In Chapter 3, Liverani pointed out that, since economy was the starting point of all the social and ideological aspects of the new city state, commerce and trade became indispensable when it comes to talking about the development of the society. The trading process was divided into two parts: the administered portion and the market-based portion. Liverani believes that the two parts coexisted pretty nicely because they essentially existed in the structure of the same commercial system.
One thing I wish Liverani made more clearly in his explanation is that, he does not exactly identify the trading partners of the people from the Lower Mesopotamian. He only says that while the temple set the price for certain goods, the merchants still had the option to manipulate the price and make some bargains with the merchants there as soon as they got to the foreign land, due to temporal and spatial differences. But it’s unclear as far as how the “foreign traders” reached the agreement about price with the temple, which is located very far away, and who exactly these foreign traders were. I would imagine that it would be a super complicated process for the two groups of people to come up with a mutually agreed market price, especially considering the lack of knowledge that they had about each other.
Another really interesting point I found about trading was that, the ancient government actually used the “propaganda of imports” as opposed to the “propaganda of exports” that we use today. The ancient state apparently believed that, it showed their strength that the state was able to make what it needed to flow in from all parts of the world. Nowadays, countries take pride in the fact they have the abilities and reputations to sell their goods overseas. This is probably because, trading was mostly involved with raw materials in the ancient time, so the reason for trading was mostly based on geographical differences as opposed to technology and skill difference that we care about today.
No comments:
Post a Comment