202 BC facts/data update.
These capsule descriptions are very enlightening!
Seleucid Empire...Economy/Culture...Spice from India came to Susa and proceeded to the West while western merchandise proceeded from Susa to the East. ...
What goods came from "the west" that were valued in places like India or China, that they would exchange items like spices or silks for at a rate that could buy enough of the Eastern goods to be worth hauling so far west as the Mediterranean?
Aside from oddities like amber, which might be unobtainable by any means except trade with the Baltic perhaps, what sort of goods were found or made in the West that found markets worth mentioning in the East? Amber is charming but clearly any civilization can operate just fine without it. (Well, it comes in handy in discovering electricity, hence the name of electricity, but that's something some savants do once or a few times and then move on to better things. Surely static electricity can be noticed other ways and then that society won't name the phenomenon after amber but whatever else was noticed collecting a charge. People might get the idea that static electricity has something to do with amber as such and so overvalue it, but I'm pretty sure that what trade value amber had, it did not come from this misimpression!
I'm just trying to figure out what general basket of useful goods could be uniquely (as far as ancients knew anyway) found only in the West, or what manufactures were so good from there that they were valued in Eastern markets. It occurs to me a lot of economic history has been presented to me from a very Eurocentric point of view and the preoccupation is the value of Eastern goods in Western markets. But except for idiosyncratic glimpses of the problem of what to sell to the people who collectively already have everything, because they have many sources for basic raw materials and know how to make useful items to their taste for themselves is not something I've thought about much. With the eventual explosion of inventions and advanced technical items such as clockwork machines and so forth, one basket of unique European products was created and filled; with the rise of industrial production methods ordinary, ubiquitous types of wares such as cloth could be produced so cheaply it could bear a heavy freight charge and still undercut craft-made competitors, even when these craft-made items were superior in quality and more suited to the target market's culture. But all that is waiting for Early Modern Europe.
Trade is a chain of course. It is not necessary for Indians to buy anything made in say Italy or Gaul, or obtained from anywhere beyond, for Eastern trade goods to filter their way westward. They change hands from one trader to another and each might be locally trading them for something made far to the east of the eventual destination of a pound of pepper or frankincense. But this means the volume of what filters westward is reduced at every stage of the way; some of it gets sold for local consumption or rerouted on some side route.
So--what sort of goods would a Seleucian trader accept in exchange for Eastern items?
My impression is that it was largely money, which is a persistent pattern right up to the Opium Wars. The Indians or Chinese were happy enough to accept gold or silver. Unless other peoples could come up with crafts or resources unique to their region, they are in effect turned toward becoming miners and refiners of precious metals for these countries so rich in both unique resources and craftsmanship. The Romans had a money drain, the British East India Company had a money drain, even though they could offer cheap though serviceable cloth and porcelains and eventually steel, until they hit upon the expedient of pushing an addictive drug they could supply economically. (To be fair, they were determined to trade with China despite the silver drain in pursuit of another addictive drug their home markets craved!)
Which causes me to wonder by the way about the prospects of Ethiopian coffee getting onto the Hellenistic markets. I'm not sure of the status of coffee cultivation in East Africa at this date, thus have no idea if the source could be expanded enough fast enough to make the Mediterranean world into coffee drinkers! If this is possible, another consequence of a Ptolemaic push southward to Kush and beyond might be to turn the kingdom into the coffee purveyor, which ought to be good for revenue--and who can say how important a strong caffeinated drink might be to Egyptian dynamism? (If it is not clear, this is not a joke, though it has its funny side of course!)
Anyway, aside from the rather dubious prospect that the Massaliot League peoples will start to manufacture machines or use them to manufacture goods having a strong combination of utility and cheapness (which would turn these goods, if they could reasonably be placed on the market in the first place, into trade staples perhaps rivaling spices and silks) we are looking here at OTL trade patterns, and I'm wondering just what western goods had the attractiveness to filter eastward.
To summarize, we have oddities like amber (which I discount though they have their niche), precious metals valued everywhere which western mines can produce, and another I have not mentioned...slaves. Whenever I did study maps of trade networks that involved Europe up until and probably well into the High Middle Ages, "slaves" were prominently featured. I suppose all ancient lands exported a certain number of slaves, but for them to get put on those high school maps I looked at, they'd have to dominate the market. Human labor is always of some value. So a land that can't produce anything else rich foreign lands are interested in can always wind up selling their own people, more or less.
I'm putting all this out there as food for thought among others ignorant of the details as I am, and to solicit answers to fill out the list of western trade goods in case others know of items I'm forgetting, overlooking or unaware of.
This is the sense in which I've long been suggesting that the West, especially the far West, Italy and beyond, are poor compared to the East. Not to neglect the accomplishments of Hellenistic civilization, but in terms of a panoply of really attractive trade goods it is my impression that the Mediterranean world is a backwater in this era compared to places like India and China.
This is why Europeans tried to conquer the world, because the eastern worlds they eventually sought to conquer had the treasures.
Is this a wrong impression? Even if it is irrelevant to general human happiness, if say the Massaliote League sphere achieves a wonderfully high standard of living in terms of diet and life opportunities for common people, what goods if any will they be producing that cause the highly refined Eastern sources of universally sought after goods like pepper, cinnamon, frankincense, and many other spices to take notice that Europe, or the Mediterranean world, is also rich in anything but aggressive warlords?
