The earliest records of commerce on an international scale are to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Such a transaction as that of Abraham, for example, weighing down “four hundred shekels of silver, current with the merchant,” for the field of Ephron, is suggestive of a group of facts and ideas indicating an advanced condition of commercial intercourse,—property in land, sale of land, arts of mining and purifying metals, the use of silver of recognized purity as a common medium of exchange, and merchandize an established profession, or division of labour. That other passage in which we read of Joseph being sold by his brethren for twenty pieces of silver to “a company of Ishmeelites, coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing spicery, balm, and myrrh to Egypt,” extends our vision still farther, and shows us the populous and fertile Egypt in commercial relationship with Chaldea, and Arabians, foreign to both, as intermediaries in their traffic, generations before the Hebrew commonwealth was founded. The allusions in Homer and other ancient writings do not bespeak so advanced a state of trade as those in Genesis. There would seem to have been brass coins among the warriors engaged at the siege of Troy; and the shields of Homeric heroes cost, some nine oxen, some more splendid a hundred oxen, implying much rude magnificence in the form of barter; and yet probably not such barter, pure and simple, as is seen in the present day at Kiakhta and Maimatchin, on the Chinese borders of Russia, where chests of tea are exchanged in bulk for Muscovite manufactures of cotton or wool. One might fairly infer, from such archaic touches of the Greek bard, that he had in view an agricultural and pastoral state of society, in which oxen, from their more ready power of purchase than any other commodity, had become a rough standard of value; but oxen could not in any state of society be a general medium of exchange, and the history of circulating media, by which exchanges were effected in ancient times, is curiously illustrative of the transition of real into symbolic value. It may be doubted whether the hundred kesitas paid by Jacob for a field in Shalem were lambs or pieces of money having lambs as their insignia. The leather money of Carthage, which appears to have been symbolic, was probably much more valuable than the iron money of Sparta, which had an intrinsic worth. Any commodity of the first rank in a public mart might become in small circulable pieces the symbol of so much of that commodity to be delivered to order, and from the constancy of that particular exchange, might be relied upon for the purchase of other commodities. But, generally speaking, the use of gold and silver as instruments of exchange betokens a much higher commercial development than where commodities are priced by a number of oxen, or by rings of brass or iron; and it is on record that the precious metals were thus employed in Arabia and Syria, some 2000 years B.C., as they, no doubt, had been much anterior to that date both in Egypt on the one hand and in the rich and populous plains of the Tigris and Euphrates on the other.
The first foreign merchants of whom we read, carrying goods and bags of silver from one distant region to another, were the Southern Arabs, reputed descendants of Ishmael and Esau. Touching in their territory on the south the Red Sea and the right bank of the Nile, and on the north and east the most densely inhabited tracts of Asia, and accustomed in their own interior economy to a free and nomadic life, it may have occurred to the more intelligent and enterprizing of these people to enter on this new and adventurous course. Their traffic could only have small beginnings, but they were pioneers of foreign trade, and showed to their richer neighbours that the desert could be pierced. On the other hand, the first navigators and maritime carriers of goods of whom we read were the Phœnicians, the débris of the Canaanites overthrown by the conquering Hebrews, who, intent on the plain of the Jordan, the hilly slopes of Judea, and the sacred Mount Moriah—the long “promised land,”—allowed the dispossessed to settle on a narrow strip of territory along the coast of the Mediterranean. As the clearance proceeded the number of refugees increased, and this outcast race, with one foot on the sea and the other barely on the land, soon outstripped the Edomites and the Ishmaelites in the career of commerce. They founded Tyre and Sidon, of whose opulence there are abundant proofs both in sacred and in profane history. Launching their oared barks on the wave, and steering close along the shore so as to be able to take shelter in the nearest harbourage from a storm, they established a securer and cheaper passage between Egypt and Syria than had before been known. The corn and ivory of the Nile and the oil, silk, dyes, and spices of Western Asia flowed into their hands. From carriers they became merchants, and to merchandize they added manufactures. They enlarged their ships, grew bolder in navigation, and hoisted sails. In the days of Solomon their vessels had penetrated the Red Sea, and brought back to the great king the wealth of Ophir; but that this land of gold was in India, and that the Phœnician craft crossed the Indian Ocean are conclusions unsupported by evidence. It is certain that they traversed thoroughly the shores of the Mediterranean, both continental and insular, established settlements and colonies in many of the islands of the Greek Archipelago, and, greatest of all, founded Carthage, one of the most noted, and probably the most lamented in its fall, of the commercial cities and empires of the ancient world. The kings of Tyre and Sidon, though often involved in the wars and troubles of the Hebrew monarchy, remained for the most part in friendly alliance with Judah and Israel, to whom they were the most valuable of allies both in a commercial and defensive point of view; and it was their adhesion to the cause of Zedekiah, king of Judah, that brought upon the Tyrians the terrible and all but fatal revenge of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, 3416 a.m. But while their old city on the shore was being reduced to ashes by a thirteen years' siege, the portion of inhabitants who clung to the defence built a new city on an adjacent island, and thus took a new lease of life from the sea—a process which was destined to be almost identically repeated by Venice many centuries afterwards, when the Roman empire was falling under the blows of the barbarians. But Phœnicia never fully recovered her former power, and the coup de grace was given to this famous commercial republic in the capture of Tyre by Alexander the Great, 250 years after the struggle with Nebuchadnezzar. The whole inhabitants of the once proud city, who had not saved themselves by flight, were either put to the sword, crucified, or sold into slavery. After this event the name of the Phœnicians disappeared from history, or was soon absorbed in the rising splendour of the commercial cities of Greece—Athens, Corinth, Argos, and their colonies; of Carthage, still in full fame; and of the great seaport named after its founder Alexander, and built in a spot so well chosen that the city retains its importance to the present hour.
