Page 77 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1854 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom and
peace. But in the face of United States aggression they have
risen up, united as one man. • Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969)

were being extracted, smelted, and traded.The Ulu Burun ductive capacities of their agricultural resources.While an
wreck, for example, carried six tons of copper, all cast into initial answer to this was depopulation through colo-
distinctive “ox-hide” type ingots, slabs of pure copper cast nization, ultimately a number of cities needed to import
into the shape of an outstretched ox-hide. It is significant food. Grain production and export soon became an
that this form of ingot had become standard throughout important industry, particularly for the agriculture-poor
the Mediterranean world by the second millennium BCE. Greek city-states.A particularly important maritime route
was established between Athens, the hungriest of the
The Rise of Urbanism cities, and the Bosporan kingdom in the Crimea. The
One other highly significant feature of the second mil- ancient ports of the Crimea sent out shiploads of grain,
lennium BCE was the development of palace cultures, receiving, in turn, bullion, wine, and elegant pottery. In
cities, and city-states.These created economic differential, the same way, other Greek states maintained links with
the possibilities of economic specialization, and particu- the agriculturally wealthy Greek colonies of Sicily.
lar centers of demand.The earliest urban cultures were sit- By the fifth century BCE, the entire Mediterranean was
uated away from the Mediterranean world, in the river a well-travelled highway, serving the hungry markets of
valleys of Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, and the Greece,Anatolia, and Syria.There are two clear indicators
Yangtze. By the middle Bronze Age, however, there was of this: the introduction of coinage in Anatolia in the sixth
an elaborate palace culture on Crete, and complex urban century, which made processes of exchange easier, and the
entities were forming in Greece and Italy. Cities provided growth of piracy.While briefly suppressed by the Atheni-
fixed markets for goods and secure environments for the ans in the eastern Mediterranean, it remained a major
storage or conversion of surplus. Cities became the prin- problem throughout the Mediterranean until the advent
cipal points of exchange in the relay trade and of eco- of Roman naval dominance in the first century BCE.
nomic distribution for their surrounding regions. Trade One feature of European trade that the pirates
became so important to the cities of the Mediterranean exploited was the trade in people as commodities: the
coast that by the first millennium BCE they were sending slave trade. Large numbers of slaves came into the Euro-
out trading colonies. pean economic system from the Eurasian steppe via the
The Phoenicians sought to exploit southern Spain, set- Black Sea. Others came from Thrace, Greece, and Ana-
ting up a series of trading and mining colonies referred tolia, even well into the Roman period.
to in the Greek sources as “Tartessus,” and in the follow-
ing centuries, the Greeks followed suit. One Greek colony The Celts
of great significance was that of Massilia (modern Mar- Urbanism did not penetrate far north of the Mediter-
seilles) at the mouth of the Rhone river, a site that ranean fringe. From the beginning of the first millennium
enabled considerable control of the tin trade, challenging BCE, the region between eastern Germany and the
the Phoenician (increasingly Carthaginian) control of Atlantic coast of France was dominated by Celtic peoples.
southern Spanish ports. Another was the city of Byzan- Principally farmers and pastoralists, they nevertheless
tium, located strategically on the Bosporus, the narrow exploited mineral deposits where they could find them.
strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, and Salt mines in Austria were opened up and the salt
therefore well situated to take advantage of trade between exported to the Adriatic. Iron was also mined and
the cities of the eastern Mediterranean and the cultures worked in southeastern France and exported to the Etr-
surrounding the Black Sea. uscans and Greeks of Italy. Gold was also exported, as
was wine, and elegant pottery fineware was imported. In
The Grain Trade the same way, Celts also exported goods north, in par-
One significant result of the development of urbanism ticular bronze and iron artifacts. Technology was also
was that the growth of some cities outstripped the pro- exchanged. Celtic kingdoms began minting gold coinage,