamian history, with thousands of texts from private and temple archives 1. Private texts belong to families of more or less well-established notables, involved in agricultural management, houses or field rentals. But their archives rarely mention trade, and very rarely long distance trade 2. The most explicit references to importation of exotic products are to be found in the numerous texts produced by the administration of the two main temples of Neo-Babylonian Mesopotamia, Eanna of Uruk, and Ebabbar of Sippar. Some of them mention regularly imported products, and give us some idea of how they where brought to Mesopotamia, and exchanged there. The best known and most studied texts have already been gathered by Oppenheim in an article 3
Al-Adab Journal
Ancient Iraq is very well known as an agricultural economic country, especially, the middle and the southern parts of Mesopotamia, which was called “the Land of Sumer and Akkad “, it's a very rich agricultural country. Sumer's economy was based on agriculture, fishing, and cattle and sheep breeding. Lived on the products of the fertile, irrigated soil, and this situation was clearly reflected in the cuneiform texts unearthed from many sites from the third and second millennium BC. And due to the young geological composition of Mesopotamia, the alluvial plain of ancient Sumer lacked so much important raw materials, these of materials were needed by the craftsmen of Sumer and Akkad for the industry, works of art and daily life. These raw material were, deferent kinds of stone, timber, and metal, therefore, the need for these materials led to exchange what the people had from the agricultural production and industrial goods and material produced by the workshops of temple or pa...