Suppose I’m writing a story, or I’ve obtained a newfangled time machine and want to try it out.
Let’s say it was 2000ish years ago, and I, from some foreign nation, wanted to sail into one of the ancient port cities of the Roman, Greek, or really any other nation and engage in trade.
What practicalities am I going to face? Will I be dealing with customs or immigration officials with nasty looking swords and spears who will want to hear all about me, where I am from, what my intentions are, with a nontrivial chance of being denied the right to port, or am I looking more at a basic inspection to make sure that I’m not laden with obvious contraband or stolen wares or am not a notorious wanted criminal, or is nobody going to bother me unless I make a fuss and alert the local civil guard to send soldiers down to the harbor because someone is screaming in a barbarian tongue and making rude gestures? Outside of officialdom, am I going to face a serious chance of being robbed, or did the authorities keep the port areas reasonably clean of pirates and other thieves?
How easy would it be for me if I (and my traveling buddies) didn’t understand the local language? Would we be able to get by with Latin in a primarily Greek or Egyptian speaking port (perhaps including hiring a local translator).
What type of trade barriers would I see, assuming that there is no serious language matter? Could I just hop on down to the market and set up a stall or troll the harbor for brokers, willing buyers, or willing sellers, or did you have to “know” someone who would be able to get you the right connections?
What about other nations? What would happen if I approached the pre-Columbian Inca Empire with a view to trade (not to conquer)? Or any other pre-modern nation?
With what you told us, you’re talking about more or less any Meditteranean port, which would be under Roman control or would be openly allied to Rome.
Mostly, people were free to go where they pleased and conduct trade as they wished. This assumes they have the money to do so; it’s rare to find that. The bigger problems were confusing arrays of taxes, which were not applied by disinterested bureaucrats. Expect a lot of hard bargaining, unexpected fees of confusing provenance, and a hard time selling your wares because you have no local contacts.
That said, it wasn’t impossible.
Not that hard. Latin would be pretty widely spoken across the Med, and many Greeks in cities would know it well enough to work in.
Depends on the location. Way too complex to discuss and I know very little about this level of detail. What I can say is that’s it’s very much a local thing. Some localities may have monopolies on some items. Others may simply have tight bonds with a certain trading coster, or have an early guild which discourages certain kinds of trade. IIRC, some places did not to like do business with anyone except from their own trading fleets. More than likely, you can overcome any barrier, but going in blind is a tough nut to crack.
Your biggest problem is having no local relationships whatsoever. Much of the ancient world relied on those to a great degree, and they functioned a line of credit, a reassurance that you were a respectable businessman, and a guarrantor of security.
Ho boy, a whole 'nother ball of wax.
The Inca mostly didn’t trade, and what they did was land trade with small tribes around the fringes of their own eclectic quasi-empire.
The Chinese did trade, but it tended to be heavily controlled by the central government depending on era and the passing political winds. The Chinese liked to pretend they were in a tribute/gift relationship when other people brought them goodies and the Emperor “generously” sent back local products. On the other hand, a lot of ports were a long way from whatever was serving as the current capital, and local magistrates are said to frequently turn a blind eye in exchange for bribes or even as a matter of policy.
Many Indian ports and states traded a lot, all up and down the coast. Language issues were and still are fiendishly complex, so it was not uncommon for traders to roll into port, lay out goods on a blanket, and negotiate by backing off, letting some local put an offer next to what they wanted, and then waiting to see if everyone looked happy with it. And this can work around the world. It’s a pretty self-explanatory method.
Suppose I’m writing a story, or I’ve obtained a newfangled time machine and want to try it out.
Let’s say it was 2000ish years ago, and I, from some foreign nation, wanted to sail into one of the ancient port cities of the Roman, Greek, or really any other nation and engage in trade.
What practicalities am I going to face?[\quote]
In the Greco-Roman case, we simply do not know the answers to most of the practical questions. Most of what we know from Roman trade comes from archaeology, like analysis of ceramics, shipwreck distributions, and site surveys. These don’t leave the kind of thick narratives that you are looking for. We also know a lot about trade at selected sites and and certain points of time. How much one can generalize from this is always questionable.
There are some trade-related documents from this period. Peter Bang discusses many of them in his recent book The Roman Bazaar. This book is only worth looking at for its comprehensive review of trade documents. I would suggest that you give the arguments and interpretations a pass.
[quote]
Will I be dealing with customs or immigration officials with nasty looking swords and spears who will want to hear all about me, where I am from, what my intentions are, with a nontrivial chance of being denied the right to port, or am I looking more at a basic inspection to make sure that I’m not laden with obvious contraband or stolen wares or am not a notorious wanted criminal, or is nobody going to bother me unless I make a fuss and alert the local civil guard to send soldiers down to the harbor because someone is screaming in a barbarian tongue and making rude gestures? [\quote]
There is very good evidence from a variety of places that Rome did in fact have import duties. Some of the best stuff comes from Berenike, a port in Egypt on the Red Sea through which most of the luxury goods from India flowed.
There effectively was no “civil guard.” In most cases, there would be scarcely any soldiers billeted in the heartland so there really would be no one to inform.
The power of the authorities was seriously limited. The Cilician pirates were a major problem for a very long time. The Senate handed over extraordinary power to Pompey to deal with them.
If you didn’t know the local language, you would have a very hard time. Latin was the language of the army, but unsurprisingly, we have almost no commercial documents in the Eastern Med written in Latin. Greek was the lingua franca in the east; only soldiers spoke much Latin. One very interesting one is a contract between a Roman and a local agent that is in both Latin and Greek. I don’t have the reference handy, since I just learned about it in a conference.
High-ranking people in Roman society were actually prohibited by custom from engaging in commerce, so they tended to do so through local intermediaries and agents. Trade itself was very high risk, given the hazards of travel. This further divided capital and labor, so to speak.
This entirely depends and is not well known. Just about everything I know comes from Egyptian documents. For the most part, people bringing in large quantities of goods sold them to middlemen who would then resell to individual markets. Someone who brought in three shipfulls of valuables would probably not set up shop himself. Not only would he have to negotiate the perils of local markets, he would have to store his (often perishable) goods. It was much better to sell your grain to someone else in full and let storage and wastage be that person’s problem.
On the contrary, mostly people were slaves and were not free to go anywhere without permission of their masters. (We have an unfortunate tendency to identify with the ruling and propertied classes of past societies, if only because they’re the ones who tended to write or commission the historical literature.) In the OP’s case, if he doesn’t speak a language known to the locals, he may find it difficult to prove to their satisfaction that he is a foreign trader and not an escaped barbarian slave or pirate. I suppose if he shows up with a magnificent ship laden with goods and with a full crew, he will arouse wonder rather than suspicion. If he’s more or less on his own in a small craft, then that’s a bit riskier.
And what if you didn’t really want 100 pounds of goat in exchange for whatever you had brought to trade? Did people buy and sell exclusively in gold or some other universal form of exchange? If not you might get a stack of locally minted coins that would only be good in that particular country or region, or were there money changers around in those days who could exchange local currency into gold or silver?
Even that estimate is dubious and is not grounded in anything resembling inferential statistics.
We have much better data for Roman Egypt, whose social structure was quite different than most of the rest of Rome. Slavery was much, much less common in Egypt than it was on the Italian peninsula.
It depends. Rome had one currency in this period, minted in silver. But the currency was subject to massive debasement starting in the middle of the 1st century AD, so this created its own problems. It was often very difficult to determine whether it would be optimal to trade according to the face value or the weight of the coins. You had to take a gamble on the wear and tear, year of issue, and the local demand for coins. A lot of the time, a trader would simply be better off trading in kind. But, to make things more confusing, traders would trade according to accounting units rather than just the weight of the good. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell in a document whether a trader or taxman is referring to the worth of some good by its unit of account or according to the actual value of the coin. This can make figuring out real ancient prices very difficult.
No, he’s right. Money changing was a common sight in ancient cities. They value of gold and silver coins is based on weight and purity, hence their use of scales. Some merchants would be willing to deal directly in whatever you had, but it was pretty common to exchange it first. Of course, you had to deal with the money changer, who had his cut, and you had to be careful he was shorting you with a false weight.
You would actually be better off with a sizable bag of peppercorns, and another bag of scrolls of cinnamon bark. Through much of history pepper and cinnamon were worth their weight in gold. You could sell off tiny amounts for local currency in small enough pieces to be useful [the average person throughout history tended to have access only to copper with an occasional silver bit, gold was practically unknown unless you were noble or seriously rich. Copper and silver could be minted locally, gold was reserved to the imperial government in general - at least when speaking of eastern and western Rome.]
from what i picked up, rome at the time of julius caesar was an open city and “nations” at the time generally had open borders. peace and order and criminality even in the city centers was a different thing altogether.
Keep in mind, though, the typical Roman city was like a small town; everyone knew everyone else’s business. Our modern concept of privacy and confidentiality did not apply. Nor did the concept of justice, fairness, and the need for reasonable cause or due process. It may not be unusual for a local merchant who was friends with the local centurion to have the merchants arrested for vague “being foreign spies or infiltrators” or some such, at which point the unlucky time travellers would have to answer reasonably or answer under duress. The centurion would not do something like that to an Egyptian or Greek captain because word would get back ond the others would stop coming; but someone with no friends or connections is fair game. Once you confessed (while they plucked your fingernails out) that you were a spy, then they could seize your valuable cargo and sell you off.
Of all the time travel techniques, sailing into a port cold and trying to trade is the worst. Someone in that port ora salior on a ship there has been anywhere in the known world. They would recognize any accent, ask questions that would prove you were lying. Lies are a good start to being arrested; they don’t need “probable cause”.
I recall a time-traveller story where the fellow showed up in medieval times and tried to claim he was from Iceland, the most remote place anyone would think of; the local king (England?) had a fellow from the Norwegian court there who had actually been to Iceland, and said that accent was wrong, and besides, he knew of the rich families in Iceland. Even England, IIRC, had only 50 noble families and it’s hard to pretend to be anything above a minor lord or knight without someone calling you on your family connections.
Harry Turtledove has written a few historical novels (not time-travel) where the protagonists are Greek nautical traders in the ancient world. They’re fiction, but he’s a historian of the period. You may find answers to some of these questions there.
In our modern world we live in hi-rise apartments and know nothing about our neighbours; we stick in our houses and watch TV rather than socialize with neighbours. There are a million people in a big city and people drop in from half-way around the world without introduction. We have a false sense of how privacy and anonymity works. In a world where you even have to hire someone to do your laundry (or scrub it yourself and hang it out to dry), literally and figuratively your dirty laundry is public to all around you. A strange ship cannot just pop up with no back story to cover it. The local sailors will peek over the bow and try to guess who built it and where; where the sail cloth came from; what type of wood it is and how it is fastened or glued. Local merchants will look at you gold jewelry or trade goods and wonder where it was made and how, and try to relate it to what they’ve seen before.
There were stories about Iraqis who turned in their neighbours to the Americans as terrorists to get out of paying back a debt. People are nasty, especially if there’s a profit to be made. You are alone and vulnerable, you have no friends, with a crapload of treasure - if there’s a simple accusation that will separate you from the goods without costing the locals much, odds are the locals will use it. Are you a witch? A spy?
Remember, Jesus was arrested by the Romans because the local temple bosses claimed he had called himself “King of the Jews”. That’s all it took. They weren’t afraid to whip him simply to see if his story changed… Even when he denied it, he was still nailed up on the say-so of the local temple heirarchy. Don’t expect fairness out of the authorities; their chief preoccupations were keep order (appeasing or intimidating the local bigwigs) and making themselves rich.
Just on this case though, I might point out that
a) the evidence for anything that happened here is pretty thin – accounts written many, many years later by those who weren’t present to any of the legal or other proceedings, and more importantly had a pretty big interest in portraying the defendant’s side of the story; and
b) 30 C.E. Judea wasn’t exactly a peaceful place; it was a recently conquered and occupied country, with a widespread violent armed revolt just a couple decades later, another one about thirty years after that, and a (temporarily) successful one thirty years after that one. So it’s not quite like Mayberry or small-town Ohio in 1999. where someone proclaiming themself “Ruler of Ohio” would get pity and a medical referral from the police. It’s a little more like Afghanistan in 2004 or France in 1943, where anyone stupid enough to publicly challenge the authorities (whether or not they actually meant it in a metaphorical, reliigous way) would very quickly find themselves having interviews or worse with heavily armed and bad-tempered men.
I assume street brawls and riots were common problems all through history. Judea or anywhere was not special. The authorities were quick to ensure any perceived problems were dealt with quickly and firmly.
My point is - a trade port would not pick on the Egyptians or Syrians or Gauls just to steal their cargo - but total strangers with no good explanation and no friends would be fair game. Most traders at a port either have friends or contacts there, or know someone who knows someone, etc. I doubt it would be “cold calling” in the modern sense.
Yeah, Jesus did not make any friends in the Temple by having a roaring entrance into town in front of an adoring crowd, and then tossing over the temple merchants tables and whipping them out of the area.
Hey Maeglin, when I saw the thread title I figured I’d find you here!
robert_columbia, if you want some protips on what sort of goods you could flog at various ports on the Mediterranean and Arabian Sea, check out an old but freely available translation of a trader’s guide to the region from the period you’re interested in.
