Dr. Steffen Laursen

Yeah, people have actually been calling it the first commercial superhighway.

Really?

Wow.

It made the exchange of really large quantities of materials and goods possible with ship faring, where the other kinds of trade that had happened over land didn't allow these volumes to be exchanged.

Well, we have archaeology and we have ancient texts.

And this area and this region is special because we have some of the oldest records written by man from the cities of Babylonia, the southern part of modern Iraq.

And that opens a whole new window into these exchanges, which we don't have in many other regions of the world.

It also makes us look at the trait in a different light because we can see that the scale and the distances were much greater than what we would have expected from what we can see in archaeology.

Yeah, I agree.

And I also say, Tristan, you mentioned that they were very bureaucratic, which in a sense is true.

But the moment you started having tens of thousands of people living in cities, you really needed a bureaucracy to record

how much you had in your storerooms.

And a lot of the information we have from ancient texts about long-distance trade are sort of there by accident.

It's because you had huge storerooms for recording how much packing materials you had.

And then sometimes people come and check out some packing materials for sealing containers going to the Indus Valley or to Eastern Arabia or to ancient Dilmun.

And then we can sort of record these things or you have a shipyard that is issuing materials for repairing a ship that's going to the Gulf.

So it's more by accident and because of the need for this enormous bureaucracy that we have our information.

So we have to put it together by these indirect references.

I can mention here that regarding textiles, we know about a city in southern Babylonia called Guaba, which means the sea coast, which probably was the most important port of trade going into Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age.

It consisted of three townships, and American archaeologists have calculated that approximately 10,000 people at one point were employed in the textile industry there.