Ticari

(İng. mercantile)

Göndermeler

Diğer

All three foci of high culture depended on the condition of agriculture. The basis of temple and court was agrarian in that their wealth and power presupposed chiefly arrangements concerning agricultural production. The market depended on agriculture less directly than did temple or court, for the traders brought goods from afar subject to other hazards than that of the local weather, and (provided there were sufficient stored savings) sold their goods in lean years as in fat. Yet, in the long run, the merchants too depended on the state of agriculture and their profits presupposed the peasants' surplus. Even when, as in Syria, mercantile city-states arose which depended primarily on distant trading by sea and land, their trade depended so intimately on the agrarian societies about them that both morally and materially they too lived ultimately from the peasants. Even the pastoralists, including the desert nomads, who depended on the agriculturists for much of their food and goods, were part of the same social complex. Accordingly, the type of social order which was introduced into the agricultural regions (and the areas dependent on them) with the rise of cities may be called agrarian-based or (to be more comprehensive) agrarianate citied society. (I say 'citied', not 'urban', because the society included the peasants, who were not urban though their life reflected the presence of cities.)

The Early Iron Age was therefore a period of commercial expansion for the coastal cities of Phoenicia, both at home and overseas. This period of prosperity also resulted in the emergence of urbanisation, an important innovation that would come to be synonymous with the Phoenicians. At Tyre and Sarepta, for instance, architectural innovation and a move towards urbanism led both cities to alter their layout significantly during this period.

Viewed holistically, the evidence from Tyre shows that as the profits from inter-regional exchange increased, the power of the king became progressively more constrained by the city’s wealthy mercantile families who were keen to influence public affairs.

Instead, economic historians are now beginning to approach ancient economies from the perspective of social and commercial networks, seeking to understand how these networks were organised, operated and maintained (an approach which is starting to yield far more positive results).

By the dawn of the first millennium, the Phoenician cities had become large industrial and commercial centres which specialised in the manufacture of luxury and prestige items. Due to the exceptionally high prices such items could command, they were either destined to be exchanged in markets outside of the Levant or, less frequently, to satisfy the needs of a very restricted number of wealthy clients within Phoenicia itself.