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Ancient Trade in the Near East

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Business Ethics from Antiquity to the 19th Century

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Abstract

Near Eastern societies quickly recognized the need to establish approved practices governing trade and commerce. The advent of writing helped preserve the legacies of Hammurabi and the Laws of Eshnunna. Basic ethical business practices became edicts. The voluminous, if often frustratingly incomplete, writings enabled historians to describe in detail how the ancients transacted business. The early Israelites also created a myriad of edicts regarding approved behavior; these edicts sometimes distinguished between behavior toward co-religionists and outsiders.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Barter does create prices by the terms of exchange. If I exchange two bananas for three coconuts, the price of a banana in terms of coconuts is one banana for 1.5 coconuts. Prices are a relative measure and do not have to be stated in monetary terms.

  2. 2.

    Morris Silver used the example of the pastoralist Israelites and the grain-growing Canaanites (Silver 1985, 12; Genesis 34:21–22).

  3. 3.

    Modern American religious radio stations require financial pledges from the faithful rely on the ever-present scrutiny of God to prevent free riding (Silver 1983b, 67).

  4. 4.

    Polanyi seemed to contradict his point regarding no professional traders made in The Great Transformation.

  5. 5.

    F. Charles Fensham remarked that believes that all people in ancient Near Eastern societies had responsibility to care for the poor; the rich and power were explicitly admonished not to oppress the poor (Fensham 1962, 138).

  6. 6.

    Deuteronomy (14:28–29, 23:25–26) extended this concept of generosity to individual travelers and Levites, allowing them to satisfy themselves with crops in the field; they could eat their fill but not take any with them.

  7. 7.

    Barrera characterized this as “a near mechanical correspondence in which wrongdoing brings about punitive consequences.”

  8. 8.

    See 346 for the requirement that the creditor had to deposit a note stating the creditor’s intent to collect his debt. Steven Levitt emphasized that the loan forgiveness policy induced potential lenders to refuse loans in the years just before and to make most loans in the years just after the year of loan forgiveness, creating a “cyclical credit crunch that punished the very people the law was intended to help” (Levitt and Dubner 2009, 140).

  9. 9.

    The brief biography of Jehoiakim described a nasty tyrant, whose lust and greed compared with many tyrants. There was no mention of his being buried with an ass.

  10. 10.

    Jean-Philippe Levy compared the Phoenicians with the Dutch of the early-modern era; both were “carriers of the seas.” Levy, too, noted the Phoenicians flexibility: they could practice piracy and abduction or they could behave themselves most correctly (Levy 1967, 11).

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  1. Department of Economics, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, USA

    David George Surdam

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Correspondence to David George Surdam .

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Surdam, D.G. (2020). Ancient Trade in the Near East. In: Business Ethics from Antiquity to the 19th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37165-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37165-4_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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