Nowadays, if you need something, you go to the closest mall, shell out a few bucks and head home. Thousands of years ago, the process wasn’t nearly as simple. If you or someone in your town didn’t grow it, herd it or make it, you needed to abandon that desire or else travel for it, sometimes over great distances. For many towns, the effort of trade was too much. Those ancient towns make only rare appearances in our history books. When the first civilizations did begin trading with each other about five thousand years ago, however, many of them got rich…and fast. Trade was also a boon for human interaction, bringing cross-cultural contact to a whole new level. Luxury goods When people first settled down into larger towns in Mesopotamia and Egypt, self-sufficiency – the idea that you had to produce absolutely everything that you wanted or needed – started to fade. A farmer could now trade grain for meat, or milk for a pot, at the local market, which was seldom too far away. Cities started to work the same way, realizing that they could acquire goods they didn’t have at hand from other […]