It's interesting that commerce/business was this sophisticated in the Bronze Age. I guess it's not that surprising given the famous customer service complaint[0] cuneiform tablet to Ea-nāṣir about receiving the wrong grade of copper ingots and his servant receiving rude service. It's also no wonder that the thing a theory describes exists long before the theory itself. We had language well before we had grammarians,…
Everyone points to Ea-nasir, but that's a meme. Meanwhile, Diocletian outlawed price gouging and standardized prices across a variety of goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices From Polanyi, Finley, and Weber to Austin and Malkin, we've come a long way in recognizing the sophistication of ancient economic thought.
Re: Trade, merchants, and the lost cities of the Bronze Age (2019) [pdf]
#11We are about ~300 years closer to Diocletian than Diocletian was to Ea-nasir. Too bad he didn't have access to Adam Smith, who could have told him that price fixing wouldn't work and might have pointed to Roman currency debasement as one of the major causes of inflation. Of course greed is always a factor I suppose.