Page 329 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

276 The Argosies

pies would mix. Undoubtedly there were complicated rules for
marriage, such as we find among nomad and hunting peoples to­
day. There would be patterns of marriage; wives should be
sought within the nation, or outside the strict kinship group, or
between cross-cousins and the like. But always there would be
individuals who flouted the laws of their people for the sight of a
pretty face. And along the borders there would be children with
a foot in either camp.
Across and through the lines, in greater numbers as the
centuries passed, moved the traders.
There has been some emphasis on traders in this book. And
appropriately so, for these middle centuries of the Second Mil­
lennium b.c. saw such a volume of international and interconti­
nental trade as was not to be found again for fifteen hundred
years. But it is time to define our terms, for trade is many things.
Even in the most self-sufficient primitive communities there is a
certain amount of specialization, and the hunter or herdsman
or farmer will try to produce a surplus of produce which he can
exchange within his community, for a smithy-made ax, a wife, a
slave, or the blessing of the tribal medicine man. This is
trade. When these communities tend to meet other communities
with a different way of life, when herdsmen in their wanderings
pass by the settlements of farmers, or hunters meet herdsmen,
then the possibilities of exchange are much greater. Each com­
munity will have surpluses of its own produce, grain or hides or
dned meat or fish or furs, which the other cannot produce. There
will be seasonal markets for large-scale exchange, and for these
markets each community will deliberately store up a surplus of
goods for exchange. This, too, is trade. Moreover, specialist com­
munities will attend these marts, communities which live by mak­
ing stone axes or mining flint or copper or salt.
A third stage is reached when the nomad people attending a
mart buy goods, not for their own consumption but to carry to
another mart to sell again, at a profit, to another people. Now
arises the professional middleman, the man or family or tribe
who live exclusively on the surplus to be gained from buying in
one mart and selling in another.
Now goods really begin to move. For an object’s value is