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Tracing the Source of the Elephant And Hippopotamus Ivory from ...

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international environment. The LBA is known for its cosmopolitan and<br />

internationalizing character, and artisans in <strong>the</strong>ir workshops were carving in an<br />

Internationalizing style which reflected <strong>the</strong> times. In this setting <strong>the</strong> ivory trade<br />

represents <strong>the</strong>se lateral relationships throughout <strong>the</strong> eastern Mediterranean.<br />

Previous discussions on Late Bronze Age trade centered around Levantine versus<br />

Aegean agency were not useful. This discourse had quite a bit <strong>of</strong> momentum in <strong>the</strong><br />

literature (e.g. Liverani 1987: 68) and <strong>the</strong> Uluburun shipwreck was unwittingly pulled<br />

into <strong>the</strong>se discussions (see Bass 1991; Knapp 1993: 335). As Knapp (1993) and Sherratt<br />

and Sherratt (1991: 337) argued, looking for specific agents <strong>of</strong> trade within nationalities<br />

(Syrian/Canaanite/Semitic versus Minoan/Mycenaean) is misleading, for reasons<br />

discussed above and also because no monopoly on trade or thalassocracy existed at this<br />

time. So many were trading that <strong>the</strong>re were no serious inequalities in trade in <strong>the</strong> region.<br />

More useful are those discussions taking centralized royal trade initiatives versus<br />

decentralized cabotage merchant trade as <strong>the</strong>ir starting point. These debates have focused<br />

on economic <strong>the</strong>ory and <strong>the</strong> role <strong>of</strong> merchants in attempting to illuminate <strong>the</strong> mechanisms<br />

<strong>of</strong> LBA trade. The “primitivist” or “substantivist” (per Karl Polanyi) schools <strong>of</strong><br />

economic thought considered <strong>the</strong> economy as driven by reciprocity (including royal gift-<br />

exchange) and redistribution. The large storage facilities <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> palace economies <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong><br />

Aegean and Near East were taken as evidence <strong>of</strong> redistributive economies focused on <strong>the</strong><br />

internal procurement <strong>of</strong> resources, and thus import-led trade. Most important, ancient<br />

economics could not be interpreted in modern economic frameworks (because <strong>the</strong>y were<br />

not market economies), and <strong>the</strong> ancient economy was socially embedded. Short distance<br />

redistributive trade was viewed as more important than long-distance trade (Sherratt and<br />

176

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