Trade, Traders and the Ancient City

Trade, Traders and the Ancient City
Author: Helen Parkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2005-06-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134709412

Trade, exchange and commerce touched the lives of everyone in antiquity, especially those who lived in urban areas. Trade, Traders and the Ancient City addresses the nature of exchange and commerce and the effects it had in cities throughout the ancient world, from the Bronze Age Near East to late Roman northern Italy. Trade, Traders and the Ancient City employs the most recent archaeological, papyrological, epigraphic and literary evidence to present an innovative and timely analysis of the importance and influence of trade in the ancient world.

Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean

Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean
Author: Taco Terpstra
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691172080

How ancient Mediterranean trade thrived through state institutions From around 700 BCE until the first centuries CE, the Mediterranean enjoyed steady economic growth through trade, reaching a level not to be regained until the early modern era. This process of growth coincided with a process of state formation, culminating in the largest state the ancient Mediterranean would ever know, the Roman Empire. Subsequent economic decline coincided with state disintegration. How are the two processes related? In Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean, Taco Terpstra investigates how the organizational structure of trade benefited from state institutions. Although enforcement typically depended on private actors, traders could utilize a public infrastructure, which included not only courts and legal frameworks but also socially cohesive ideologies. Terpstra details how business practices emerged that were based on private order, yet took advantage of public institutions. Focusing on the activity of both private and public economic actors—from Greek city councilors and Ptolemaic officials to long-distance traders and Roman magistrates and financiers—Terpstra illuminates the complex relationship between economic development and state structures in the ancient Mediterranean.

Trade in Classical Antiquity

Trade in Classical Antiquity
Author: Neville Morley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2007-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139461311

Historians have long argued about the place of trade in classical antiquity: was it the life-blood of a complex, Mediterranean-wide economic system, or a thin veneer on the surface of an underdeveloped agrarian society? Trade underpinned the growth of Athenian and Roman power, helping to supply armies and cities. It furnished the goods that ancient elites needed to maintain their dominance - and yet, those same elites generally regarded trade and traders as a threat to social order. Trade, like the patterns of consumption that determined its development, was implicated in wider debates about politics, morality and the state of society, just as the expansion of trade in the modern world is presented both as the answer to global poverty and as an instrument of exploitation and cultural imperialism. This 2007 book explores the nature and importance of ancient trade, considering its ecological and cultural significance as well as its economic aspects.

Trading Communities in the Roman World

Trading Communities in the Roman World
Author: Taco T. Terpstra
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2013-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004238603

In Trading Communities, Taco Terpstra shows that long-distance trade in the Roman Empire was conducted through foreign trading communities living overseas, held together by ethnic and geographical identity.

Trade, Transport and Society in the Ancient World (Routledge Revivals)

Trade, Transport and Society in the Ancient World (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Onno Van Nijf
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317575997

This book, first published in 1992, presents an introduction to the nature of trade and transport in antiquity through a selection of translated literary, papyrological, epigraphical and legal sources. These texts illustrate a range of aspects of ancient trade and transport: from the role of the authorities, to the status of traders, to the capacity and speed of ancient ships. It is clear that the actual means of transportation were crucial; the book illustrates the limitations of ancient transport technology and the consequences for the development of commerce. It focuses first on different aspects of transport over land and then on transport by river and concludes with a discussion of several aspects of ancient seafaring, This book is ideal for students of ancient history.

Law and Trade in Ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia

Law and Trade in Ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia
Author: N. J. C. Kouwenberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9789088909153

This book contains a selection of nineteen articles published by K.R. Veenhof, focusing on his main field of study: law and trade in the Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian society of the early second millennium B.C. They were originally published in journals, conference proceedings and collective volumes over the past fifty years. Their reissue here is motivated by their lasting value and their fundamental importance to the study of these subjects.It includes both "broad" articles, which give an introduction to or an overview of a specific subject, e.g. Old Assyrian trade and the practice of justice in Babylonia in the early second millennium B.C., and "narrow" ones that give an in-depth study of a single issue or a single text, such as a problematic paragraph of Hammurabi's law code or the meaning of the noun iṣurtum. The first two articles provide a general introduction to the subject; the next nine focus on Old Assyrian society, and the final eight concern Old Babylonian.The inclusion of "broad" and "narrow" articles makes this publication of interest both to the well-informed general reader interested in the Ancient Near East and to the specialist working on Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian society.Prof. dr. Klaas R. Veenhof (1935) was a teacher at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and from 1982 until his retirement in 2000 professor at the University of Leiden. Key publications are his dissertation "Aspects of Old Assyrian Trade and its Terminology" (1972), "The Old Assyrian list of year eponyms from Karum Kanish and its chronological implications" (2003), and several editions of Old Assyrian texts, especially "Altassyrische Tontafeln aus Kültepe" (1992) and Kültepe Tabletleri 5 and 8 (2005 and 2010).

The Organization of Ancient Economies

The Organization of Ancient Economies
Author: Kenneth Hirth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2020-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1108863671

In this book, Kenneth Hirth provides a comparative view of the organization of ancient and premodern society and economy. Hirth establishes that humans adapted to their environments, not as individuals but in the social groups where they lived and worked out the details of their livelihoods. He explores the variation in economic organization used by simple and complex societies to procure, produce, and distribute resources required by both individual households and the social and political institutions that they supported. Drawing on a wealth of archaeological, historic, and ethnographic information, he develops and applies an analytical framework for studying ancient societies that range from the hunting and gathering groups of native North America, to the large state societies of both the New and Old Worlds. Hirth demonstrates that despite differences in transportation and communication technologies, the economic organization of ancient and modern societies are not as different as we sometimes think.