Mercanti e politica nel mondo antico.

• Author: Snell, Daniel C.
• Position: Book Review

Mercanti e politica nel mondo antico. Edited by CARLO ZACCAGNINI. Rome: "L'ERMA" DI BRETSCHNEIDER, 2003. Pp. 361. [euro]180.

Zaccagnini's volume addresses the question of how mercantile activity in the ancient world was affected by politics. There is no sustained argument in the collection, but a series of unrelated reflections on particular cases, which we will briefly summarize here.

J. Renger's essay explores the supposed change from the third-millennium temple retainers who conducted trade to the risk-taking entrepreneurs of the second millennium. A. Archi shows that the Ebla silver accounts had prices that varied wildly. He asserts there was clearly private trade beside the state-sponsored trade.

M. G. Biga argues that at Ebla KI: LA[M.sub.7] (LAM x KUR) referred to fairs held in particular months. This term was previously read as a preposition i[s.sub.11]-ki, but Biga makes the case that it is for the more familiar KLLAM = mahirum. K. Veenhof suggests in regard to the Old Assyrian trade in Anatolia that the basic meaning of tamkaru is "traders, traveling or working abroad," and says that "there is no evidence of any regulation of the prices, exchange values or equivalencies of the main trade goods ..."

M. Liverani shows for the Amarna trade that though kings stressed their ceremonial obligations to exchange gifts, they in fact were profit-oriented. He notes that traders and even messengers could not cross borders without royal consent; the international system was actually a barrier to free trade. He derives the crisis of the twelfth century from famine: rulers became incapable of managing the situation and were swept away, but merchants went private and continued to trade. The new states stressed the supposed common descent of the citizens, as opposed to the Bronze Age states that were open to all. New trade routes went around population centers, perhaps to avoid taxation.

A. Bresson points out that a lot of profit could be made from trade in Ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle disdained trade, but this was not the normal Greek attitude. G. Reger notes that in the Hellenistic world noncitizens controlled much of the commerce. Greek cities granted honors to some foreign merchants, and clearly some politicians appreciated the work of merchants. D. Musti studies piracy and slave trading in Hellenistic times. Polybius (202-120 B.C.E.) criticized the Cretans for making "base profit" from this trade, condemning not the slave trade but the...