TRADE ROUTES. In Mediaeval English the word "trade" meant a path ; it was connected with the word "tread." Exchange, which is now of the essence of trade, was not at first implicit in the word, but rather the idea of movement to and fro. In a sense trade routes are older than trade. Many of them probably began as "raid-routes." The Norse pirates, for instance, sallied forth annually in the spring by familiar courses and in the autumn re turned with their ships laden with spoil. The pathways in Central Africa which guided the European explorers of the 19th century had been organized as a thorough system by the Arab slavers.
Ancient Routes.—The trade routes which now envelop the globe as with a net may be regarded as having grown from the track which at the dawn of recorded history connected Babylonia with Egypt. These two lands, while both rich with the agriculture of a river plain, so differed in the details of their civilizations as to offer to each other commodities suitable for exchange. The primi tive way was, no doubt, north-westward along the bank of the Euphrates and then south-westward along the fertile foot of the Syrian mountains, but that way was early "short circuited" by a direct route across the Syrian desert. The change was effected by the Semitic nomads of the desert, whose wealth was of horses, camels, asses, sheep and goats. Periodically they made descents on the borders of the cultivated land, robbing the tillers of the soil, the cattle owners, and compelling the towns to engird them selves with walls. In time the nomads discovered that articles of luxury taken as booty from one side of the desert commanded a high price on the other side, and gradually a lucrative system of transport and exchange was substituted for the dangerous prac tice of raiding. The nomads knew the whereabouts of the wells and oases, and jealously guarded their secret. Ultimately, because they held the central position and could concentrate quickly for attack, they conquered and ruled the settled peoples of the encompassing fertile plains, and the desert tracks became the links of empire. Rich cities, taking a toll of the passing traffic
in return for sending it forward, arose in the oases, as at Tadmor and the later Palmyra, or where the caravan routes ended at the edge of the cultivated land, as at Damascus.
From the Mesopotamian and Syrian ends of this "desert-ferry" there gradually extended ramifications into Europe and into Asia, in each case with alternative routes by land and by sea. Towards Europe a traffic grew up through the country of the Hittites, by the Taurus passes and the upland of Asia Minor, to the Balkan peninsula and the Danube basin, and on into Northern Italy. Troy may have risen to wealth and power on this traffic, and by inter fering with a local Greek trade through the Dardanelles may have brought upon herself the war sung by Homer. On the other hand a Semitic tribe, the Phoenicians, took to the sea and, with tran shipment at Tyre, prolonged the desert route over the waters of the Mediterranean to Carthage and Spain. In the opposite direc tion, towards Asia, a trade was organized through the passes in the Persian Mountains and round the north of the Persian deserts into Turkestan and Hindustan, while shipping from the Indies came up the Persian Gulf.
The first great change of routes resulted from the conquest of Egypt by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. From the newly f ounded Alexandria, which took the place of Tyre, ruined by the war, a water-way led up the Nile to Koptos, which is distant by caravan across the desert only loo miles from the Red Sea—no more than the breadth of the Isthmus of Suez. According to Herodotus the Egyptians had long before joined the western to the eastern waters by a canal through the Isthmus, but in the time of Alexander this had been abandoned, probably for the reason that the homeward voyage of sailing ships up the northern part of the Red Sea was rendered difficult by a persistent contrary north wind, the local equivalent of the trade wind of the same latitudes in the Atlantic Ocean. The Koptos route came out at the coast some 300 miles from the northern end of the Red Sea.