Trade, Merchants and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age - Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem Cosar and Ali Hortaçsu
- An overview of the paper
- Links between the paper and other papers studied during the module
- Research ideas and weaknesses of the paper
Long before our time, many ancient cities prospered across the world, exchanging and trading with one another, while building the very foundations of modern civilisation. While some of them still exist nowadays, others have completely disappeared from the surface of the Earth, leaving historians conjecturing about the original location of these lost cities.
The academic paper I will present in this report, "Trade, Merchants and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age" was conjointly written by Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem Cosar and Ali Hortaçsu. Their work expresses how we can estimate a structural gravity model of long-distance trade in the Bronze Age, analysing ancient records from Assyrian merchants dating from the 19th century BCE. Here, this structural gravity model is also used to try to locate our previously mentioned lost cities; the authors then compare their quantitative discoveries to the qualitative research previously done by historians.