Historical

Amber, fossilized resin prized for ornament and credited with healing powers, washed up along the Baltic and North Sea coasts and ...

Running up to 3,000 kilometers from the frankincense groves of Dhofar and Hadramawt, in modern Yemen and Oman, through the Hejaz t...

Built or organized under Darius I in the 5th century BCE, the road ran about 2,700 kilometers from the Aegean coast of Asia Minor ...

Each sailing season a state-supervised fleet ran from Alexandria to Puteoli and later Ostia, riding the Etesian winds in roughly t...

Bronze needs copper plus tin, and tin was scarce. The richest western source was Cornwall and Devon in Britain, moved overland thr...

From roughly the 2nd millennium BCE, herders and traders moved metals, horses, wool and grain along the grass belt from the Altai ...

Shallow-draft longships that could row up rivers and be portaged between them let Norse traders build a western network of emporia...

Rus merchants ran convoys of furs, wax, honey and enslaved captives down the Volga to Bolghar, the market city of the Volga Bulgar...

Held in rotation at Troyes, Provins, Lagny and Bar-sur-Aube, the fairs brought Flemish and northern cloth face to face with Italia...

The flota system gathered merchant ships and escorts into scheduled convoys: one to Veracruz for Mexican silver and cochineal, one...

Long before Rome was an empire, salt pans near the mouth of the Tiber supplied a commodity that every farming people needed for pr...

Scandinavian traders and warriors known as Varangians or Rus sailed from the Baltic up the Volkhov to Novgorod, then dragged their...