These are a couple notes on trade in the ancient economy after reading Howe in his 2015 edited book (Traders in the ancient Mediterranean). According to Monroe in the first paper of this collection, donkeys were a “rather inefficient means of long-distance transportation” (p. 13 of “Tangled up in blue: Material and other relations of exchange in the Late Bronze age world”). He mentions their carrying capacity as being a third of their weight. Wasn’t it a fifth rather, i.e. 20 to 30% of their weight, that is about 50 kgs (36 to 82kgs)? How is one to measure their efficiency? Monroe doesn’t detail the low consumption of feed, the longevity, resistance to disease, etc. He does note that they are cheap. So, in ground transportation, the “point of diminishing returns” was rapidly reached, but what if the goods were luxury goods rather than grain? I think of the example of the Samaritan in Luke 10. Fortunately, we now have the 2018 book on The donkey in human history. An archaeological perspective, by Peter Mitchell. Here is a quote from chapter 8, the donkey’s tale, about the nature of the association of donkeys and people.

… donkeys (and mules) extended the geographical reach of human societies. They ate away, in other words, at what James Scott has termed ‘the friction of distance’, bringing people into closer contact with each other and making desired resources more accessible (page 225).

Concerning “importations” of grain, the figure of 80,000 kors of grain is reported by Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 15.314, and accepted by APPLEBAUM, “Economic life in Palestine,” 2:669. The figure seems impossible at first sight. The overland transport of such a quantity of grain would require in the neighborhood of 100,000 camel-trips or donkey-trips, and a great deal of time to organize the continuous train of caravans. It represents ca. 16,000 tons, which about one hundred heavier boats of the time could carry. One may however accept that very large quantities of grain were brought in. Josephus insists on the magnitude of the effort and on the deep impression it made on Herod’s subjects as well as neighbors. For comparison, it may be noted that thousands of camels and donkeys could be mobilized for long periods of time in the 1920s to transport cereals from the Hauran to the coast of Lebanon: WEULERSSE, Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient, 137.

As for entrepreneurship and “incipient capitalism” in the ancient Mediterranean, Monroe gives a simplistic definition of capitalism. It would be a “rational, continual pursuit of profit”. His approach is to give a catalogue of examples or what he calls “indications”: rationally used weights with known ratios, the use of symbols (seals), etc. No structural reasoning that I can see.

Why not add military conquest to this “incipient capitalism?” Use of force was a much more efficient way of getting at stored silver, bronze, gold and luxury cloth in palaces and temples, as well as at specialized labor—including soldiers—that would be useful for more conquests or revenue. In two ways: a) by helping the military machine; b) by suppressing the local capacity to rebel and therefore appropriating directly the mostly agrarian goods and local metal trade that were absolutely vital for carrying on more wars. This use of force required that the local political systems had reached a certain level of development that made them attractive targets for military powers of similar or superior strength. Not too surprisingly, ancient Israelite prophets—or the exilic and post-exilic leadership that had to make do without kings and prophets and edited the prophetic books we have—saw the accumulation that kings and elites went after for what it would become: an unmitigated disaster, no matter the religiously-framed excuses they had in their competition for security and risk abatement.