Trade, Kingdom, and Empire: Edom and the South Arabian Trade

Abstract

AbstractDuring the first millennium BCE, extensive trade networks linked the South Arabian and Mediterranean worlds. While these trade networks are well known for their transport of highly lucrative materials, these connections afforded myriad economic and diplomatic opportunities for the intermediaries located along its routes, and held significant bearing on the political economies of southern Levantine kingdoms. While the wealth and opportunity afforded by the Arabian trade to these kingdoms are frequently invoked—particularly in relation to Edom—such references, and related discussions of the Arabian trade, are often restricted in their chronological scope and reliant on limited data. Recent scholarship on Edom, however, has substantially contributed to a more detailed understanding of settlement trajectories and shifts in sociopolitical organization, which, combined with recent archaeological research on varied aspects of the Arabian trade, necessitate an expanded synthesis of the trajectory of this trade and its relation to Edom. This work thus presents first an outline of the diachronic trajectory of the Arabian trade in relation to the southern Levant using textual and material culture data, and second, analyzes it within the context of sociopolitical developments in the late Iron Age kingdom of Edom. Ultimately, this work argues for a close association between the flourishing of long-distance trade in the southern Levant and the presence of sedentary sociopolitical complexity in southern Transjordan, as evident in the kingdoms of Edom and later Nabataea.