Traders and money were closely related and can be viewed together as part of a process that profoundly shaped the development of early and later states. Most approaches to the subject have been materialistic to some degree, following Marx’s method of determining how a people creates and distributes its wealth. Because the dominant mode of production in early states was not capitalist (that is, organized to facilitate profit-based trading), many twentieth-century scholars relegated trade to the unimportant dustbin of history. A later group of scholars, influenced by sociology and anthropology, noticed how important demand for luxury goods was in some cases, and started seeing long-distance trade as more pivotal in how societies changed over time.
At this point archaeologists and Assyriologists have made great strides in figuring out how money and trade related to both production and consumption, supply and demand, in the Ancient Near East. We have learned that certain discoveries, like Ugarit, the karum of Kanesh, and the Uluburun shipwreck, can change the field nearly overnight and reveal lives of traders who operated in social and geographic interstices between the great centers. Theirs was a world of particular social relations related to consumption and production, and it had its own dynamics. Technologies such as money, accounting, business correspondence, sailing, caravanning, loading, and weighing were obviously important. Legal protections, endowments by palace and temple, trader partnerships, ethnic and familial bonds, and the suspicion of merchants and their resultant coping strategies - these are all important social relations. These dynamics are beginning to be studied, and there is room for promising discoveries in libraries as well as in archaeological sites. To penetrate this challenging aspect of the Ancient Near East, students will do well to follow the progress of sociology and economic anthropology as well as excavations and text editions.
World History
