The word trade comes from the Anglo-Saxon word "trade," meaning to carry goods to market; it's a term that predates written history in most languages.
Trade is the history of coming into contact with someone and exchanging things. You don't need coins or specie when trading with somebody, sometimes all you need are credits on an account - but you definitely need something. Trade goods were usually utilitarian items such as salt, clothing, tea and potatoes. As economies grow, so does trade because it can offer goods people can’t make for themselves.
According to Andreas Antonopoulos, the first trade in history was about cave paintings: “people drew on cave walls for the ultimate purposes of advertising these trades to other people.”
One of the oldest trades documented was that of shells used as tools, with evidence dating as far back as 3200BC.
Without documentation, trade is believed to have begun well before recorded trade. One example is the bartering of food: if one person had pigeons and wanted wheat, they would have traded pigeons for wheat.
The first long-distance trade occurred between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in Pakistan around 3000 BC, various materials such as spices, metals, and cloth, were traded. When civilizations got bigger, more people needed more resources which became the reason behind the development of trade.
Indus Valley reatains in it Samara remains were unearthed, which are traditionally considered to represent the world’s first known currency. The script inscribes a five-column layout used across Eurasia and North Africa to facilitate computations.
Ancient Trade through Silk Road:
Around 130 BCE the Silk Road connected a 5000-mile trade route including China, India, the Roman Empire, and Persia. At this time horses were used for transportation to travel and carry goods across long distances. Materials that were exchanged and introduced because of the long-distance trade between different civilizations:
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This impacted society because the culture grew and developed with the addition of these goods and the communication of information between societies.
The Decline of the Silk Road:
The Silk Road brought East and West together, communicated language, art, literature, religion, science, and disease, but also made trade and merchants major players in the history of the world. Thus, trade continued and grew, but the overland Silk Roads declined as the newly powerful China and Russia devoured the Central Eurasian nations of the Silk Road, and Britain colonized India.
Though there are debates over whether the spoken word preceded writing (or at least the use of writing instruments), it is clear that early man traded goods long before he could write down his deals using a pen or pencil. Trade was also a boon for human interaction, bringing cross-cultural contact to a whole new level and today’s world trading and trade financing technicalities gave another height to trading.
