Commerce in the Ancient Near East
Authors: Warburton David A. 
Published: August 2024

From ca. 3500 bce the ancient Near Eastern trading system, dominated by the urban ancient Near Eastern states, began to grow into what became the first and oldest commercial network in human history, remaining the solitary example of a major economic trading system for almost two millennia. The real take-off began in the 3rd millennium bce when the palaces and temples of Mesopotamia became major centers of commerce, producing and dispatching textiles to distant lands to acquire silver to purchase exotic commodities.

The basis of the transformation opening the way to market exchange was a series of cognitive and social changes taking place between ten and four thousand years ago (ca. 8000–2000 bce). This prelude was the incipient beginning of the creation of a new world, dominating the course of history with a unique system for the two millennia of the Near Eastern Bronze Age (ca. 3500–1200 bce), with further revolutionary changes enabling trade to blossom, in an evolution which stabilized as the premodern economic system still prevailing in many parts of the world today. Two leading cores—the states in Egypt and Mesopotamia—emerged, determining how the periphery responded, partly through military and political force and partly through the market. Responses in the periphery during the millennia when this premodern system was dominant varied widely from a relatively rash adoption of a variety of state and market systems in parts of Asia and an enduring failure to develop such in northern Europe (until relatively recent times, just before the early modern began to develop, by adopting and adapting innovations of the earlier Asian premodern systems—and culminating in a transformation). What happened economically in the earliest states and the evolution of their Bronze Age trading system played the decisive role in the emergence of money, its formation, and the later development of the premodern economies, as had already begun during the Iron Age and eventually led to the gradual incorporation of parts of the ancient Near East into the Mediterranean world (ca. 1200 bce–650 ce), which had itself emerged in the shadow of the Near Eastern system.

Commerce in the ancient Near East took place on three levels: (a) the periphery (Central and South Asia; Anatolia, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula; the Aegean; Nubia), whence raw materials (lapis lazuli, copper, silver, incense, wood, etc.) as products were exported into the core (Egypt, Mesopotamia); (b) the core institutions (temples, palaces), which exported money (silver) and finished products (textiles) to the periphery; and (c) the local markets in the core, where gods, royalty, craftsmen, peasants, and officials were in one way or another remunerated for services and could acquire or dispose of goods in exchange for silver. The entire system depended on state institutions of the core: the labor of men in the agricultural sector and (largely) women in the textile industry served the bureaucrats and the merchants benefited from their business with the institutions to build up the commercial networks upon which the system relied.

Over the course of the millennia, the private sector gradually began to play an increasingly important role in production for the market, and just centuries before the end of the ancient Near East—in the second half of the 1st millennium bce—merchants began to invest heavily in fields and gardens. By the time the Romans appeared in the Near East a little over 2,000 years ago, the private sector was nearing independence, and developments took a very different turn, for example, as the production of textiles came to be dominated by private industry serving the markets and the institutions to a greater degree than had been the rule in the Bronze Age (i.e., before 1000 bce).