Ancient European Trade Research Paper

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Geographical advantages on the peninsula that is Europe enabled the development of trading networks from an early date. Rivers and long coastline provided the highways by which goods and peoples moved with increasing freedom. Amber, metals, and grain were early commodities; urbanization brought roads, empires, and commercial networks that reached their peak in the second century CE.

Europe is a broad peninsula spreading westward from the Ural Mountains. Black and Mediterranean seas wash its southern shores, the Arctic Ocean its northern shores. To the west, Europe is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, in which the great continental islands of Britain, Ireland, and Iceland sit. The coastal extremities of the greater European peninsula are in turn fragmented into number of smaller peninsulas: the Italian, the Greek, the Iberian, and the Scandinavian. The land mass is mountainous, although not impassably so, and the plains are intersected by great rivers that flow from the mountain ranges to the sea. Great river systems, in particular the Rhine, the Danube, the Dnieper, and the Rhone, connect the coast with lands far inland. These geographical advantages enabled the development of trading networks from an early date. In the absence of roads, the rivers and long coastline provided the highways by which at first goods and later people moved with increasing freedom.

The Foraging Era

Europe was peopled by anatomically modern humans (Cro-Magnons) from about forty-five thousand years ago. Habitation was initially limited to the more temperate southern coastal lands, because further north much of the landscape was dominated by the glaciation of the last great Ice Age. Such severe climatic conditions demanded ingenuity on the part of those humans who moved into those regions. Over millennia, a portable and flexible technology was developed in which there was a high demand for fine-grained stone cores (shaped but not completed stone tools). While it is clear that human bands dispersed during the long winters, all the better to subsist, there is good evidence to suggest that they gathered during the summers. For example, there is no doubt that they exchanged objects and, as a result, some artifacts moved a very long way from their initial point of origin. Baltic amber has been found at Cro-Magnon sites in southern Europe and seashells and sharks’ teeth far inland.

The Neolithic Era

The melting of the ice sheets, with the resulting rise in sea levels, was complete by about 10,000 BCE. It was only then that Europe, as we know it, finally took shape. The North Sea and the Black Sea were flooded; rising sea levels also created the Aegean archipelago, cut Sicily off from Italy, and divided Sardinia from Corsica. The principal cultural development of the Neolithic is farming on dry, nonirrigated land. This resulted in the emergence of village communities and the development of more specialized technologies. It is also possible to begin to identify the emergence of an agricultural surplus as a tradable commodity. Luxury items have been found very far inland: in particular, shell jewelry of Aegean origin at sites in Germany and Hungary. Obsidian from the Lipari islands has been found in Malta, and the island of Melos served as a source for much of the obsidian used in the eastern Mediterranean. It has been argued that the trading networks established in the Neolithic of Mesopotamia/Anatolia for the distribution of obsidian established the trading patterns that dominated the ancient Mediterranean world.

It is unlikely that such goods were taken directly from the place of manufacture to the sites where they have been found. In all likelihood, they were transported indirectly through a series of relays. This kind of “relay trade” is the principal way in which goods were moved long distances for most of antiquity, and it remains significant that only luxury goods were capable of being moved in this way, since only they could sustain the margins being added at each point of exchange.

The Amber Route

A good example of this early relay trade is amber, a commodity that was highly prized from the foraging era onwards, and the principal source of which, in Europe, was the Baltic region in the vicinity of the modern Russian territory of Kaliningrad. Very sophisticated networks for the transportation and distribution of Baltic amber were established during the Neolithic and continued into the classical period. Amber is found in the early Bronze Age graves of Mycenae, the middle Bronze Age ship wrecked near Ulu Burun, and the magnificent tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen.

The amber was transported along the coast of the Baltic to the River Elbe. From there, it was taken far upstream. In southern Germany, it was transferred to transport overland, making the journey through the Alps and down to the Adriatic Sea. From ports on the Adriatic, it was transported, mostly through cabotage (that is, local trading networks), to the great economic centers of the ancient world.

The Metals Trade

The increased working in metal ores marked the end of stone-based technology. One stone that became extremely popular, where it was available, was raw copper. There were a number of major deposits of copper in European centers—in particular, the Balkans and the island of Cyprus. There were also smaller deposits elsewhere. When the frozen body of Otzi, the Ice Man, was discovered in a glacier on the Austrian- Italian border, he was found to be carrying a copper axe, which had been quarried locally, and which he had (probably) worked himself.

Nevertheless, copper-producing regions became the centers of trading networks. In many cases, these simply followed the same patterns as those established in the Neolithic. Deep copper mines were already operating in the copper-rich region of eastern Serbia in the fifth millennium BCE. Copper from the Balkans supplied a rich culture across what is now Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. In the same way, copper from Cyprus supplied the needs of the eastern Mediterranean. It was in this region that it was discovered that copper could be alloyed with Anatolian tin to make bronze. This in turn drove a demand for the much scarcer ore.

The emergence of the demand for tin broadened the Mediterranean trading network. While there were sources of tin in the Mediterranean world, the major source was tin-rich Cornwall. Herodotus refers to Britain as “the Tin Islands” (Cassiterides) and Cornish tin found its way to the Mediterranean, either by a short sea trip to the mouth of the Loire, then up the Loire and down the Rhone to the coast, or by a long sea trip through Gibraltar to southern Spain. Like the amber route, this tin route connected the extremities of the European world through a network of exchanges.

Other highly prized metals were also being increasingly traded over long distances. Spanish silver and Irish gold both found their way into the Mediterranean trading world. By the middle Bronze Age large amounts of metal were being extracted, smelted, and traded. The Ulu Burun wreck, for example, carried six tons of copper, all cast into distinctive “ox-hide” type ingots, slabs of pure copper cast into the shape of an outstretched ox-hide. It is significant that this form of ingot had become standard throughout the Mediterranean world by the second millennium BCE.

The Rise of Urbanism

One other highly significant feature of the second millennium BCE was the development of palace cultures, cities, and city-states. These created economic differential, the possibilities of economic specialization, and particular centers of demand. The earliest urban cultures were situated away from the Mediterranean world, in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, and the Yangzi (Chang). By the middle Bronze Age, however, there was an elaborate palace culture on Crete, and complex urban entities were forming in Greece and Italy. Cities provided fixed markets for goods and secure environments for the storage or conversion of surplus. Cities became the principal points of exchange in the relay trade and of economic distribution for their surrounding regions. Trade became so important to the cities of the Mediterranean coast that by the first millennium BCE they were sending out trading colonies.

The Phoenicians sought to exploit southern Spain, setting up a series of trading and mining colonies referred to in the Greek sources as “Tartessus,” and in the following centuries, the Greeks followed suit. One Greek colony of great significance was that of Massilia (modern Marseilles) at the mouth of the Rhone River, a site that enabled considerable control of the tin trade, challenging the Phoenician (increasingly Carthaginian) control of southern Spanish ports. Another was the city of Byzantium, located strategically on the Bosporus, the narrow strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, and therefore well situated to take advantage of trade between the cities of the eastern Mediterranean and the cultures surrounding the Black Sea.

The Grain Trade

One significant result of the development of urbanism was that the growth of some cities outstripped the productive capacities of their agricultural resources. While an initial answer to this was depopulation through colonization, ultimately a number of cities needed to import food. Grain imports soon became important, particularly for the agriculture-poor Greek city-states. A particularly important maritime route was established between Athens, the hungriest of the cities, and the Bosporan kingdom in the Crimea. The ancient ports of the Crimea sent out shiploads of grain, receiving, in turn, bullion, wine, olive oil, and elegant pottery. In the same way, other Greek states maintained links with the agriculturally wealthy Greek colonies of Sicily.

By the fifth century BCE, the entire Mediterranean was a well-travelled highway, serving the hungry markets of Greece, Anatolia, and Syria. There are two clear indicators of this: the introduction of coinage in Anatolia in the sixth century, which made processes of exchange easier, and the growth of piracy. While briefly suppressed by the Athenians in the eastern Mediterranean, it remained a major problem throughout the Mediterranean until the advent of Roman naval dominance in the first century BCE.

One feature of European trade that the pirates exploited was the trade in people as commodities: the slave trade. Large numbers of slaves came into the European economic system from the Eurasian steppe via the Black Sea. Others came from Thrace, Greece, and Anatolia, even well into the Roman period.

The Celts

Urbanism did not penetrate far north of the Mediterranean fringe. From the beginning of the first millennium BCE, the region between eastern Germany and the Atlantic coast of France was dominated by Celtic peoples. Principally farmers and pastoralists, they nevertheless exploited mineral deposits where they could find them. Salt mines in Austria were opened up and the salt exported to the Adriatic. Iron was also mined and worked in southeastern France and exported to the Etruscans and Greeks of Italy. Gold, wine, and elegant pottery wares were imported. In the same way, Celts also exported goods north, in particular bronze and iron artifacts. Technology was also exchanged. Celtic kingdoms began minting gold coinage, probably in imitation of Macedonian coinage, in the third century BCE. These exchanges were insufficient to prevent conflict between the Celtic and Mediterranean worlds, however. Major Celtic raids in the fourth and third centuries BCE saw a Celtic kingdom established in Anatolia, and Rome itself sacked. It was, nevertheless, the Romans who brought regularity and security to western and southern European trade.

The Romans

When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul in the first century BCE, he brought it firmly into the Mediterranean economy. The subsequent conquests of Britain, Illyricum (the modern Balkan states), and the western part of Germany brought much of Europe into close economic contact. One major feature of Roman rule was the construction of roads; another was the suppression of banditry and piracy. Goods could travel long distances quite freely. Just as Athens had been dependent upon imported grain from the Crimea, the vastly bigger city of Rome received its grain in great freighters that sailed from grain ports in Africa, Sicily, and Egyptian Alexandria. The Roman network of roads and maritime routes made travel around and across the Mediterranean and deep into its European hinterland a relatively straightforward proposition.

Trading was no longer dependent upon cabotage, although that was still the most frequent type of trade. Rather, a number of mercantile diasporas were established throughout the Roman world and beyond it: Syrians, Jews, and Greeks established subcommunities within great cities like Rome and Alexandria. While this sometimes led to conflict, it also led to the spread of ideas. Christianity spread swiftly throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond it because of its strong base in Jewish Diaspora communities.

By the second century CE, the European economy was highly complex and interconnected. It has been spoken of as a segment in an increasingly complex world system. As such, it was subject to economic fluctuations. The long recession of the third century was felt throughout Europe, and it made Rome itself vulnerable to raids from predatory foreign peoples, which depressed the domestic economy even further. The subsequent recovery was partial, and by the late fifth century the Western Roman Empire had collapsed, disrupting ancient lines of trade and communication. While the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire continued in existence for another millennium, it was never again so dominant a military and economic presence.

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