7. Rise of Egyptian commerce; characteristic wares.—Egypt never became a commercial country so long as it remained under its native rulers. With the period known as the New Empire, however, beginning about 1600 B.C., commerce at least became more important than it had been before. Regular communication was established with Asia, and caravans brought to the country the products of Phœnicia, Syria, and the Red Sea district. Before the eyes of Joseph and his brethren “behold, a company of Ishmaelites came from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt”; to this caravan Joseph was sold as a slave. The wares named here were characteristic imports of Egypt; among others were precious woods, ivory, gold, wine, and oil. Among the exports of the country were grain, linen, and manufactured wares like weapons, rings, and chains. Even to a late period trade was carried on by barter, the use of coins being rare, and many of the imports came as tribute, for which the Egyptians needed to make no return.

8. Development of Egyptian commerce in a later period.—Only in the last period of Egyptian independence, a few centuries before the country was conquered by Alexander, did commerce bind it closely to other portions of the ancient world. The government, which formerly had discouraged trade, now permitted and encouraged it; Greek merchants came in considerable numbers to Egypt; and an active commerce sprang up. It is said that Necho, the king who ruled about 600 B.C., sent out Phœnician sailors to attempt the circumnavigation of Africa; and the same king took up the work of cutting a canal across the isthmus of Suez which was completed shortly afterward. The canal was allowed to fill up with sand, but was reopened later, and its course may be distinctly traced, it is said, along the route of the modern canal.

9. Rise of commerce in the Mesopotamian Valley.—The district northwest of the Persian Gulf, centering in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, offered opportunities for the rise of civilization which led to the establishment of settled governments while Egypt was still living secluded from the rest of the world. This district was rich in agricultural products, but lacked the metals, some of the building materials, and other of the raw materials of industry. Though it was bordered in part by deserts, communication with other districts was far easier than in the case of Egypt; and commerce with other countries early acquired an importance here which Egyptian commerce attained only in the last period of the country’s history. Ancient Babylon, which rose to importance some time after 3000 B.C., under a Semitic people (with a language akin to that of the Jews), was a market-place for wares brought not only from the South (Arabia) and West (Syria), but also from the East (Iran, the later Persia). Clay tablets, used like modern paper for the preservation of records, have been discovered and deciphered in modern times, and show an active trade in the precious metals, grain, wool, building materials, etc.

10. Development of commerce under the Assyrian and Persian empires.—Military expeditions extended the commercial relations of the people of this district; and the conquests of an Assyrian, who founded a great empire about 745 B.C., were guided in part by commercial considerations. Babylon, Armenia, Syria, and parts of Iran and Palestine, were brought under one rule; peoples on the frontiers were held in check, and order was fairly well maintained within; so that merchants could traverse the different parts of the empire, and meet at its capital, Nineveh, to exchange their wares. The Assyrian empire was made by the sword, and it fell by the sword after a brief duration; but its place was taken by succeeding states, and commerce continued to grow. The Persian empire, which enjoyed its full power for about two hundred years, until its destruction by Alexander in 330 B.C., included an area more than half that of modern Europe; it stretched from the Mediterranean on the West to the Indus on the East, from the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf to the Black and Caspian seas. Within these boundaries lay some of the richest regions of the ancient world, the products of which could now be exchanged without passing from under the protection of the Great King.

11. Relative insignificance of the commerce of the ancient empires. The Jews. The Phœnicians.—In the Oriental states which we have hitherto considered, commerce never grew to a position of decisive importance in the national life, however great it may seem when we compare it with its meager beginnings. It served mainly the needs of luxury, and left untouched the economic position of the mass of the people. If we seek in the ancient Orient a people whose very existence depended on trade we must look further. We do not find the Jews to have been such a people, though we are accustomed nowadays to think of them as devoted largely to the pursuit of trade. The descriptions of the Bible show that they lived mainly a pastoral and agricultural life; and down to the time of the Roman Empire they counted for little in the world of commerce. A truly commercial people we do find, however, in near neighbors of the Jews, the Phœnicians, who inhabited a strip of land on the coast of Syria and Palestine, scarcely ten miles wide in most places and little over a hundred miles long. They could gain a scanty food supply from the level ground, and had timber in abundance on the mountains that separated them from the interior, but had to look to trade with other peoples for the means of growth which their home denied them.

12. Commerce of the Phœnicians. Beginnings of sea-trade.—From raw materials which were in many cases procured from other countries they manufactured products which found a market throughout the ancient world. Their cloths and glass were celebrated; they exported large amounts of metal ware; and they had a monopoly of the purple dye extracted from a species of shell-fish, which was highly prized throughout this period. These wares were but a few of those in which they regularly traded; the reader who would have a more detailed account of the wares of Phœnician commerce, especially the imports, is advised to study the description in the Bible. They maintained an active exchange with peoples to the South, East, and North of them by caravan routes, while they were the first people of antiquity to secure such mastery over the sea that it could be made the medium of regular and extensive transportation. The beginning of these sea voyages is lost in the obscurity of the past. We know that they were highly developed by 1500 B.C., when Sidon was the leading Phœnician city, and that they did not cease to extend when the primacy of the Phœnician cities passed to Tyre. The Phœnicians taught the art of navigation to the ancient world. Their ships were long the accepted models of construction, and the Greeks learned from them to direct their course at night by the North, or, as the Greeks called it, the Phœnician star.

13. Development of sea-trade; wares of Phœnician commerce.—Beginning, presumably, with fishing and short coasting trips, and reluctant always to venture out in the stormy season, they had reached the islands of Cyprus and Rhodes, and had established regular commerce with Greece in the heroic age of Greek history, say before 1000 B.C. From this point their progress was rapid, and soon they had traversed the whole Mediterranean, and passed outside it into the Atlantic. The means of cheap transportation which they controlled gave them an immense economic advantage. We may accept as a product of the imagination the story that on their arrival in Spain they found silver so plentiful that they not only filled their ships but made their utensils, even their anchors, from it; still the story shadows forth a truth. They found wares in some districts cheap and begging a market because of their abundance, which were rare and highly prized elsewhere; and they could make great profits by exchanging wares so as to put each where it was most wanted. From the island which we now call England they procured tin, which is a very rare metal in Europe, and which was especially desired as a component of the important alloy bronze. They got copper in Cyprus and Spain, also silver and iron in Spain, and gold and ivory in Africa. They carried westward the wares of the Orient (cf. our words cinnamon, cassia, hyssop, cumin, manna, all from Hebrew forms), and manufactures, which not only gratified the momentary needs of Europeans but served also as models for imitation.

14. Establishment of colonies by the Phœnicians. Carthage.—The Phœnicians are noteworthy not only as the greatest merchants and the first navigators of the ancient world; they were the leaders also in the founding of colonies. At points important for commercial or naval reasons they established stations which enabled them to trade in security with the natives and to control the sea. Gades, for instance (the modern Cadiz), near the straits of Gibraltar, was a rallying-point from which the Carthaginians extended their voyages to the tin islands in the North, and far down the Atlantic coast of Africa on the South. Similar stations were established on many of the Mediterranean islands (Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Balearics); and one founded on the north coast of Africa, Carthage (near the site of modern Tunis), grew to especial importance. The power of the Phœnicians declined, a few centuries after 1000 B.C., partly by reason of internal dissensions and the attacks of land-powers like Assyria, partly by reason of the commercial rivalry of the Greeks, who had risen to an independent position and cut the lines of communication between East and West. In this period Carthage fell heir to the Phœnician establishments in the western Mediterranean, and maintained its power and policy on substantially similar lines until it received its great defeats at the hands of Rome.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

1. What evidences of prehistoric commerce are given by Indian arrow-heads, wampum, Indian ornaments, or the relics of the mound-builders?