Trade, Merchants and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age - Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem Cosar and Ali Hortaçsu

Résumé du document

Long before our time, many ancient cities prospered across the world, exchanging and trading with one another, while building the very foundations of modern civilisation. While some of them still exist nowadays, others have completely disappeared from the surface of the Earth, leaving historians conjecturing about the original location of these lost cities.

The academic paper I will present in this report, "Trade, Merchants and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age" was conjointly written by Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem Cosar and Ali Hortaçsu. Their work expresses how we can estimate a structural gravity model of long-distance trade in the Bronze Age, analysing ancient records from Assyrian merchants dating from the 19th century BCE. Here, this structural gravity model is also used to try to locate our previously mentioned lost cities; the authors then compare their quantitative discoveries to the qualitative research previously done by historians.

Extraits

[...] The academic paper I will present in this report, “Trade, Merchants and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age” was conjointly written by Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem Cosar and Ali Hortaçsu. Their work expresses how we can estimate a structural gravity model of long-distance trade in the Bronze Age, analysing ancient records from Assyrian merchants dating from the 19th century BCE. Here, this structural gravity model is also used to try to locate our previously mentioned lost cities; the authors then compare their quantitative discoveries to the qualitative research previously done by historians. [...]

[...] In this paper, it was considered irrelevant because the waters of the Tigris are difficult to navigate. However, in many other places, Europe for example, access to water was an essential factor to fight against diseases and epidemics while boosting economic activities; the example of settlements in England previously mentioned comes to mind. Following this logic, things would be drastically different on an archipelago setting or within a vast and luxurious rainforest such as the Amazon. While being close to natural roads is a clear factor of influence on the size of a city and its persistence all over the world, other priorities might be different depending on climate, topography, culture, or natural risks. [...]

[...] Only 26 among them appear as either origin or destination of the shipments mentioned on the tablets. Out of those 26 cities are “known” and 11 are “lost”. Known cities have been associated to an archaeological site without any ambiguity while lost cities have no definitive answer concerning their location. Using the data on bilateral trade between both known and lost cities, they notice the mean number of travels across all city pairs is 0.60 which is similar to modern international trade data; many city pairs do not trade. [...]

[...] The value of the results for the distance elasticity of trade is 3.825 with a standard error of Compared to nowadays, this means that trade four thousand years ago was much more sensitive to distance. Adding on the map the qualitative estimated locations of our lost cities from two historians with different opinions, Massimo Forlanini, and co-author of the paper Gojko Barjamovic, they compare those locations to the quantitative ones generated by their model. For two cities, Ninassa and Sinahuttum, the gravity estimates are very close to the conjecture of both historians who agree on their locations. [...]

[...] In Rauch and Michaels (2016), the authors study how the fall of the Roman Empire completely wiped out the urban network of Great-Britain. In this paper, they ask themselves: Are cities in today's Britain closer to or further away from the Roman towns relative to their counterparts in France? While in France the institutional framework remained intact with the rule of the Merovingians, it wasn't the case in Great-Britain. We observe in this paper that French city moved significantly less than the British ones. [...]