Hacker News Reader

Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

Raoul McLaughlin in The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean estimates that customs taxes on trade through Red Sea ports could have accounted for fully _one third_ of all Roman income in the first century AD. It’s always been fascinating to me what might have happened if Rome tried to play tall instead of wide.

View on HN

The book seems to be available at:

https://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Docu...

>Its value, after payment of the Roman Empire’s 25 percent import tax, was nearly seven million sesterces, which scholars have calculated was easily enough to buy a luxury estate in central Italy, or, if you prefer, to pay 40,000 stonecutters for a year. That translates into some vast fortunes.

Aparrently this value from one ship, and it's reported to have 100 ships per monsoon season to Indian Ocean, it means per year since you need to have two monsoon for departing and returning. This report is for the first century AD, before the trade route reached its peak.

What I love about this perspective is that one can imagine production plans based on catching the monsoon season. The Indian ocean is also no joke to sail through anytime much less monsoon season. This took sophisticated thought and cultural focus to pull off.

And calendars, I am sure.-

More than that, it takes a very sophisticated and well-integrated society to no only make it possible, but affordable and profitable.

With the tech and scales of the times, it's mind-blowing and a testament to how badass humanity already was.

What could they have achieved with what we have today?

> With the tech and scales of the times, it's mind-blowing and a testament to how badass humanity already was.

At the scale of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens, Antiquity is yesterday. A good rule of thumb in History is that people were and will be exactly the same as we are.

Totally.-

PS. That, and antibiotics ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com