500 BCE onward: (The Mediterranean-Levantine Commercial Model and the Garamantes Connection — In the Lands Around the Eastern Mediterranean Where States and …

500 BCE onward: (The Mediterranean-Levantine Commercial Model and the Garamantes Connection — In the Lands Around the Eastern Mediterranean Where States and Highly Stratified Societies Had Already Existed for Centuries, Merchants Increasingly Supplanting Agents of Kings and Priesthoods as Principal Movers of Long-Distance Trade While Skilled Artisans Responded More Directly to Widening Markets, Kings Shifting from Direct Monopoly of Goods to Imposing Taxes and Tolls While Making Themselves Protectors of Commerce, by the Middle of the First Millennium BCE the Garamantes — Africans of the Central Sahara — Connecting West African Trade to the Mediterranean): In contrast, in the lands around and east of the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, states and highly stratified societies had already existed for centuries. Over time, with the rise of the new kinds of economic relations, merchants increasingly supplanted the agents of kings and priesthoods as the principal movers of long-distance trade, and skilled artisans became able to work not just for kings and priesthoods but also to respond more directly to the widening markets for their products. Kings and their courts, rather than profiting primarily from directly monopolizing the acquisition of valued goods, instead could now thrive by imposing taxes and tolls on the trade and its profits while, at the same time, increasing the value of the trade by making themselves the protectors of commerce and the routes of travel. By the middle of the first millennium the Garamantes, Africans of the central Sahara, had connected the trade of West Africa to that of the Mediterranean. The Garamantes are one of the most consequential and least known peoples in the history of ancient commerce. Living in the central Sahara — in what is now southwestern Libya — they built an irrigation-based civilization in the desert and served as the essential intermediaries connecting the commercial networks of West Africa to those of the Mediterranean world. Without the Garamantes, the gold and other trade goods of the western Sudan belt would not have reached Carthage and Rome, and the Mediterranean commercial world would have been poorer for it. The trans-Saharan trade that later centuries would associate with camel caravans and Islamic merchants had its foundations in the chariot-borne commerce of the Garamantes, African middlemen who bridged two commercial worlds and profited from both.