The First Marketplaces

From exchange among people who knew each other, to exchange among strangers. In Mesopotamia, by the middle of the third millennium BC, grain and land and labour all had prices. The Greek agora began not as a market but as an open place where free citizens gathered — for summons, proclamation and argument; the market function settled on it later. To the problem of how to trade with someone you cannot read, antiquity had another answer, too. Herodotus describes silent trade: Carthaginian merchants lay out goods on the shore, return to their ships and send up smoke. The inhabitants come, leave gold, and withdraw. If the gold is not enough the merchants wait, saying nothing, and more gold appears. A price was settled entirely in the pauses. (The account itself may be embellished, as scholars have noted.) This map does not claim that markets were born with cities. What is known is that records of trade cluster around the temples and palaces of the first cities.