Ezion-Geber
Ezion-Geber was a city of Idumea, a biblical seaport on the northern extremity of the Gulf of Aqaba, in the area of modern Aqaba and Eilat. According to Targum Jonathan, the name means "city of the rooster". Ezion-Geber is mentioned six times in the Tanakh. Ruins at Tell el-Kheleifeh were identified with Ezion-Geber by the German explorer F. Frank and excavated by Nelson Glueck, who thought he had confirmed the identification, but a re-evaluation dates them to a period between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE with occupation continuing into the 4th century BCE. According to the Book of Numbers Ezion-Geber was one of the first places where the Israelites camped after the Exodus from Egypt; the ships of Solomon and Hiram started from this port on their voyage to Ophir. It was the main port for Israel's commerce with the countries bordering on the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. According to Book of II Chronicles, the King of Judah, joined with Ahaziah, the King of Israel, to make ships in Ezion-geber. In 1 Kings 9:26 it says: And king Solomon made a navy of ships in Eziongeber, beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom.
And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, brought it to king Solomon
Dido
Dido was, according to ancient Greek and Roman sources, the founder and first queen of Carthage. She is known from the account given by the Roman poet Virgil in his epic, Aeneid. In some sources she is known as Elissa. Many names in the legend of Dido are of Punic origin, which suggests that the first Greek authors who mention this story have taken up Phoenician accounts. One suggestion is that Dido is an epithet from the same Semitic root as David, which means "Beloved". Others state Didô means "the wanderer". According to Marie-Pierre Noël, "Elishat/Elisha" is a name attested on Punic votives, it is composed of the Punic reflex of *ʾil- "god", the remote Phoenician creator god El a name for God in Judaism, "‐issa", which could be either "ʾiš" means "fire", or another word for "woman". Other works state. In Greek it appears as Theiossô; this understanding of the chronology related to Dido and her company resulted in the following dates for Dido and her immediate relations, as derived from F. M. Cross and Wm. H. Barnes: Baal-Eser II 846–841 BC Mattan I 840–832 BC 839 BC: Dido was born in Tyre 831 BC: Pygmalion begins to reign 825 BC: Dido flees Tyre in 7th year of Pygmalion, after the death of Acerbas 825 BC and some time thereafter: Dido and companions on Cyprus Between 825 BC and 814 BC: Tyrians build settlement on island of Cothon 814 BC: Dido founds Carthage on mainland 785 BC: Death of Pygmalion 759 BC: Dido died in Carthage The person of Dido can be traced to references by Roman historians to lost writings of Timaeus of Tauromenium in Sicily.
Historians gave both for the foundation of Carthage and the foundation of Rome. Appian in the beginning of his Punic Wars claims that Carthage was founded by a certain Zorus and Carchedon, but Zorus looks like an alternative transliteration of the city name Tyre and Carchedon is just the Greek form of Carthage. Timaeus made Carchedon's wife Elissa the sister of King Pygmalion of Tyre. Archaeological evidence of settlement on the site of Carthage before the last quarter of the 8th century BC has yet to be found. Paucity of material for this period may be explained by rejection of the Greek Dark Age theory; that the city is named at least indicates it was a colony. The only surviving full account before Virgil's treatment is that of Virgil's contemporary Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus in his Philippic histories as rendered in a digest or epitome made by Junianus Justinus in the 3rd century AD. Justin quoting or paraphrasing Trogus states, a king of Tyre whom Justin does not name, made his beautiful daughter Dido and son Pygmalion his joint heirs.
But on his death the people took Pygmalion alone as their ruler though Pygmalion was yet still a boy. Dido married Acerbas her uncle who as priest of Heracles—that is, Melqart—was second in power to King Pygmalion. Acerbas can be equated with the Zikarbaal king of Byblos mentioned in the Egyptian Tale of Wenamon. Rumor told that Acerbas had much wealth secretly buried and King Pygmalion had Acerbas murdered in hopes of gaining this wealth. Dido, desiring to escape Tyre, expressed a wish to move into Pygmalion's palace, but ordered the attendants whom Pygmalion sent to aid in the move, to throw all Acerbas' bags of gold into the sea as an offering to his spirit. In fact these bags contained only sand. Dido persuaded the attendants to join her in flight to another land rather than face Pygmalion's anger when he discovered what had become of Acerbas' wealth; some senators joined her in her flight. The party arrived at Cyprus. There the exiles seized about eighty young women who were prostituting themselves on the shore in order to provide wives for the men in the party.
Dido and her followers arrived on the coast of North Africa where Dido asked the Berber king Iarbas for a small bit of land for a temporary refuge until she could continue her journeying, only as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide. They agreed. Dido cut the oxhide into fine strips so that she had enough to encircle an entire nearby hill, therefore afterwards named Byrsa "hide"; that would become their new home. Many of the local Berbers joined the settlement and both Berbers and envoys from the nearby Phoenician city of Utica urged the building of a city. In digging the foundations an ox's head was found, indicating a city that would be wealthy but subject to others. Accordingly, another area of the hill was dug instead where a horse's head was found, indicating that the city would be powerful in war, but when the new city of Carthage had been established and become prosperous, Iarbas, a native king of the Maxitani or Mauritani, demanded Dido for his wife or he would make war on Carthage.
Dido's envoys, fearing Iarbas, told Dido only that Iarbas' terms for peace were that someone from Carthage must dwell permanently with him to teach Phoenician ways and they added that of course no Carthaginian would agree to dwell with such savages. Dido condemned any who would feel that way when they should indeed give their lives for the city if necessary. Dido's envoys explained that Iarbas had requested Dido as wife. Dido was trapped by her words. Still, she preferred to stay faithful to her first husband and after creating a ceremonial funeral pyre and sacrificing many victi
Cedrus libani
Cedrus libani known as the cedar of Lebanon or Lebanon cedar, is a species of cedar native to the mountains of the Eastern Mediterranean basin. It is an evergreen conifer, it is the national emblem of Lebanon and is used as an ornamental tree in parks and gardens. C. libani is an evergreen coniferous tree. It can reach 40 m in height with a massive monopodial columnar trunk up to 2.5 m in diameter. The trunks of old trees ordinarily fork into several erect branches; the rough and scaly bark is dark grey to blackish brown, is run through by deep, horizontal fissures that peel in small chips. The first-order branches are ascending in young trees. Second-order branches grow in a horizontal plane; the crown is conical when young, becoming broadly tabular with age with level branches. The shoots are dimorphic, with both short shoots. New shoots are pale brown, older shoots turn grey and scaly. C. libani has resinous ovoid vegetative buds measuring 2 to 3 mm long and 1.5 to 2 mm wide enclosed by pale brown deciduous scales.
The leaves are needle-like, arranged in spirals and concentrated at the proximal end of the long shoots, in clusters of 15–35 on the short shoots. Cedrus libani produces cones at around the age of 40. Male cones occur at the ends of the short shoots; the female seed cones grow at the terminal ends of short shoots. The young seed cones are resinous and pale green; the mature, woody cones are 3 to 6 cm wide. Mature cones open from top to bottom, they disintegrate and lose their seed scales, releasing the seeds until only the cone rachis remains attached to the branches; the seed scales are thin and coriaceous, measuring 3.5 to 4 cm long and 3 to 3.5 cm wide. The seeds are ovoid, 10 to 14 mm long and 4 to 6 mm wide, attached to a light brown wedge-shaped wing, 20 to 30 mm long and 15 to 18 mm wide. C. libani grows until the age of 45 to 50 years. Cedrus is the Latin name for true cedars; the specific epithet refers the Lebanon mountain range where the species was first described by French botanist Achille Richard.
Two distinct types are recognized as varieties: C. libani var. libani and C. libani var. brevifolia. C. Libani var. libani: Lebanon cedar, cedar of Lebanon – grows in Lebanon, western Syria, south-central Turkey. C. libani var. stenocoma, considered a subspecies in earlier literature, is now recognized as an ecotype of C. libani var. libani. It has a spreading crown that does not flatten; this distinct morphology is a habit, assumed to cope with the competitive environment, since the tree occurs in dense stands mixed with the tall-growing Abies cilicica, or in pure stands of young cedar trees. C. Libani var. brevifolia: The Cyprus cedar occurs on the island's Troodos Mountains. This taxon was considered a separate species from C.libani because of morphological and ecophysiological trait differences. It is characterized by slow growth, shorter needles, higher tolerance to drought and aphids. Genetic relationship studies, did not recognize C. brevifolia as a separate species, the markers being undistinguishable from those of C. libani.
C. libani var. libani is endemic to elevated mountains around the Eastern Mediterranean in Lebanon and Turkey. The tree grows in well-drained calcareous lithosols on rocky, north- and west-facing slopes and ridges and thrives in rich loam or a sandy clay in full sun, its natural habitat is characterized by warm, dry summers and cool, moist winters with an annual precipitation of 1,000 to 1,500 mm. In Lebanon and Turkey, it occurs most abundantly at altitudes of 1,300 to 3,000 m, where it forms pure forests or mixed forests with Cilician fir, European black pine, eastern Mediterranean pine, several juniper species. In Turkey, it can occur as low as 500 m. C. libani var. brevifolia grows in similar conditions on medium to high mountains in Cyprus from altitudes ranging from 900 to 1,525 m. The Lebanon cedar is mentioned several times in the Tanakh. Hebrew priests were ordered by Moses to use the bark of the Lebanon cedar in the treatment of leprosy. Solomon procured cedar timber to build the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Hebrew prophet Isaiah used the Lebanon cedar as a metaphor for the pride of the world, with the tree explicitly mentioned near the end of Psalm 92 as a symbol of the righteous. The Lebanon cedar is the national emblem of Lebanon, is displayed on the flag of Lebanon and coat of arms of Lebanon, it is the logo of Middle East Airlines, Lebanon's national carrier. Beyond that, it is the main symbol o
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in modern days corresponding to most of Iraq, parts of Northern Saudi Arabia, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, regions along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders. The Sumerians and Akkadians dominated Mesopotamia from the beginning of written history to the fall of Babylon in 539 BC, when it was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire, it fell to Alexander the Great in 332 BC, after his death, it became part of the Greek Seleucid Empire. Around 150 BC, Mesopotamia was under the control of the Parthian Empire. Mesopotamia became a battleground between the Romans and Parthians, with western parts of Mesopotamia coming under ephemeral Roman control. In AD 226, the eastern regions of Mesopotamia fell to the Sassanid Persians; the division of Mesopotamia between Roman and Sassanid Empires lasted until the 7th century Muslim conquest of Persia of the Sasanian Empire and Muslim conquest of the Levant from Byzantines.
A number of neo-Assyrian and Christian native Mesopotamian states existed between the 1st century BC and 3rd century AD, including Adiabene and Hatra. Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC, it has been identified as having "inspired some of the most important developments in human history including the invention of the wheel, the planting of the first cereal crops and the development of cursive script, mathematics and agriculture". The regional toponym Mesopotamia comes from the ancient Greek root words μέσος "middle" and ποταμός "river" and translates to " between two/the rivers", it is used throughout the Greek Septuagint to translate the Aramaic equivalent Naharaim. An earlier Greek usage of the name Mesopotamia is evident from The Anabasis of Alexander, written in the late 2nd century AD, but refers to sources from the time of Alexander the Great. In the Anabasis, Mesopotamia was used to designate the land east of the Euphrates in north Syria.
The Aramaic term biritum/birit narim corresponded to a similar geographical concept. The term Mesopotamia was more applied to all the lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris, thereby incorporating not only parts of Syria but almost all of Iraq and southeastern Turkey; the neighbouring steppes to the west of the Euphrates and the western part of the Zagros Mountains are often included under the wider term Mesopotamia. A further distinction is made between Northern or Upper Mesopotamia and Southern or Lower Mesopotamia. Upper Mesopotamia known as the Jazira, is the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris from their sources down to Baghdad. Lower Mesopotamia is the area from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf and includes Kuwait and parts of western Iran. In modern academic usage, the term Mesopotamia also has a chronological connotation, it is used to designate the area until the Muslim conquests, with names like Syria and Iraq being used to describe the region after that date. It has been argued that these euphemisms are Eurocentric terms attributed to the region in the midst of various 19th-century Western encroachments.
Mesopotamia encompasses the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, both of which have their headwaters in the Taurus Mountains. Both rivers are fed by numerous tributaries, the entire river system drains a vast mountainous region. Overland routes in Mesopotamia follow the Euphrates because the banks of the Tigris are steep and difficult; the climate of the region is semi-arid with a vast desert expanse in the north which gives way to a 15,000-square-kilometre region of marshes, mud flats, reed banks in the south. In the extreme south, the Euphrates and the Tigris empty into the Persian Gulf; the arid environment which ranges from the northern areas of rain-fed agriculture to the south where irrigation of agriculture is essential if a surplus energy returned on energy invested is to be obtained. This irrigation is aided by a high water table and by melting snows from the high peaks of the northern Zagros Mountains and from the Armenian Highlands, the source of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that give the region its name.
The usefulness of irrigation depends upon the ability to mobilize sufficient labor for the construction and maintenance of canals, this, from the earliest period, has assisted the development of urban settlements and centralized systems of political authority. Agriculture throughout the region has been supplemented by nomadic pastoralism, where tent-dwelling nomads herded sheep and goats from the river pastures in the dry summer months, out into seasonal grazing lands on the desert fringe in the wet winter season; the area is lacking in building stone, precious metals and timber, so has relied upon long-distance trade of agricultural products to secure these items from outlying areas. In the marshlands to the south of the area, a complex water-borne fishing culture has existed since prehistoric times, has added to the cultural mix. Periodic breakdowns in the cultural system have occurred for a number of reasons; the demands for labor has from time to time led to population increases that push the limits of the ecological carrying capacity, should a period of climatic instability ensue, collapsing central government a
Arabic
Arabic is a Central Semitic language that first emerged in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term used to describe peoples living in the area bounded by Mesopotamia in the east and the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in northwestern Arabia, in the Sinai Peninsula. Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, derived from Classical Arabic; as the modern written language, Modern Standard Arabic is taught in schools and universities, is used to varying degrees in workplaces and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, the official language of 26 states, the liturgical language of the religion of Islam, since the Quran and Hadith were written in Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic, uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties, has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties.
Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-classical era in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, construed as a multitude of dialects of this language; these dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are acquired in families, while the latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children; the relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Latin and vernaculars in medieval and early modern Europe. This view though does not take into account the widespread use of Modern Standard Arabic as a medium of audiovisual communication in today's mass media—a function Latin has never performed. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe in science and philosophy.
As a result, many European languages have borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence in vocabulary, is seen in European languages Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Catalan, owing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and language in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic as al-Andalus. Sicilian has about 500 Arabic words as result of Sicily being progressively conquered by Arabs from North Africa, from the mid-9th to mid-10th centuries. Many of these words relate to related activities; the Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history; some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Spanish, Kashmiri, Bosnian, Bengali, Malay, Indonesian, Punjabi, Assamese, Sindhi and Hausa, some languages in parts of Africa. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Greek and Persian in medieval times, contemporary European languages such as English and French in modern times.
Classical Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims, Modern Standard Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by as many as 422 million speakers in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography. Arabic is a Central Semitic language related to the Northwest Semitic languages, the Ancient South Arabian languages, various other Semitic languages of Arabia such as Dadanitic; the Semitic languages changed a great deal between Proto-Semitic and the establishment of the Central Semitic languages in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation into a past tense; the conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense.
The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms. The development of an internal passive. There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of the northern Hejaz; these features are evidence of common descent from Proto-Arabic. The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for Proto-Arabic: negative particles m *mā.
Time travel
Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person using a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a widely-recognized concept in fiction; the idea of a time machine was popularized by H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine, it is uncertain. Forward time travel, outside the usual sense of the perception of time, is an extensively-observed phenomenon and well-understood within the framework of special relativity and general relativity. However, making one body advance or delay more than a few milliseconds compared to another body is not feasible with current technology; as for backwards time travel, it is possible to find solutions in general relativity that allow for it, but the solutions require conditions that may not be physically possible. Traveling to an arbitrary point in spacetime has a limited support in theoretical physics, only connected with quantum mechanics or wormholes known as Einstein-Rosen bridges.
Some ancient myths depict a character skipping forward in time. In Hindu mythology, the Mahabharata mentions the story of King Raivata Kakudmi, who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is surprised to learn when he returns to Earth that many ages have passed; the Buddhist Pāli Canon mentions the relativity of time. The Payasi Sutta tells of one of the Buddha's chief disciples, Kumara Kassapa, who explains to the skeptic Payasi that time in the Heavens passes differently than on Earth; the Japanese tale of "Urashima Tarō", first described in the Nihongi tells of a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea palace. After three days, he returns home to his village and finds himself 300 years in the future, where he has been forgotten, his house is in ruins, his family has died. In Jewish tradition, the 1st-century BC scholar Honi ha-M'agel is said to have fallen asleep and slept for seventy years; when waking up he returned home but found none of the people he knew, no one believed his claims of who he was.
Early science fiction stories feature characters who sleep for years and awaken in a changed society, or are transported to the past through supernatural means. Among them L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fût jamais by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, When the Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells. Prolonged sleep, like the more familiar time machine, is used as a means of time travel in these stories; the earliest work about backwards time travel is uncertain. Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is a series of letters from British ambassadors in 1997 and 1998 to diplomats in the past, conveying the political and religious conditions of the future; because the narrator receives these letters from his guardian angel, Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in English literature is a guardian angel." Madden does not explain how the angel obtains these documents, but Alkon asserts that Madden "deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the form of an artifact sent backward from the future to be discovered in the present."
In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries, editor August Derleth claims that an early short story about time travel is Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism, written for the Dublin Literary Magazine by an anonymous author in 1838. While the narrator waits under a tree for a coach to take him out of Newcastle, he is transported back in time over a thousand years, he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery and explains to him the developments of the coming centuries. However, the story never makes it clear whether these events are a dream. Another early work about time travel is The Forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon by Alexander Veltman published in 1836. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol has early depictions of time travel in both directions, as the protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, is transported to Christmases past and future. Other stories employ the same template, where a character goes to sleep, upon waking up finds themself in a different time. A clearer example of backward time travel is found in the popular 1861 book Paris avant les hommes by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard, published posthumously.
In this story, the protagonist is transported to the prehistoric past by the magic of a "lame demon", where he encounters a Plesiosaur and an apelike ancestor and is able to interact with ancient creatures. Edward Everett Hale's "Hands Off" tells the story of an unnamed being the soul of a person who has died, who interferes with ancient Egyptian history by preventing Joseph's enslavement; this may have been the first story to feature an alternate history created as a result of time travel. One of the first stories to feature time travel by means of a machine is "The Clock that Went Backward" by Edward Page Mitchell, which appeared in the New York Sun in 1881. However, the mechanism borders on fantasy. An unusual clock, when wound, transports people nearby back in time; the author does not explain the origin or properties of the clock. Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's El Anacronópete may have been the first story to feature a vessel engineered to travel through time. Andrew Sawyer has commented that the story "does seem to be the first literary description of a time machine noted so far", adding that "Edward Page Mitchell's story'The Clock That Went Backward' is described as the first time-machine story, but I'm not sure
Trade route
A trade route is a logistical network identified as a series of pathways and stoppages used for the commercial transport of cargo. The term can be used to refer to trade over bodies of water. Allowing goods to reach distant markets, a single trade route contains long distance arteries, which may further be connected to smaller networks of commercial and noncommercial transportation routes. Among notable trade routes was the Amber Road, which served as a dependable network for long-distance trade. Maritime trade along the Spice Route became prominent during the Middle Ages, when nations resorted to military means for control of this influential route. During the Middle Ages, organizations such as the Hanseatic League, aimed at protecting interests of the merchants, trade became prominent. In modern times, commercial activity shifted from the major trade routes of the Old World to newer routes between modern nation-states; this activity was sometimes carried out without traditional protection of trade and under international free-trade agreements, which allowed commercial goods to cross borders with relaxed restrictions.
Innovative transportation of modern times includes pipeline transport and the well-known trade involving rail routes and cargo airlines. Long distance trade routes were developed in the Chalcolithic Period; the period from the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE to the beginning of the Common Era saw societies in Western Asia, the Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent develop major transportation networks for trade. One of the vital instruments which facilitated long distance trade was portage and the domestication of beasts of burden. Organized caravans, visible by the 2nd millennium BCE, could carry goods across a large distance as fodder was available along the way; the domestication of camels allowed Arabian nomads to control the long distance trade in spices and silk from the Far East to the Arabian Peninsula. Caravans were useful in long-distance trade for carrying luxury goods, the transportation of cheaper goods across large distances was not profitable for caravan operators. With productive developments in iron and bronze technologies, newer trade routes – dispensing innovations of civilizations – began to rise.
Evidence of maritime trade between civilizations dates back at least 90 millennia. Navigation was known in Sumer between the 4th and the 3rd millennium BCE, was known by the Indians and the Chinese people before the Sumerians; the Egyptians had trade routes through the Red Sea, importing spices from the "Land of Punt" and from Arabia. Maritime trade began with safer coastal trade and evolved with the manipulation of the monsoon winds, soon resulting in trade crossing boundaries such as the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. South Asia had multiple maritime trade routes which connected it to Southeast Asia, thereby making the control of one route resulting in maritime monopoly difficult. Indian connections to various Southeast Asian states buffered it from blockages on other routes. By making use of the maritime trade routes, bulk commodity trade became possible for the Romans in the 2nd century BCE. A Roman trading vessel could span the Mediterranean in a month at one-sixtieth the cost of over-land routes.
The peninsula of Anatolia lay on the commercial land routes to Europe from Asia as well as the sea route from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Records from the 19th century BCE attest to the existence of an Assyrian merchant colony at Kanesh in Cappadocia. Trading networks of the Old World included the Grand Trunk Road of India and the Incense Road of Arabia. A transportation network consisting of hard-surfaced highways, using concrete made from volcanic ash and lime, was built by the Romans as early as 312 BCE, during the times of the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus. Parts of the Mediterranean world, Roman Britain, Tigris-Euphrates river system and North Africa fell under the reach of this network at some point of their history. According to Robert Allen Denemark: "The spread of urban trading networks, their extension along the Persian Gulf and eastern Mediterranean, created a complex molecular structure of regional foci so that as well as the zonation of core and periphery there was a series of interacting civilizations: Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley.
Beyond this was a margin which included not only temperate areas such as Europe, but the dry steppe corridor of central Asia. This was a world system though it occupied only a restricted portion of the western Old World. Whilst each civilization emphasized its ideological autonomy, all were identifiably part of a common world of interacting components." These routes – spreading religion and technology – have been vital to the growth of urban civilization. The extent of development of cities, the level of their integration into a larger world system, has been attributed to their position in various active transport networks; the Incense Route served as a channel for trading of Indian and East Asian goods. The incense trade flourished from South Arabia to the Mediterranean between the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE; this trade was crucial to the economy of Yemen and the frankincense and myrrh trees were seen as a source of wealth by the its rulers. Ptolemy II Philadelphus, emperor of Ptolemaic Egypt, may have forged an alliance with the Lihyanites in order to secure the incense route at Dedan, thereby rerouting the incense trade from Dedan to the coast along the Red Sea to Egypt.
I. E. S. Edwards connects the Syro-Ephraimite War to the desire of the Israelites and the Aramaeans to cont
