“Oh Father Zeus, May I Get Rich”

A History of Mankind (85)

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An explosion in trade during this era is not unrelated to the rising use of coins. Over the late Sixth Century BC, several polis and many Aegean islands focused on the production and export of local specialties, the sale of which provided them with enough resources to buy Egyptian grain loaded in Naucratis, steppe grain from Crimea or Levantine grain from Al Mina, as well as delicacies such as the famed wine from Byblos or Egyptian perfumed oils and folding stools.

Chios, for example, became notorious for its textiles, fine pottery and standard wine jars[1], and more so for slave trading, as the island became the main logistic center for slave-trafficking and production of eunuchs – in much demand in Ephesus and the Persian hinterland – in the Eastern Greek world. Many of these slaves were bought or captured along the northern, western and eastern Black Sea shores, the world’s foremost slave-trading region for the next two thousand years, to the point that Greeks often called slaves “Scythians,” or “Skythes,” well before Western European started calling them “Slavs” or “Slaves.”   

Self-sufficiency was slowly abandoned, as poleis accumulated wealth in the certainty that their large fleets[2] would allow them to stay supplied in whichever circumstances. Life-sized and larger statuary, executed in the local, hard white marble, became an industry in the Cyclades Island. Crete, meanwhile, gained reputation for its orientalizing metalwork and armor, including specialized plaques suspended from a belt to protect warriors’ reproductive system.