Industry and commerce received a huge impetus in the Hellenistic period. In part, commerce was, as always, closely related to agricultural production. Whereas around a big city such as Rome horticultural enterprises arose whose products—vegetables, fruit, and flowers—were brought to the city and sold there by the producers themselves, the import of grain from overseas gave rise to a new class of large-scale transporters and traders of grain. At the level of the family business, industry and commerce were traditionally combined, in that the artisan or craftsman himself sold his products from his workshop. This remained largely true, though additional slave labor could sometimes considerably enlarge the workplace. Besides the older crafts such as those of the potter, the bronze worker or ironsmith, the leather worker or shoemaker and the like, new arts and crafts emerged in the big cities of the Hellenistic world and foremost in Rome, specialists for whom there usually had not been enough employment in an earlier period: goldsmiths and silversmiths, furniture makers, tailors and other cloth workers, and so forth. Moreover, completely new professions appeared, such as innkeeper, doctor, schoolmaster, and other more or less intellectual professions, to which, at a higher level, also belonged the lawyer. In the big cities, there were owners of donkeys, mules, and carts to be hired for transport, and also people who in fact had only their manual labor to hire out for a living: dockers and porters in the harbors or at the city gates, laborers in construction projects, and the like. Another category again was made up of those belonging to artistic professions, such as painters, sculptors, mosaicists, or professional musicians and actors, the latter usually moving from city to city in groups that claimed the god Dionysus as their patron. Taken together, the economic life of at least the bigger cities in the Hellenistic world seems to have been richer and more variegated than had been the case in earlier periods. It was not rare for craftsmen and traders from abroad to settle in these cities too; whole streets or neighborhoods could be inhabited by foreigners.
Perhaps the most striking economic characteristic of the Hellenistic age was the emergence of a truly long-distance trade. Compared to the total economic activity of the period, this commerce was probably of minor importance, but the connections that since Alexander the Great had been made between various regions for the first time created an integrated economic space that encompassed the whole of the Mediterranean, West Asia, and parts of Central and South Asia—a space in which not only goods but also ideas could travel. Trade routes crossed both land and sea. On land, the traders dealt primarily in highly valued luxury goods, such as precious stones and pearls from the regions of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and farther away, pepper and other spices from India, incense from South Arabia or Somalia, myrrh and other aromatics from the desert regions of Arabia and Iran, and finally silk from China after the establishment of the Silk Road around 120 BC. These products from countries outside the Hellenistic world were paid for with gold and silver coins or with products of Hellenistic applied art, such as bronze vessels, bronze mirrors, sculptures, glass, and ceramics. Sometimes, the exotic products were processed in the Hellenistic world, such as Chinese silkbeing dyed in Phoenicia, and could subsequentlybe re-exported. The merchants in this long-distance trade were mainly Phoenicians, Syrians, Jews, and Arabs, Iranians, and
Indians. Greek and Aramaic were the languages that were commonly understood along the trade routes as far as India. Caravans followed fixed routes touching markets and stopping places and regional or even international commercial centers, such as Petra in the desert of modern Jordan, Antioch, and later Palmyra in Syria, Seleucia, and Ctesiphon on the Tigris in Mesopotamia. In the Mediterranean area itself, it was above all Alexandria in Egypt, a few Phoenician cities, Rhodes, Delos (after 167 BC), Corinth, and Carthage in the west that could be called commercial centers. Much of the caravan trade was intermediate
(a)
Figure 31 Delos and Hatra (2nd - 1st c. BC). Delos and Hatra were two important transit centers: the one a seaport, the other a caravan city. The aerial photograph above shows part of the island of Delos in the Aegean sea, and the one overleaf shows Hatra in Northern Iraq, in the desert lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers. Delos, renowned throughout history as the holy island of the god Apollo, in 166 was placed by the Romans under Athenian supervision, to function as a free port for all of the Eastern Mediterranean. The city on the island flourished, attracting traders from far and wide. After about a century, Delos lost its importance again, especially because trade routes tended to be relayed toward Italy. On the photograph here we see from top to bottom (we are looking in a northerly direction): the sacred lake (now dry: the dark circular shape), the agora of the Italian traders, several temples, other agoras and stoas, and then, on the slopes of a low hill, residential quarters. Warehouses lined the seaside. Higher up the hill there are more sanctuaries, also catering to the foreigners in this cosmopolitan community, such as the sanctuaries of the Egyptian Isis and Sarapis and of the Syrian Atargatis. Hatra was a semi-autonomous town in the Parthian Empire. It was founded in the 1st century BC, and it flowered in the first centuries AD until it was captured and destroyed by the Sassanids in 240-245. It was an important trade center on the route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and a caravan city where many caravan routes came together (the dark lines leading away from the city in all directions are such caravan routes). We can see an extensive built-up area enclosed by a city wall that was over 6 km in length and strengthened with 160 towers. In the center is a huge sanctuary, walled as well, which housed several temples for both Greek and indigenous gods. It may also have been the seat of the local government. Photos: a) from A. A.M. Van der Heyden Atlas van de antieke wereld, Amsterdam 1958 Elsevier; b) Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, PRM 1998.294.1241
Figure 31 (Continued)
(b)
Trade: the silk from China, for instance, passed through many hands before it reached the Mediterranean. The same was true, until far into the 2nd century BC, for the overseas trade between Egypt and India: Egyptian ships did not go further than the straits near Aden, where they met Arabian and Indian traders who monopolized the routes up to the west coast of India. The discovery of the monsoon winds toward the end of the 2nd century BC established a direct sea link between Egypt and India, initiating overseas commerce that was modest at first but would greatly increase after Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Empire. The Ptolemies had already at an early stage sent expeditions through the Red Sea to explore the east coast of Africa in search of war elephants, spices, and other exotic valuables. This commerce, as well as the trade with Arabia and India, was heavily regulated by the royal government, for import and export duties on all traded goods provided the royal treasury with a considerable income.
In this way, Egypt was also an exporter of Indian and Arabian goods, apart from its own products such as grain, linen, various vegetable oils, leather, papyrus, and glass. In its turn, the country imported from northern Mediterranean lands timber, metals, wine, and olive oil. On the whole, the balance of trade was very favorable for Egypt, and the royal treasury was usually well-filled. Its income was largely spent on the royal court, the central administration, and on warfare, so that the population at large certainly did not enjoy any increase in prosperity. to the papyri, relatively much is known of Egypt,
But elsewhere, too, the economic innovations of the period cannot have touched the mass of the rural population very much; rather, their position may well have deteriorated both economically and juridically. Those who profited most from economic activities that were more than strictly local were everywhere the rich, both the traditionally rich and the new rich: large landowners; those who in the service of the kings acquired, legally or illegally, enormous fortunes; and a few big merchants. Together, they formed only a very small part of the population, but it was they who offered a market for the luxury goods from the long-distance trade. That market remained small, and thus the trade in luxury goods played only a modest role in the economy of the Hellenistic world. Far more important were the trade movements between various Hellenistic regions dealing in grain, wine, and olive oil. The group of countries that were thus connected with each other gradually increased, which made possible more economic development and growth regionally. That was the case, for instance, in the Black Sea region in the 3rd century BC, where the Greek cities experienced growing prosperity as a result of the grain trade. Above all, the orbit of the Hellenistic economy expanded in a western direction: here, the Roman conquests brought about the unification of Italy, where the import and export of agrarian products led to an economic flourishing, while the elite, grown rich on war booty, offered a strong consumer market.
All that commercial traffic required, among other things, harbor facilities. In the Hellenistic period, new and artificial harbors were constructed that were provided with quays, piers, docks, arsenals, and light towers, foremost at Alexandria but hardly less impressively at Carthage, Rhodes, Delos, and a few other Greek cities (Athens and the Piraeus in comparison lost much of their significance).
World History
