ABSTRACT
As long as humans have lived on earth, they have resolved economic questions such as how to divide an available amount of food between consumption today and consumption tomorrow, or how to divide labour between the members of a group. Written documents of reflections on economic matters are available for a period of more than 2,000 years, beginning with the biblical writers and the ancient Greeks. More recent writers, such as the scholastics in the thirteenth century and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, were deeply read in those ancient works. They transmitted some ideas to our time and rejected others. We begin with a few passages about the earliest manifestations of economic thinking.
