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This study seeks to ascertain the identification and origins of the commodities in trade between the Levant and Aegean during the Persian period, ca. 540-330 B.C. Using Semitic and Greek textual sources, as well as numismatic, epigraphic and archaeological evidence, I identify and discuss nearly 200 commodities, including spices, pigments, dyes, chemicals, and manufactured items such as coinage and ceramics. In the final chapter, a synthesis of the material is presented along with the historic and economic conclusions for Persian period trade that can be drawn from the assembled evidence.
This chapter considers the relationship between the consumption of commodities imported via long distance trade and the ideal of communal economic self-sufficiency (autarkeia). In the first part of the chapter, aggregated data for commodities appearing in long distance Levantine-Aegean trade in the archaic and classical periods are presented. Drawn from textual and archaeological sources, these data demonstrate not only the wide range of commodities in trade—dozens of items including raw materials, processed goods, and finely wrought objects—but also the apparent increase in the number of items appearing in trade over time. Based on these observations, the second part of the chapter argues that a process of increasing “democratization” of access to imports, including co-called luxury goods, and the concurrent development of consumerism in the Aegean world, and in Athens particularly, complicated any notion of communal economic self-sufficiency. As individuals developed life styles involving imported goods, and poleis became dependent on the import taxes derived from these goods to fill state coffers for communal purposes, the ideal of autarkeia moved ever farther from becoming a reality.
Pottery Markets in Ancient Greek World (8th-1st c. B.C.), Proceedings of the Symposion held at the Université libre de Bruxelles 19-21 June 2008
Egypt as a ‘Market’ for Greek Pottery: Some Thoughts on Production, Consumption and Distribution in an Intercultural Environment (2013)2013 •
I examine the importance of maritime trade in the Greek world of the Classical and Hellenistic periods, arguing that it played a role in the economy of many Greek poleis comparable to that of the highly urbanized and prosperous civilizations of Renaissance Northern Italy or 17th century Holland, and significantly greater than in England, the early Modern world's other major international trading power, in the early 19th century. Two important indices of trade activity will be examined first: the taxes levied on maritime trade in the harbours of Athens, Delos, Rhodes and the member states of Athens' Delian league; and evidence for the size and cargo capacity of merchant ships. The rest of the paper will offer a synthesis of recent archaeological research, which corroborates this literary and epigraphic evidence for a high level of trade activity. Leaving aside agricultural products and transport amphoras, which are the subject of other papers, I will briefly discuss the evidence for the trade in commodities such as timber, metals and building stone, and discuss in greater depth a series of recent studies, which show how Greek manufactured goods, including painted or glazed fineware pottery, stone and terracotta statuary, jewelry, gold and silver plate, metalwork, furniture and housewares were imported and exported throughout the Mediterranean.
in Robinson, D. and Goddio, F. (eds), Thonis Heracleion in Context: The Maritime Economy of the Egyptian Late Period, Proceedings of the Conference in the University of Oxford, 15-17 March 2013. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology, 229-246
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