Commercial Activity in Sargonic Mesopotamia

Abstract

Records of commercial activity from Sargonic Mesopotamia offer a wealth of evidence to the student of ancient trade and business. In view of the richness of the documentation and the dearth of studies dealing with it, a broad survey of the problems and evidence seems called for in preference to a detailed study of a particular issue or group of texts. Questions that such a survey confronts are the nature and purpose of commerce in Sargonic Mesopotamia; who the people were who engaged in it and why; what the sources of their capital were; what commodities they dealt in, where and why; how their business was conducted, and what sort of records they kept. Documents and letters from various sites provide answers to some of these questions, even if they raise other problems of their own. This essay considers each of these questions in turn and the evidence the texts provide that helps to answer them.Commerce in the Sargonic period is best defined by recourse to contemporaneous terminology: šám, that is, buying and selling of commodities. The purpose of this commerce was two-fold: to make a profit and to acquire goods not available locally in Mesopotamia. Most of the available documents are records of business transactions of a profitable sort. Of these two possible motives for commerce: personal or institutional profit and the necessity of importing foreign commodities, the profit motive was probably the more important in the Sargonic period. Evidence for this hypothesis will be offered below.

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