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206 The View from the Customs House
ourselves faced with a dizzying variety of ways of exacting value
from those moving and their goods, and a whole gamut of stages
of abstraction in the process from simple ad hoc appropriation
to sophisticated fiscal systems. The variety of types of movement
and kinds of commodity, ranging across the spectra of
value, bulk, prestige, and utility, and across the different complex
zones of transition from public to private, will also need to
be largely overlooked in this account. The diversity of the
levying authorities themselves will form an integral part of the
argument.
More unsettling still than the terminological clumsiness of
modern vocabulary, however, is a conceptual unfamiliarity
which deserves to be flagged up at the beginning of the discussion.
Strange as it seems to modern fiscalities, the taxation of
exports was a crucial element in pre-modern Mediterranean
practice. Indeed, it is in this comprehensiveness of the regime
of exactions on omnipresent, risk-enduced mobility, that we
may seek some of the distinctiveness of the Mediterranean as
an object of historical enquiry.
3. three phases of mediterranean evidence
The dossier opens in the early archaic period, when economic
transactions and social relations are especially hard to disentangle.
13 The Sidonian silver mixing bowl in the Iliad which the
Phoenicians gave to Thoas, king of Lemnos, stesan d’en limenessi
(and set it up in the harbours), may claim to be the first harbour
due in western literature. 14 A boustrophedon silver tablet of the
mid-sixth century bc from the foundation deposit of the Artemision
at Ephesus, which has received attention mainly in the
context of the coins in the deposit, is perhaps our earliest fiscal
text in Greek, and records in minute detail the deposition in the
and points. The first two are characteristic of a developed sense of fiscal
territoriality, and we shall be dealing more in what follows with the less
articulated patterns that result from linking sequences of points. Ibid.
309–10, for definitions of portorium.
13
Mycenaean precursors are not inconceivable; for possible earlier instances
in the Fertile Crescent and in Egypt, see below.
14
Iliad 23, 741–5; A. M. Andreades, A History of Greek Public Finance
(Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 21.