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By Root 557 0

civilisation. For archaeologists there are three baffling features of the ancient Peruvian towns. First, their people had no cereals in their diet. Maize was yet to be invented, and although there were several domesticated squashes and other foods, there was nothing so easily accumulated and stored as the grain which was the staple of Mesopotamia. The idea that cities are made possible by largescale hoarding of grain thus takes a blow. Second, the Norte Chico towns have yielded no pottery of any kind: they were ‘preceramic’. This surely made both the storage and the cooking of food more difficult, again undermining one of the favourite tenets of archaeologists trying to explain how cities began. And third, there is no evidence of warfare or defensive works. So the conventional wisdom that cereal stores made cities possible, that ceramic containers made them practical and that warfare made them necessary takes quite a knock from Norte Chico.

So what was driving people together into these South American towns? The answer, in a word, is trade. The settlements on the coast harvested fish in huge quantities, mainly anchovies and sardines, but also clams and mussels. For this they needed nets. The settlements in the interior grew huge quantities of cotton in fields irrigated with Andean snowmelt. They fashioned the cotton into nets, which they bartered for fish. There was not just mutual dependence, but mutual gain. A fisherman need only catch some more fish rather than spend time making his own nets; a cotton grower need only grow some more cotton rather than spend time fishing. Specialisation raised the standard of living for both. Caral lay at the centre of a large web of trade, reaching high into the Andes, over into the rainforest and far along the coast.

The flag follows trade

To argue, therefore, that emperors or agricultural surpluses made the urban revolution is to get it backwards. Intensification of trade came first. Agricultural surpluses were summoned forth by trade, which offered farmers a way of turning their produce into valuable goods from elsewhere. Emperors, with their ziggurats and pyramids, were often made possible by trade. Throughout history, empires start as trade areas before they become the playthings of military plunderers from within or without. The urban revolution was an extension of the division of labour.

When a usurper named Sargon founded the Akkadian dynasty by conquest in the middle of the third millennium BC, he inherited the prosperity of the Syrian city of Ebla and its trading partners: a world in which grain, leather, textiles, silver and copper flowed easily between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Managing to resist the temptation of bureaucratic authoritarianism rather more than their Chinese and Egyptian contemporaries, the Akkadians allowed this trade to expand until it made fruitful contact with Lothal near the mouth of the Indus and bought the cotton and lapis lazuli of India with the wheat and bronze of Mesopotamia. A great free trade area stretched from the Nile to the Indus. An Akkadian merchant could handle Anatolian silver from a thousand miles to the west and Rajasthani copper from a thousand miles to the east. And that meant that he could raise the standard of living of the consumers he supplied, whether they were farmers or priests, by connecting them with distant producers of diverse goods.

Who was such a merchant? The economist Karl Polanyi argued in the 1950s that the concept of the market cannot be applied to any time before the fourth century BC, that until then instead of supply, demand and price, there was reciprocal exchange, state-sponsored redistribution of goods and top-down treaty trade in which agents were sent abroad to acquire things on behalf of the palace. Trade was administered, not spontaneous. But Polanyi’s thesis or those of his fellow ‘substantivists’ has not stood the test of time well. It now seems that the state did not so much sponsor trade, as capture it. The more that comes to light about ancient trade, the more bottom-up it looks.