Chapter 15. Technical Requisites for the Transportation of Goods

For the existence of commerce as an independent occupation, specific technological conditions are prerequisite.  In the first place there must be regular and reasonably reliable transport opportunities. One must, to be sure, think of these in the most primitive possible terms through long ages.  Not only in the Assyrian and Babylonian times were inflated goat skins use for the diagonal crossing of rivers, but even in the Mohammedan period, skin-bag boats long dominated the river traffic.

On land the trader had recourse far into the middle ages to primitive transport media.  The first was his own back, on which he carried his goods down to the 13th century; then pack animals or a two-wheeled cart drawn by one or at the most two horses, the merchant being restricted to commercial routes as roads in our sense are not to be thought of.  Only in the east and in the interior of Africa does caravan trade with slaves as porters appear to occur fairly early.

Traffic by sea had to make use of equally primitive means of transportation.  In antiquity, and likewise in the early middle ages, the boat propelled by oars was the rule.