Chapter 16: Trivia of Crete (Part II)

Not to mention how Carol, Doraemon, and King Minos in the underground dormitory are messy in the wind, chickens flying and dogs jumping, and chickens and ducks are talking about it...... In a side hall outside the dormitory, Wang Qiu and Ma Tong were sitting cross-legged on a brand-new reed mat, fiddling with a box of Babylonian checkers.

In the civilized countries around the Eastern Mediterranean in this era, this thing is a puzzle game that everyone from the royal family to the common people will play.

However, since it is a gift from the Minoan royal family to the "gods", this set of checkers is naturally extraordinary - the chess box is made of gold, the black chess pieces are polished from obsidian, the white chess pieces are cast in silver, and the lid of the box is inlaid with various gemstones such as lapis lazuli and carnelian to inlay some mythological figures. Just such a small thing is enough for many low-level ordinary families to eat for a lifetime.

In addition, the Queen Mother also presented them with various Cretan-style gold and silver utensils, handicrafts made of precious stones, pearls and beautiful shells, and precious fragrant wood, etc., which were dazzling for a while, but they were far from being able to pay off Doraemon's huge debt of tens of billions of yen—an order of magnitude lower than the previous debt of 300 billion—and it was not what the Japanese immigrants needed to build colonial towns.

Therefore, after giving back some modern goods such as fruit knives, refined salt, and candy to the Minoan royal family, Wang Qiu and his family naturally proposed that they want to start trading in this seaport city, hoping that the royal family will provide convenience - the main goal is not only to raise money for Doraemon to pay off his debts, but also to buy some "special goods" that cannot be provided in the modern world, or rather, cannot be obtained from legal channels in the modern world......

For this reasonable and simple request, the Queen Mother naturally has nothing to do - she is also very curious about the goods of these "gods".

However, since it was not a market day, and even when they arrived, there was no one to buy or sell, so the royal family had to send someone to inform the caravans in the city that they would meet up at the market with their goods and hold an unplanned special market...... In order to attract as many merchants as possible to come with goods, so as not to make the scene too deserted and displease the "gods and men", the Queen Mother even gritted her teeth and exempted today's transaction tax.

However, it turns out that she seems to have underestimated the attraction of the Nile Daughters and "Godmen" who fell from heaven to the curious people.

——As time passed, even in the deep palace, Wang Qiu and Ma Tong soon heard the increasingly noisy noise outside.

Then, a court maid dressed in a high-slit white linen dress respectfully came to inform them of the news.

“…… Ladies and gentlemen, the merchants of the whole city have been summoned to the bazaar and their stalls have been arranged. The palace steward and the guards are also ready to travel, can you move out now? ”

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As the world's largest maritime trade center in this era, Crete is clearly much more commercial than Egypt, an agricultural country.

For example, the largest bazaar in the city of Duknossos is located directly in the main square in front of the palace. As far as the eye can see from the front of the palace, there are tents everywhere, tall and low. All kinds of people rubbed shoulders one after another, and the cries of selling and shouting resounded in the sky.

In fact, even the garden-like royal palace of Knossos itself was used as a royal warehouse and a royal handicraft workshop - with the exception of a few industries such as metal smelting, the pollution problem of those handicraft workshops in ancient times was far less severe than that of the later large industrial factories and mines, so if necessary, it was completely possible to stay in the same courtyard ⊥ craftsmen and nobles without worrying about bad smells.

Unlike other countries, the goods and handicrafts made by the craftsmen of the court were not just for the nobles, servants, and armies, but were also to be traded on the market, the royal family was the largest industrial and commercial group and import-export company in the country, not only for the purpose of making money from trade, but also to control the kingdom economically, as the Lee family would later do.

In other Western countries at that time, because the civil bureaucracy had not yet appeared, all countries were theocratic and militarized societies, and the king claimed to be the embodiment of the gods, controlling the minds of the people with temples and armies, expropriating the wealth of the land, and suppressing the rebellion of the Quartet, so as to maintain his rule over the country.

However, in Crete, which made a living from maritime trade, due to its high commercialization and high population mobility from the beginning of civilization, it was never tied to the land, and as a result, the Cretan islanders were open-minded and religiously far less religious, but very close to modern Western society, and the status of the priest was relatively pitiful, and even part-time - so Mycenaean spies were so easy to blend in. In ancient Egypt, it was as absurd to let a group of foreigners take control of the temple as it was to put a group of golden-eyed foreigners in charge of the imperial examinations in Ming China.

Not only did the temple system not work well in Crete, making it difficult to fool the people, but the army also had special problems. Although the government of this country has gone all out to develop a powerful fleet and has unparalleled sea power, after all, the navy cannot go ashore, and it is difficult to expand its territory externally, and it is not easy to resist internally. The worst thing is that Crete's wealth comes not mainly from land, but from trade, and indiscriminate use of violence and expropriation will only drive merchants to the side of competitors, thus leading to the decline of the country. So, the royal family of this island nation had to take part in trade and industry themselves, firmly hold on to the maximum profits, and rule the people with wealth rather than violence or superstition, similar to the big business groups in the modern West - of course, modern Wall Street has developed to the point of controlling society with finance, but this was not possible in Crete BC.

In short, the voyagers of Crete and the merchants who came from all over the world brought to the island all kinds of rare goods, from fierce birds and animals to delicate rings and earrings...... Pottery, grain, furs, cloth, ivory, pearls, amber, spices, as well as yuguo from afar, exotic blankets, well-trained slaves, clowns and dancers, everything that can be found in this era is available here. Most of the merchants with a slight stature put their goods in front of their tents for the guests to choose from, while leaving only a few men to look after the trade, while they themselves had to take time to wander around the bazaar and buy the goods they liked.

——In the ancient times before the birth of coins and before the emergence of a wealthy society, the social economy of all countries in the world was mainly self-sufficient, international trade was still in a primitive embryonic state, and commerce was only an accessory and supplement to the production industry. Therefore, most merchants do not aim to make a profit by reselling, but exchange their surplus products for scarce materials that are difficult for the owner to produce, and novelties that are of interest.

For example, if the Egyptians had a surplus of grain but lacked wood and metal, the task of the Egyptian caravan was to find a way to trade with wood and metal for food, and to ensure that they could exchange grain for wood and metal, rather than their own profits.

In the same way, those who sit on mines and forests, but lack fertile land, must also exchange a few qiē resources in their own territory for food to avoid starvation. Due to the poor transportation conditions in ancient times, in practice, it was often enough to find a caravan willing to send food over. As for how much grain can be exchanged for it, and whether it will be lost, I don't care at all. In these days of bartering in the commercial market, most commodities were generally scarce rather than excessive, and the situation of the big American capitalists of later generations who left wheat rotting in the ground and poured milk into the Mississippi River in order to maintain profits would never have occurred in this era of insufficient productivity.

Therefore, at this time, international trade was really just a village bazaar with an enlarged scale, not to mention any spectacular and majestic trading buildings, and even fixed shops (the private mansions of big merchants were another matter), which was far less high-end and high-end than that of later generations. Everyone just found a convenient place to put their surplus out and see if they could make an exchange - today's Crete, with its powerful fleet and unique location, was able to play the role of a bazaar and make a profit, but nothing more.

In addition, the lack of a universal intermediary for coins forced merchants to ship and buy at the same time. The thing they are most worried about is often not how much profit they can make, but how to make a deal with the other party and exchange their own things for what they want......

In this case, when Wang Qiu commanded a group of zombie post-apocalyptic Japanese refugees from the world of "School Apocalypse", carried the [automatic pawn machine] to the market in front of the palace, publicly announced that he was willing to buy anything of value in the hands of these merchants, and openly sold a qiē modern goods ranging from glass, ironware, cotton, matches to condiments, the entire city of Knossos boiled at once

- This is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clear the warehouse, and all the things that were smashed in the past and couldn't be sold can be taken off now

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So, in a flash of time, local olive oil and colourful pottery, fresh fish and fish from the Aegean Sea, Babylonian bronze artefacts inlaid with filigree, Abyssinian ivory wine cups, Mitanni's emerald bracelets, openwork silver vases, ornaments made of shells, oriental spices as expensive as gold, mysterious mushrooms that are said to rejuvenate women when eaten, and pickled animal organs that make men flourish in bed...... All sorts of strange and mundane stockpiles were toiled out of the city's bracket by the industrious Cretan islanders and foreign merchants, and brought to the traversers, who were crowded in long queues and took turns to stuff the [automatic pawn machines].

Then, they took a few pieces of printed paper and metal round cakes from each other, and went to the stalls next to them to exchange them for a variety of novelties: small sticks that could light a fire with a single stroke; It is as clear as spring water, but it is like a mellow liquor like fire when drunk; Wonderful cloth in bright colors; Sweet "sugar cubes" that are as colorful as jewels; A metal knife sharper than the Hittite sword...... Everything made them feel fascinated and smile.

However, there are also people who are dissatisfied, for example, a senior craftsman of a painted pottery workshop, who can't accept the good colored clay pots that he has carefully fired with ancestral skills, and what he can exchange from the "gods" is not as good as a big crab picked up by a coolie at the dock at random - but Wang Qiu is also helpless in this matter, for this Cretan painted pottery jar that is very rough in the eyes of modern people, the [automatic pawn machine] spit out a 1oo coin, obviously not as an antique to value...... This is the difference in productivity between the industrial age and the agricultural age

So, after arguing a few words, the unhappy middle-aged man still changed a fruit candy and took it back to make the child happy.

- In the above transaction, the traversers sold all the goods they bought from the modern world at a price of twice as much as they could raise money.

What made the Cretan islanders even happier was that these gods, who were said to have healed King Minos, were willing to treat each of them

In the Mediterranean world in the 14th century B.C., although human beings have long since gotten rid of ignorance and established civilization, medical technology is still very primitive, and the so-called doctors are actually more like sorcerers, and sometimes the treatment of diseases is simply nonsense. Even in ancient Egypt, which is known as the most advanced in medicine, those Egyptian doctors would treat tooth decay by eating rats raw from dental caries, and jump on them and chant mantras to ward off evil spirits when they couldn't figure out what was wrong with them...... The curative effect of such a messy medical technique can naturally be imagined, but the problem is that the medical level of other countries is even inferior to that of ancient Egypt

Therefore, most ordinary people in this era, once they get sick, can only beg the gods for protection while lying at home and holding on. If you survive, the gods will bless you with good luck, and if you can't survive, you will be summoned by the gods to ascend to Bliss forever...... Now that there are really "men of God" coming down from heaven to heal everyone, all the families who have sick people in the house are busy carrying their sick relatives over.

At the beginning, Wang Qiu also used the [automatic medical box] to diagnose and treat them one by one to ensure that the medicine was cured, and many people were quickly cured of tuberculosis and rheumatism. But look at those rich people who are still acquaintances, and know to give some gold, silver, jewelry, and other thank-you gifts. The rest of the poor people can't pay for the medicine at all, so they will only kneel on the ground and kowtow in thanks, causing themselves to lose their money...... So he also began to be stingy, only for those rich people to diagnose and treat with their hearts, and the poor were left to a few Japanese refugees to deal with, casually ask their conditions, and give a few aspirin tablets - this medicine is not big in the treatment of headaches, brain fever, analgesia and inflammation and other common pathological problems, and even if the medicine is not symptomatic and has no pharmacological effect, then at least the psychological effect is still there. As for the really seriously ill patients, that's your life. No matter what the world is, there are poor people who are sick and dying, and we travelers are not here to do charity......

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