The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  After 2000 BC: bronze boosts trade

  Bronze metallurgy itself played an important role in this constructive expansion of trade, especially once metal-working reached the densely settled societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

  As with the earliest types of farming, innovation in metal-working (and the same was later true of iron) did not originate in the most privileged areas. The smelting of copper and its alloys developed from the fourth millennium b c in the northern sector of the Fertile Crescent: western Iran, the Caucasus, Armenia and Asia Minor. The excavations which have revealed the sites of palaces in Troy II, Alishar, Ala^a H&yttk and Kultepe, and the treasures of Astrabad, Tepe Hissar or Maikop in Transcaucasia, unequivocally mark out a broad zone where bronze was in use. Nowhere else in the Middle East, even in Egypt or Mesopotamia, has there been discovered such profusion of rich metals as in the tombs of Alaca, dating from c. 1300: everything is there– gold, silver, copper, bronze and even iron – at the time a more rare and precious metal than the others.

  Bronze made its very first appearance in Mesopotamia in about 2800, and did not reach Egypt until about 2000. More significant for developing trade was its generalized use, which is harder to date with precision – say about 2000 to 1500, with Mesopotamia starting early and Egypt lagging behind. In the tomb of King Tutankhamun (c. 1350 BC) there are more copper objects than bronze.

  This gradual extension, a sort of second career for bronze, was linked to waves of emigration by the metal-workers of Asia Minor already mentioned. They were to be found at Ugarit, where they remained for two hundred years or so, until about 1700 BC; in Byblos, an important metal-working centre in about 2000, where they developed very fine techniques of ‘damascene’, the art of chasing gold thread on to copper, silver or niello; and their traces are also found in Cyprus, Palestine, Egypt and central Europe. Richer regions were the beneficiaries of this important diaspora. With bronze, it became possible to manufacture that impressive armoury of offensive and defensive weapons without which there would have been no state, no prince who commanded respect. It became the foundation of a material civilization – just as iron and steel are still the basis of our own civilization. Copper and tin mines would therefore become coveted objects, jealously guarded. Comparatively rare, but scattered across the known world, they usually had to be exploited from a distance. To capture trade in these precious metals, rich regions had a built-in advantage, using their trading networks which had long been organized around the so-called ‘palace economy’.

  For it was indeed the princes who, having started by controlling the daily life of their subjects under the system of barter, later drew into the palace coffers any resources which could be mobilized – dues paid in kind, taxes, unpaid labour, customs duties. It was in the palaceworkshops that craft production intended for foreign export was organized. This ‘royal palace’ system would expand further, feeding off the new developments in trade. The palace was not only the most important economic centre in the region, it was often the only one, with the prince himself being the leading producer, financier and customer. It was for his benefit, and for that of the small group of people attendant on his person, that trade was organized and developed. Religious temples too, with their landed estates, peasants and craftsmen, were ‘palaces’ in an economic sense. Sometimes they had even preceded the princes in this respect. In the second millennium BC, such economic concentration can be found not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but in the Hittite Empire, or in Crete– where the fabulous palace cellars with their giant amphorae of oil or wine (70,000 litres in stock according to Evans’s calculations) speak for themselves, as visitors to Knossos can attest. The palace at Ugarit was regularly extended to match the city’s fortunes and those of its rulers, and the development of its ‘administration’. King Solomon too had his ‘palace economy’.

  So without a palace there could be no state – and where there was a palace there was always a state. The system was only viable because it was based on the ruthless exploitation of masses of peasants and craftsmen. If the economy expanded, the people’s dependence could only increase. Before long every region had marked out its own jealously guarded supply zones, from which it derived both luxury goods and military strength. Centred on these zones, a form of private capitalism was soon seeking to expand beyond the palace economy in the narrow sense. Copper from Anatolia, Arabia (via Bahrain) or Cyprus, and tin from Iran or possibly already from Tuscany, Spain and England, were circulating in the form of crude, half-finished (or even finished) products. Primitive furnaces, dug in the ground, have been found in Sinai, where copper ore was treated before being dispatched to the Nile. When in i960 underwater archaeologists discovered a wreck dating from 1200 b c off Gelidonya on the Turkish coast, its cargo was found to consist of forty copper ingots in the shape of ‘oxhides’, bearing the mark of the Cypriot copperfounders.

  The network went on expanding, taking in Malta, Iran, Turkestan, and the Indus; it stretched from the north which produced copper, tin and amber, to Nubia in the south, a colonial territory mercilessly exploited by the Egyptians. Overland caravans and shipping convoys connected with each other. Ships and boats were already venturing into the seas of northern Europe, perhaps already hoisting the leather sails the Venetii were using when Caesar defeated them in a hard-fought naval battle. The north-south land routes must have been even busier across the narrow European continent, obeying the call of the Mediterranean. The same drawing power affected the Red Sea, where a Theban tomb painting (sixteenth century BC) depicts the local coasting trade: native producers are taking their goods to an Egyptian port, possibly Koseir at the far end of the route running from Coptos on the Nile to the Red Sea. What I find particularly striking is that these round boats, probably made of osiers, and built to a design still found in Arab countries today, have a triangular sail, carefully rendered by the painter. Now the triangular sail is characteristic of the Indian Ocean. Two thousand years later, Islamic sailors were the first to introduce to the Mediterranean this exotic shape of sail (so well adapted to its waters that it came to be considered typically Mediterranean, as compared to the Atlantic, and was known as the ‘Latin’ or lateen rig). So the Theban painting suggests links with that other zone of sea travel, from the Persian Gulf to the Indies, governed by the monsoon.

  This traffic on land, river or sea benefited from favourable circumstances. I am not suggesting that there were no pirates on the high seas or brigands on land routes. But these long-distance connections implied a degree of complicity between one city or state and another. In Mesopotamia, goods were passed efficiently from city to city, like the ball in a good rugby match. The great caravans of black donkeys, for example, which travelled north from Assur to Kanesh (present-day Kliltepe) carrying tin and fabrics bought in southern Mesopotamia, and bringing back copper from Anatolia on the return trip, were never intercepted or harassed on their regular routes. A Babylonian document from this time (early in the second millennium BC), mentions ‘royal travel permits’, which no doubt had to be paid for, and the itineraries were well-organized with overnight halts and ‘refreshment-providers at the crossroads’. Even so, the journey was tough going and dangerous enough for the Mesopotamians to invoke the protection ofShamash, the sun-god, before leaving: ‘O Thou, helper of the traveller whose road is harsh, and comforter of him who crosses the sea, fearing the waves’.

  Mesopotamia’s advantages: roads and currency

  Mesopotamia lay at the crossroads of many routes: it bordered on Iran and the Indian Ocean, stretched up as far as Asia Minor, and could make contact with Cappadocia through the good offices of Assyrian merchants. But the most vigorous arteries of trade ran to Syria, beyond powerful Mari, aggressive Carchemish and Aleppo, towards the Orontes valley, and down to the sea and the great port of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra). An early version of Genoa or even Venice, Ugarit was the gateway to the ‘upper sea of the setting sun’, as the Mesopotamians called the Mediterranean, as opposed to the ‘lower sea�
�, the Persian Gulf.

  Without necessarily seeing Mesopotamia in the ages of Sargon and Hammurabi as an illustration of the theory of ‘poles of growth’, one is forced to recognize the region’s obvious precociousness, revealed very early by the rise of an economy that used currency. This was not money-as-symbol in the sense we know it today. But a monetary economy is one in which a single commodity – say, a precious metal– tends to be used as a measure for all others and to be substituted for them in trading. It was the mighty Persian Empire which much later on generalized the Lydian invention of money in the modern sense, using stamped coins which it dispatched all over the Middle East, including Mesopotamia and Egypt (the latter being rather resistant to them, as it happens).

  The earliest form of currency used for payment by the Sumerians was a measure of barley. So in Mesopotamia money had its origins in crop cultivation, rather than in livestock, which was the unit used in Rome (pecunia), in Greece (bous) and in India (rupia). Barley as currency continued to be used for ordinary transactions, since metal, when it made its first appearance (first copper, then silver, in weighted amounts), was a sort of money of account, a scale of reference. Barley continued to be the ‘real’ money. A contract, after stipulating the price in silver, would indicate in an appendix what the current exchange rate was between silver and barley. For foreign trade, however, the currency which acted as a stimulus and became widely adopted was, of course, metallic.

  Silver, as soon as it appeared and began to be used as real currency for some transactions, tended, in fact, to prevail over other forms of payment. This explains one decision of the code of Hammurabi: if the proprietress of a tavern will not accept grain as the price for drink, but receives silver and therefore ‘makes the price of the drink fall below the price of grain, the said proprietress will be seized and flung into the water’. This unexpected detail indicates the ambiguous nature of a semi-monetary economy. Perhaps as one expert suggests, barter was retained when it was possible to pay in kind in heavy goods – near rivers or by the sea – or when palaces had been built, since they could store goods in quantity. The monetary economy would have prevailed, on the other hand, among ‘capitalists’ who did not have enormous storehouses to draw on, and whose ‘travelling salesmen’ travelled the roads, with their ‘agents carrying their capital’, as suggested in the invocation to Shamash quoted above.

  The rapid appearance alongside palace officials of authentic merchants, some of them travelling wholesalers, others providers of funds (the latter definitely the more important), was an unmistakable sign of Mesopotamia’s economic precociousness. In every city these merchants made up a community apart, the karum. To judge by the karum of Kanesh, which we know about from its plentiful correspondence, they had at their disposal warehouses and the facilities of a trade association which acted as a sort of chamber of commerce. They were competent to handle silver for payments, and were familiar with notes of hand, bills of exchange and compensatory payments – which proves that the instruments of capitalism emerge spontaneously whenever circumstances favour them. In Babylon, there were even banking houses, so we are not surprised to find a monetary economy in Ugarit, the outlet on the coast for the Mesopotamian hinterland: it was an active port (150 vessels are mentioned as being there) and not far from the Taurus silver mines. The city’s merchants, importers and exporters, some of them foreign in origin, paid for their purchases of wool, slaves and even land in silver sides.

  Did the choice of silver, as a less cumbersome form of payment thancopper or bronze, promote Mesopotamia’s foreign trade? One would think so. But silver itself had to be purchased. In return for imported raw materials and foodstuffs – silver, timber, copper, tin, precious and semi-precious stones, oil and wine – Mesopotamia could offer only barley, dates, hides, woollen fabrics, engraved cylinders and other craft goods. It also acted as an intermediary, taking a commission for its services. The rule seemed to be to buy as much as possible from the south and east, where silver was highly valued (so southern Mesopotamia preferred to buy copper from Bahrain rather than from Anatolia) and to sell luxury goods and textiles to the north and west, the suppliers of silver. Perhaps the Mesopotamian economy did not operate entirely on the standard rule for advanced countries – buying raw materials and making a profit by selling them on, either in original condition or as manufactured products. It could be that Mesopotamia was already benefiting from the rule which prevailed so long in the Mediterranean, whereby the use of silver, an over-valued commodity in the Far East, was an advantage in itself, a beneficial ‘multiplier’ of trade, at least for return goods. In that case, the choice of silver currency in Mesopotamia, close to the currents of trade with India, would carry extra significance. But the explanation is based on rather slight evidence.

  Egyptian gold

  To explain everything in terms of silver would be an exaggeration. And to explain everything by the contrast between Egypt and Mesopotamia would be equally so. Yet that contrast is striking and economists register astonishment and even exasperation when confronted with the spectacle of life in Egypt: fantastically well-ordered and intelligent, yet obstinately archaic. Just as the potter’s wheel took a long time to enter everyday life, so too did bronze. First introduced in about 2000 BC, it was not in common use until 1500, after an interval of five hundred years during which it was hardly used at all. Similarly, Egypt only ever had one money of account, the shat (7.6 grammes) of copper or bronze, dating from the fourth dynasty. In about 1400 BC this was replaced by the qite (9.1 grammes). This should not be regarded as a strengthening of the currency: money remained of mar-ginal significance in Egypt, barter being the rule until the Persian or indeed the Greek conquests.

  And yet Egypt, like Mesopotamia, had to engage in the foreign trade necessary for its survival and its luxuries. It exported manufactured products: linen cloth renowned for its fineness, porcelain, multicoloured glass, furniture, jewels and amulets. But it was not as committed to this long-distance trade as Mesopotamia, since except for timber, Egypt could obtain either at home or on its doorstep almost all the raw materials it needed: copper from Sinai (ingots from Syria and Cyprus were not imported until the middle of the second millennium b c); various types of stone for building, to be found along the banks of the Nile – granite, sandstone, schist, limestone or basalt; many precious and semi-precious stones from the eastern desert; coral from the Red Sea; ivory, ebony and especially gold from Nubia (the name itself means ‘land of gold’). Gold was obtained by primitive panning methods, carried out by labourers who were treated as slaves. Production was plentiful. Under Tutmosis HI (1502-1450 BC) Nubia sent the pharaoh two or three hundred kilos of gold in a single year. This is a fabulous figure, if one thinks that Spanish America, from the first voyages of discovery until 1650, was delivering on average hardly more than a ton a year. There was some truth then in the repeated claims in the diplomatic correspondence of Amarna (Amenophis III, 1413~ 1377, and Amenophis IV, 1377-1358) that in Egypt gold was as common as sand. Pusratta, the emperor of Mittani, a contemporary of Amenophis IV, preferred to say ‘like dust between the toes’. Silver on the other hand was in short supply, so the gold-silver ratio under the Middle Kingdom was only 1 : 2 or even 1:1.

  By possessing gold, Egypt was unconsciously but effectively in a strong position. Was this an encouragement to stagnate? Whereas Mesopotamia was obliged to make constant efforts, to remain active and alert and to launch into foreign trade, Egypt suggests to us, mutatis mutandis, China in the eighteenth century ad: self-confident and supremely self-centred.

  The very long-term trend: the ‘conjoncture’

  The Mediterranean economy described above had its highs and lows and experienced a number of crises. It was admittedly prosperous for centuries on end: evidence for this lies in its expansion, or in the creation of mighty states and huge palaces, whose interest is not confined to art history. It is even possible that the move beyond the palace economy, traceable in the regions of ‘cuneiform script�
�, was both proof and result of economic expansion greater than elsewhere. All the same, ups and downs occurred. We are fairly sure that routes were sometimes blocked, that prices fluctuated, and that the size of the population rose and fell (at least in Egypt and Crete), and we also know that there were political accidents or upheavals which could not help but bring economic catastrophe in their wake.

  All this being so, and since I have rather provocatively brought the word ‘conjoncture’ (trend) into the debate, can we find a genuine use for it? Some kind of overall pattern must have existed of course, but we can do little more than imagine what it was like, on the basis of some sketchy evidence and hypotheses which are no more than plausible.

  i) I would imagine that this world, with its criss-cross trading links, and allowing both for inertia and abrupt change, must nevertheless have had some kind of overall rhythm, though that would of course have concerned only the higher forms of trade.

  2.) The only indicators we have, and they are very imperfect, concern Mesopotamia and Egypt. The former was active, and carried much weight, but was, so to speak, lacking in direction, or rather disrupted by excessive political change; the latter by contrast was a huge but passive economy: all trade routes seemed to lead there but it was often manipulated from outside, as in later times Cantonese China would be by European capitalism.