ABSTRACT
This chapter is divided into three sections: land transport, navigation, and trade.
The first section of this chapter concerns land transport. The mountainous Greek topography and early development of water transport for communities in coastal or riverine areas meant no pressing need for expensive land routes other than local roadways and paths in Greece until the use of wheeled vehicles became popular. The exceptions were Sacred Roads and special roads for heavy transport from quarries. The Persians and the Romans, however, with their expansive central administrations, built and maintained vast networks of roads, tunnels, and bridges. The centralised powers required reliable road networks for military traffic and for communication, the latter resulting in the development of elaborate of postal systems to link remote geographical areas to the seat of government. To meet this need, the governments invested considerable financial and human resources for the improvement and maintenance of roadways and bridges. Merchants and other travellers, utilising a variety of wheeled vehicles, began to follow the routes, which contributed to the creation of reliable maps and charts. At the same time, dense urban growth stimulated street building in the cities, a combination that produced the irritants (noise, congestion, pollution, accidents) still found in modern large cities.
The second section of this chapter concerns navigation. Travel, trade, and military actions were being conducted over the expanse of the Mediterranean Sea by ship since the Early Bronze Age. First the Greeks, and later reluctantly the Romans, with their iron tools and a long tradition of ship construction and navigation to build on, eventually brought the level of maritime expertise and activity to new peaks. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods in particular, major advances were made in the size of various types of ships (military, grain transports, riverboats), in the sophistication of their equipment (sails and pumps), and in the design and new technologies to build canals and harbours as well as cranes to deal with the ships and their cargoes. In fact, throughout antiquity, ships were the most efficient means of long-distance transport for travel and trade, and they remained the largest and most complex machines constructed by any of those cultures.
The third section of this chapter concerns Metrology, invented, according to Herodotus, for taxation purposes by the Egyptians. Most ancient units of measurement were based on naturally available models: units of length on parts of the human body (digit, palm, cubit, foot, pace); units of area on the amount of land a team of oxen could reasonably plough in a day (plethron in Greek, iugerum to the Romans); units of weight sometimes on human capacity (e.g., a talent was the load a grown man could carry); and units of volume on the vessels used for the commonest dry and liquid produce, grain and wine (e.g., a Roman amphora represented both the vessel and the standard measure of volume, equal to a Roman cubic foot). Unlike today, local standards rather than a universal one, were the norm. The origin, development, and technology of coinage, a specific and flexible standard, are still imperfectly understood. In both Greece and Italy, minted coins were a relatively late invention that finally replaced barter and unstandardised ingots or bars worth the weight of their constituent metal. Both the weight of the tokens and continual testing of value at every exchange made this an awkward system, so that when long-distance trade re-emerged during the Archaic Age, individual states assumed responsibility for guaranteeing the purity and weight of the metals used in exchange by issuing the first true coinage bearing symbols attesting to its authenticity. Minting of coins is one of the best examples of mass production in antiquity, but the literary evidence for explaining its technology is sparse. Conversely the millions of surviving coins provide an abundance of evidence for both struck and moulded coins.
