trade, Greek

trade, Greek
Exchange in some form has probably existed since the emergence of the first properly human social groups. Trade, whether local, regional, or international, is a much later development. It is a certain inference from the extant documentary records in Linear B script that the world of Mycenaean age palace-economy knew all three main forms of commerce (see Mycenaean civilization), and a reasonable guess that a considerable portion of the long-distance carrying trade was in the hands of specialized professional traders. But whether that trade was ‘administered’ or ‘free-enterprise’ is impossible to say. It is one sign among many of the economic recession experienced by the Greek world generally between about 1200 and 800 BC that in these dark centuries regional and international trade dwindled to vanishing-point; the few known professional traders were typically men of non-Greek, especially [The entire page is 1444 words long]

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