Economy and centers of government in the Bronze Age and antiquity

[Yora]

Hey, a history question for a change!

It just occured to me that during the Bronze Age, the capital cities of the various empires tended to be somewhere in the middle of great rivers. (The Mycenaeans being the exception because they had no great rivers.) In contrast to that, later in Antiquity, all the really big and important cities tend to be sea ports. Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, Syracuse, and so on. (Though again we have an exception with the Persian capital being in a central location and not on the coast.)

Somehow I don't think this is coincidence or some selection bias on my part. Something seems to have changed significantly during the Iron Age in regards to where rulers put their capitals.

Possibility 1 that I see is perhaps some kind of advances in shipbuilding and navigation that made sea trade across the Mediterranean Sea significantly increase in volume, and the sea ports rise in importance accordingly. But given the scope of sea trade in the Bronze Age, I don't think that would have been such a big difference.

Possibility 2 that comes to my mind is a change in administration. Bronze Age empires were highly centralized planned economies revolving around a main palace that is both the seat of the administration and the main distribution center of goods. I know that at least the city of Rome had a strong government control over housing, food, and public services, but I've never seen the term "palace enecomy" used in the context of Antiquity, while it's all over the place in discussions of Bronze Age society.

Could it be that Bronze Age capital cities were places in very central locations to oversee the distribution of goods from the storehouses of the royal palace? And that in Antiquity, overseeing the exchange of carge between trade ships in the sea ports gained a much more important role? Seems somewhat plausible to me, but I really don't know anything about economy and trade in Antiquity.
Anyone better informed on that subject?

[Telok]

From my haphazard knowledge scounge my instinct is to say its a number of things pushing into a combined set of pressures.

The general trends are more food surplus leading to more artisans & soldiers. That causes technological progress and a larger population to govern and increased trade. That causes sea ports to increase in relative power, luxury, & importance.

Start with the basic food surplus making more people available for creation & conquest. If you aren't growing and you aren't the biggest civ within reach you need to expand for saftey. Eventually a couple things happen, you need to administer lands further away somehow and you need to move the food for your ever increasing armies. This leads to either a breakup as you can't do that, or you improve transport options. As seas can more easily transport larger amounts and more easily transport to/from more places than rivers the sea ports start to become the larger cities. Since larger cities can provide larger pools to draw armies from and have better logistics they become both more critical to strategic control and an easier place for administration to fliw from. Since eventually everyone makes mistakes the river palace civs hit some size limit or break up into smaller states, making it possible for a another civ to take them over, or at least nibble a province or two off the edge. Eventually shipping & logistics tech hits a max for rivers & roads, which is lower than the limits for sea shipping, and adds a proper full on advantage to the sea port based civs. Like Rome did eventually hit its size limit and made mistakes that resulted in a break up, but the max capacity & speed of ocean transport made its limits higher than a purely river based civilization.

Edit: decent binge reading for all this at https://acoup.blog/
Just be aware that you'll spend a few days wiki walking through the archives to hit all the relevant stuff

[Mechalich]

Somehow I don't think this is coincidence or some selection bias on my part. Something seems to have changed significantly during the Iron Age in regards to where rulers put their capitals.

So, I'll be that guy and suggest that actually, yes it is coincidence.

First, the transition to dominance by coastal maritime powers was a Mediterranean Sea phenomenon, tied to the specific regional geography. Generally, this transition did not occur elsewhere. For example, neither Iron Age China or India transitioned to coastal empires. Second, many of the riverine Bronze Age cultures remained quite strong during the Iron Age: Egypt, the various states of the Fertile Crescent and Persia certainly did not disappear during the Iron Age. Persia, in fact, is almost entirely an Iron Age phenomenon. Third, specific historical circumstances matter a lot. The various maritime states of the Med were mostly established by the Phoenicians and their competitors (including the Greeks) in the 9th - 7th centuries BCE. This was enabled by the Late Bronze Age collapse and possibly by a clearing of maritime-adjacent territory due to the Invasions of the Sea Peoples.

Possibility 1 that I see is perhaps some kind of advances in shipbuilding and navigation that made sea trade across the Mediterranean Sea significantly increase in volume, and the sea ports rise in importance accordingly. But given the scope of sea trade in the Bronze Age, I don't think that would have been such a big difference.

There is actually fairly good evidence that shipbuilding technology advanced considerably during the 1st Millennium BCE. Even large late Bronze Age vessels, such as those of the Myceneans, carried perhaps 20 tons of cargo at a maximum. Iron age galleys were considerably larger.

[Yora]

As seas go, the Mediterranean is indeed quite unique. The only other sea that is of comparable size and has a similar narrow width is the Baltic. And that one also saw a huge boom in rich port cities, though over a thousand years later.
Maybe the South China sea as a third case. Not very familar with it, but I believe they also got periods of very prosperous maritime trade down there. (Though also no great river valleys.)

[Gnoman]

The extent of trade networks likely played a role. In the earlier period, the economies might well have run fine on a smaller selection and quantity of goods that could easily be acquired from the relatively small region served from a river network. Later, those needs required ever greater quantities and variety of goods, which may well have needed coastal trade to really support unless there was already a very extensive river or land trade network.

[Aeson]

I have to point out that Rome isn't exactly what you'd call a seaport, even in antiquity.

[Yora]

It's not beachfront property. But the city center of Rome is 25km from the sea. Same as Rotterdam and Yokohama, Shanghai is 50km, and Hamburg 80km. There is very little arguments that these are major high sea ports.

[Aeson]

It's not beachfront property. But the city center of Rome is 25km from the sea. Same as Rotterdam and Yokohama, Shanghai is 50km, and Hamburg 80km. There is very little arguments that these are major high sea ports.

Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Hamburg are all on much more substantial waterways than Rome; Yokohama is on Tokyo Bay. It isn't about distance, it's about the quality of access to the sea, and Rome doesn't have anything like the access to the sea that those cities do.

Also, you know what you don't see evidence of along the waterfront in Rome that you do see in Rotterdam, Shanghai, Hamburg, and Yokohama? Substantial port facilities - and even in antiquity major ports usually have significant port facilities for which there is usually archaeological (and, in places like Rome, literary) evidence. Both the archaeological record and the extant written historical record indicate that Rome was not a substantial seaport in antiquity - the major seaport serving the City of Rome was down at the mouth of the Tiber, first at Ostia and then Portus, not anywhere within the city itself.

[Mechalich]

It's important to remember, also, that there is a huge amount of time separating the Bronze Age - which ends ~1100 BCE - from Classical Antiquity - which traditionally begins with Heredotus in 550 BCE (and the achievements of powers like Rome don't occur until several centuries after that). There was a lot of development during that time in order to change institutions and technologies, including some very basic but substantial population growth.

[Quizatzhaderac]

This seems to me to be an issue of how many cities existed in massive river valleys versus not.

Originally 100% of cities were in massive river valleys.

By the late bronze age, other cities existed, but those were mostly within the empires of river valley civilizations.

By the time the Greeks started writing again there were many costal cities, and relatively few new cities in-land, so you got a lot of thalassocracies (Phoenicia, Athens, Carthage), because that's mostly what the new empires could be.

[Mechalich]

This seems to me to be an issue of how many cities existed in massive river valleys versus not.

Originally 100% of cities were in massive river valleys.

By the late bronze age, other cities existed, but those were mostly within the empires of river valley civilizations.

By the time the Greeks started writing again there were many costal cities, and relatively few new cities in-land, so you got a lot of thalassocracies (Phoenicia, Athens, Carthage), because that's mostly what the new empires could be.

There's also the influence of long term climatic change. In the late Iron Age/Early Antiquity the dominant power was Persia, which was very much a river valley Empire. When the Greeks conquered them under Alexander, they founded settlements eastward as far as the Fergana Valley (the very easternmost portion of modern Uzbekistan). There is strong evidence that this section of Central Asia, including Eastern Iran, Eastern Turkmenistan, Eastern Uzbekistan, and essentially all of Afghanistan grew significantly drier in the final centuries BCE, making it substantially less prosperous - to the point of conquest by Han Chinese armies very far afield - and allowing for a gradual shift of power westward.

[Tyndmyr]

Hey, a history question for a change!

It just occured to me that during the Bronze Age, the capital cities of the various empires tended to be somewhere in the middle of great rivers. (The Mycenaeans being the exception because they had no great rivers.) In contrast to that, later in Antiquity, all the really big and important cities tend to be sea ports. Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, Syracuse, and so on. (Though again we have an exception with the Persian capital being in a central location and not on the coast.)

Most civilizations tend to make great cities into capitals. Great cities basically arise at trade nexuses, because trade increases the value of an individual's work. So...lots of people end up gathering that and reaching a critical mass.

The precise expression of this may vary depending on local geography, but both rivers and oceans are highly connected to trade. One obvious difference is that seaports tend to allow for craft of deeper draft. So, as technology advances, this would favor ocean areas. It's not instant, or necessarily perfectly consistent across cultures, but we do see a general trend towards it.

Possibility 2 that comes to my mind is a change in administration. Bronze Age empires were highly centralized planned economies revolving around a main palace that is both the seat of the administration and the main distribution center of goods. I know that at least the city of Rome had a strong government control over housing, food, and public services, but I've never seen the term "palace enecomy" used in the context of Antiquity, while it's all over the place in discussions of Bronze Age society.

That sort of centralization is essentially a function of scale. Governments change in accordance with scale, and that changes with available tech.

For instance, while even fairly small civilizations have tribes, until you have a society that produces grains or similar, you tend not to have significant wealth differentiation. Storable, portable food allows the concentration of wealth, and allows civilizations to try out various schemas of redistribution that wouldn't work with fast spoiling food.

Could it be that Bronze Age capital cities were places in very central locations to oversee the distribution of goods from the storehouses of the royal palace? And that in Antiquity, overseeing the exchange of carge between trade ships in the sea ports gained a much more important role? Seems somewhat plausible to me, but I really don't know anything about economy and trade in Antiquity.
Anyone better informed on that subject?

There is sometimes a tendency to focus greatly on the Mediterranean cultures. It can be helpful to look outside these. For instance, Nanjing was the capital of China until WW2, far after the time frame you're looking at, yet it is a river-city, not a deep sea port. Even Beijing is not an ocean port. However, trade was still fundamental to the selection of both, as they are relatively well situated to trade with much of China...or at least the wealthier eastern portion that has more to trade.

For the Aztecs, perhaps the most centralized civilization of the era, highly grounded in importance, ceremony, and station, Tenochtitlan was not close to any oceans at all, and was roughly as far away from them as any could get. It was built there because...nobody else wanted the land. Or for religious reasons, take your pick. This location is fairly difficult to justify by any trade-based explanation...but it may be that their society was so rigid that other factors dominated over the more common ones.

Still, they managed to get enough food there to support the growing population, and it did work for a time after a fashion.

So, overall, I don't think capitals had to be on the ocean in that time period, it was just handy for civilizations that happened to have a relatively mild ocean nearby with a number of available trading partners.

[Vinyadan]

I think that there was some selection bias, or that the selection ended up putting together a number of cities overlooking their differences.

The first thing that comes to mind is Mycene, which was close to the sea, wasn't on a river, had a fortress atop a mountain, and got its water from a spring there. This would have been a Bronze Age city of great power.

Athens also was a city of great power, close to the sea, whose administrative centre was atop a hill. It likely started out as many different small settlements, later unified by this common administration. It was already an important city in the Bronze Age, and the tradition was that it wasn't conquered after the fall of the Myceneans.

Syracuse originated in an island close to the coast. After the arrival of the Greek colonists and after tyrants took to rule, the island remained the city's administrative centre and fortress.

So, as you can see, the really distinctive feature of these cities is the acropolis, or something comparable to it, in a highly defensible position.

The origins of Rome are always subjected to debate, but the important fact here is that it was built on a major river (and a river crossing with a cattle market immediately nearby). However, I do believe that it's important that it was close to the sea, because it later made supplying it with food much easier.

Alexandria is yet another bag. It was founded at least centuries after these cities. And it still was pretty close to a major river, or, at least, to the Nile delta.

Then again, these are massively complex subjects, so there likely is a lot I am missing in this short answer.

[LibraryOgre]

I have to point out that Rome isn't exactly what you'd call a seaport, even in antiquity.

The port was at Ostia.

My general rule of thumb would be "Rivers build agriculture, oceans build empires."

A river valley gives you a steady supply of reasonably potable water and floods to renew your soil. This lets you develop agriculture which will mostly endure until climate change or river meandering stops that. Once you've got the trick of it, though, you can farm other places, and use more marginal agricultural land for pastoralism. You can be a local power, with local being your river and the places near it.

But an ocean lets you go places. You can trade with far away peoples, expanding your resource base, and your ability to project force. Your base may still be in the breadbasket, but you can also take other people's breadbaskets.

[Mechalich]

My general rule of thumb would be "Rivers build agriculture, oceans build empires."

I disagree. Thalassocracies were dependent upon specific geography. They existed in the Mediterranean and in SE Asia almost exclusively and they weren't really a thing until the final centuries BCE when shipbuilding technology finally advanced far enough to make them possible, a good 2000 years after the concept of Empire - pioneered by Sargon of Akkad - had become a thing. Empires remained primarily land based beyond the Med and SE Asia until almost the 15th century, when shipbuilding tech again advanced enough to make true ocean-going empires possible.

Historically the biggest empires have been in China, India, and the Middle East, none were principally maritime, and the biggest empire ever belonged to the Mongols, decidedly not a maritime state.

[LibraryOgre]

Good point. I'll admit a Mediterranean bias in that rule of thumb.

[Blackhawk748]

That's cuz it's the rule for the Mediterranean, outside of that it more goes off of "what natural border is in the way?". Cuz part of the reason China, the Mongols and Sargon could take as much as they did was because they could just keep walking.

Granted mountains don't necessarily hard stop you, look at the Romans, but they do tend to be a soft hurdle

[Murk]

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is defensibility.

Depending on the region and the situation, defensibility might be much more important than access to trade or agriculture. Your city can be as wealthy or well-supplied as you want - if it gets regularly burned to the ground it won't build an empire.

I see people here arguing whether Rome was a coastal or river city, and I'd say neither. The Tiber was a terrible river. Early in Rome's development it didn't even allow access to the sea! The river was basically a long swamp.
So Rome was built on several hills in the middle of a swamp. That's a bad position for trade or agriculture, but it's a very defensible location. Central Italy at the time was a hotbed of tribal (and civil) wars, and major cities were destroyed left and right. Rome didn't need to be rich - as long as it survived it would be better off than the other cities in the region.

And I think the same applies to a lot of cities in regions where conflict is common.
Venice also originated on a bad spot for sea commerce, in the middle of a shallow marsh. But Northern Italy had been invaded and counter-invaded for decades and all other major cities in the area were razed into oblivion - so suddenly the middle of a shallow marsh seemed like a good place to live.
I'm Dutch, and Amsterdam has one of the worst spots to be a major commercial hub, also being located in the middle of wetlands and next to an inland sea that's too shallow for ocean-going vessels. Compared to a lot of other Dutch cities it lacks accessibility to either the large rivers or the ocean. But that also meant it was relatively safe from floods, from pirates and especially from enemy armies.
All the Greek acropoleis were also specifically defensible positions, as were cultural capitals in central Mexico (like Cholula or Tzintzuntzan).
Can't speak for India or China (though I think Delhi also explicitly started out as a citadel?)

So maybe coastal commercial hubs do better in times of prosperity, while they might not survive prolonged conflict?

[Mechalich]

Can't speak for India or China (though I think Delhi also explicitly started out as a citadel?)

The Four Great Ancient Capitals of China were Louyang, Xi'an (Chang'an), Nanjing, and Beijing, with Beijing not being important until much later.

Louyang occupies a highly fertile valley surrounded basically on all sides by mountains and can be attacked only through narrow passes (narrow enough that the Eastern Han built walls across them entirely, which is why history records events such as Hu Lao Gate). Xi'an further to the west, is largely similar, though the valley is larger and closer to Inner Mongolia (meaning steppe peoples who succeeded in forcing their way in were immediately on top of the capital. Nanjing is located on a largely flat coastal plain, but is importantly on the southern side of the Yangtze River - which is a substantial barrier to attack from the north - and Nanjing was generally only the capital of Southern Chinese dynasties with a hostile north. Beijing is surrounded by mountains to the north and west. Louyang and Xi'an are also sufficiently close to each other that it was possible for the government to 'fall back' from one to the other with some regularity. So they were fairly defensible, depending on circumstances.

[Willie the Duck]

So maybe coastal commercial hubs do better in times of prosperity, while they might not survive prolonged conflict?

There certainly are (cherry picked, I acknowledge) points of evidence. The Minoans had a capital with no walls, that seemed to serve them fine while they had miles of oceans and a huge navy... right up until it didn't and they were raided back into being just an island full of fishing communities, linear-A writing we can't read, and a bunch of bull statues. The Bronze Age collapse devastated the coastal empires of the time (although whether it devastated them because they were coastal, or it just devastated the empires which happened to be coastal is a hard knot to untie), and some of the places which weathered it best were Egypt (which has a coastal component, but also a significant portion of its' resource-base inland up the Nile) and Mesopotamia.

Of course, again that's looking at the specific history of the Mediterranean and near-East and trying to draw generalizable trends from that history. Plenty of other cultural collapses (the urnfield cultures of central-northern Europe, the classic Maya collapse, everyone the Mongols took out, and then the Mongols as well sorta, the Champa of SE Asia) took place with one component of this (coastal, or a collapse once prosperity started to wane), but not the other.

[Aedilred]

Isn't this, to an extent, a question of which civilisations were predominant at any given time, rather than a particular general shift away from rivers to coasts?

Mesopotamia and Egypt, the two constants throughout the Bronze Age, built cities on rivers, because those rivers were where the fertile soil could be found, hence where cities naturally grew up, and thereafter the cities, being all along rivers, used the rivers to trade with each other. They didn't not build cities on the coast (some which are now a long way inland were coastal at the time) but their useful coastlines were relatively narrow and for most of their history there wasn't anywhere more interesting to go by sea than there was by river. Even if you wanted to go from one to the other, the land route wasn't much more arduous than the sea route (since Egypt didn't have a Red Sea port until late on and even that wasn't particularly well-connected internally).

But on the Med, as noted, there weren't rivers, so the civilisations there built along the coast instead. These civilisations didn't attain the same prominence in the Bronze Age as Egypt or Mesopotamia but some of them were still quite impressive: the Minoans are perhaps the most obvious. But there were major cities built by the Hittites, etc. all up the eastern Mediterranean coast.

The Iron Age, and classical antiquity in particular, saw a decisive shift in the gravity of power from Mesopotamia and middle/southern Egypt to the Med, where coast-based cities would proliferate because the water network is river-based rather than coast-based.

But I suppose that the question then arises as to why that shift happened in itself, and I would hazard a guess at a few things. Firstly, straightforward technological development. Waterborne travel is key where it is quicker and safer than overland travel, but Bronze Age seafaring wasn't all that*, with Egyptian seafaring being famously poor in particular, and floating barges up and down a relatively placid and predictable river is much easier than putting out to sea, even a sea as calm as the Med.

But during the Iron Age there were major improvements in shipbuilding and sailing which meant that the Phoenicians, among others, were able to sail all over the place in a way which simply may not have been possible during the Bronze Age. There were also improvements in agricultural techniques which probably opened up new areas for settlement outside the traditional flood plains in the fertile crescent. Once you (a) can travel by sea reasonably safely and (b) have somewhere worth going by sea, that's going to set off a virtuous cycle of port-building.

It may also have been felt that port cities were too inherently vulnerable to invest a lot in turning them into great imperial capitals, as a couple of people have mentioned above. Firstly to storms and freak events like the Thera eruption. The tsunami resulting from that appear to have wrecked Crete, but the Minoans were probably not the only civilisation meaningfully affected, and the memory of that may have dissuaded investment in port cities thereafter. Also to seaborne raiders, which even with Bronze Age sailing technology are difficult to defend against since they can strike without enough warning to redeploy troops from further inland. The inability of the late Bronze Age civilisations to defend their Med ports during the Collapse suggests that they were more vulnerable than the inland/riverine cities.

Also of course, the general effect of the Bronze Age Collapse (together with localised climate change causing previously fertile areas to dry up) saw a lot of the older cities abandoned, and once they're not worth going to then the river networks which both sustained and fed off them are less worthwhile.

So it may have been that sea-ports were not particularly attractive for the great Bronze Age civilisations, simply because they didn't have the same ability to use and maintain them that the later Iron Age and classical civilisations did. Indeed, it might be that the improvements in seafaring by the Phoenicians et al themselves contributed to the Bronze Age Collapse, and the shift from river-based government to thalassocracy was by way of violent (if somewhat indirect) displacement, given that their rise coincided with the appearance of the Sea Peoples who made such a mess. But that's pretty speculative.

This doesn't address China or the Indus Valley, but I imagine many of the same principles, where not specific to western Asia/north Africa largely apply there too.


*Except in the Pacific, obviously, but since the great seafaring cultures there weren't city-building, and didn't have much if any contact with civilisations that were until centuries later, that doesn't really give us anything useful to go on.

[Aeson]

The port was at Ostia.

Which is ~16 miles from Rome as the crow flies. That's a not inconsiderable distance when you can't just hop in a car and drive off - it's a good hour or more on horse at a canter (probably longer, really, since I don't think most horses outside of myth and legend could sustain a canter for sixteen miles without pause), probably around two hours on horse at a trot or in a carriage, or four to five hours walking even on the straight-line path and without the inconvenience of crowds and slower traffic.

Beyond that, you're well outside the ancient city of Rome by the time you get to Ostia.

[Misereor]

I see people here arguing whether Rome was a coastal or river city, and I'd say neither. The Tiber was a terrible river. Early in Rome's development it didn't even allow access to the sea! The river was basically a long swamp. So Rome was built on several hills in the middle of a swamp. That's a bad position for trade or agriculture, but it's a very defensible location. Central Italy at the time was a hotbed of tribal (and civil) wars, and major cities were destroyed left and right. Rome didn't need to be rich - as long as it survived it would be better off than the other cities in the region.

Actually, Rome was in a superb position for trade. It was the first inland point where a bridge could be built across the Tiber, making it a natural nexus for trade between North and South Italy. The bridge brought wealth and immigration, leading to rapid growth in both population and power, hence the significance of the position of Pontifex Maximus.