The Most Profitable Ancient Industries

Money makes the world go round, and the maxim held just as true in ancient times. The pre-Industrial economies that fed and clothed early civilizations rested on a handful of leading industries. Agriculture and mining built the underlying wealth. Jewelry, textiles, and pottery turned raw materials into trade goods. The spice trade carried the highest-value cargoes across thousands of miles, and the forced labor of enslaved people made much of this production possible. Seven industries below that shaped which ancient civilizations rose and which declined.

Agriculture

Agriculture sat at the base of nearly every ancient economy. Growing plant-based food and raising domesticated animals for consumption and trade allowed societies to break from the hunter-gatherer pattern that had defined human life for tens of thousands of years. Farming methods varied by terrain. In Egypt, irrigation systems drew on the Nile River to water crops. In Asia, rice and millet emerged as the dominant grains, supported by increasingly advanced tools. As farms grew, their owners could acquire more livestock and land, yielding greater supply and eventually greater commerce. Surplus food freed individuals from the daily struggle to find enough to eat, and entire villages and later cities developed around productive farmland, condensing populations and giving rise to the complex political, economic, and cultural systems of the ancient world.

Mining

Lucrative then and now, mining for minerals was considered essential in the ancient world. Gold was prized for its purity and chemical stability and was usually recovered from streambeds and gravel through placer mining. Silver was sought for similar reasons and, in some periods and places, was valued above gold. Copper, the most abundant of the early metals, was being mined as early as 3800 BC on the Sinai Peninsula and even earlier in other parts of the world. Non-metals also held value. Around 4,000 years ago, Egyptians prized amethysts for the purple they produced, a color rare elsewhere in nature. Stone quarries supplied the Egyptians with the limestone, granite, and sandstone used to build the pyramids and the more utilitarian buildings of daily life. Beyond extraction for jewelry and construction, mining drove technological advancement, since metallurgy required new tools and techniques at every stage.

Jewelry

The downstream industry of mining, jewelry making has a long history and catered to the wealthy of antiquity. Filigree, decorative designs made with extremely fine wiring, and granulation, the technique where tiny gold beads are fused to the metal surface, first appeared with the Sumerians around 2500 BC. After spreading through Mesopotamia, jewelry-making techniques moved westward into modern-day Turkey, where excavations at Troy uncovered fine gold jewelry from approximately 2500 to 2300 BC. Around 1700 BC, the Minoans on the Mediterranean island of Crete advanced the field with repoussé, a technique that creates three-dimensional designs by hammering the back of a metal sheet. Starting roughly in 800 BC, the maritime Phoenicians established trading colonies across the Mediterranean Sea, connecting jewelry-making techniques between eastern Mediterranean civilizations and the emerging Greek and Roman societies. In the ensuing imperial Roman period, the empire’s infrastructure carried the jewelry trade across most of Europe, including the northern Celtic regions.

Slavery

Considered morally indefensible today, the enslavement of human beings was treated as standard by most ancient civilizations. A workforce that did not have to be paid was favored in economies where large-scale, often dangerous labor had to be performed. Slavery touched nearly every part of ancient life, with domestic servitude, agriculture, construction, and the military among the most common applications. Recorded prices give a sense of the scale. A male slave could go for 500 Roman denarii during the reign of Augustus, while one Pompeii record from 79 AD shows a slave selling for 2,500 sestertii, or 625 denarii. Research estimates roughly one in four people in Athens between 450 and 320 BC were enslaved, and 15-25% of the population of Italy in the first century BC was likely enslaved as well. Owning many enslaved people was treated as a sign of social status, and only the wealthy could afford to maintain such households.

Textiles

Fabrics have been fundamental to human life for a very long time. Anthropologists believe humans first started wearing clothing sometime between 100,000 and 170,000 years ago, based largely on genetic studies of clothing lice. The tradition continued through the earliest civilizations, including China, Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire, where particular fabrics carried significant fashion and status weight. The Minoans of Crete, beginning around 2000 BC, specifically bred sheep for high-grade wool and built sizable production workshops that exported wool and linen to surrounding lands. In interior decoration, textiles were used by Romans and early Byzantines to divide rooms, cushion surfaces, and add comfort. The Egyptians made some of the earliest documented advances in weaving, generating lacy textures and fringes by 3000 BC and developing weft looping and inlaid fringing techniques by 2000 BC.

Spice Trade

A favorite of cooks then as now, spices were prized in ancient times and traveled enormous distances to reach buyers. The trade had its origins by about 1,000 BC, when cinnamon and possibly pepper were transported from traders in India and Indonesia to the Egyptian kingdom. Clove, mace, and nutmeg followed through the same network. Arab merchants controlled the route between Asian producers and the Mediterranean world for centuries. Their hegemony broke around 116 BC, when a shipwrecked Indian sailor rescued in Ptolemaic Egypt taught Greek navigators how to use the monsoon winds of the Arabian Sea to reach India directly. By the first century AD, the Indian subcontinent had become the central exchange point for spices moving between Indonesia, the Roman Empire, and points beyond. By 250 AD, the Roman Empire’s decline shifted the bulk of the spice trade toward the rising Byzantine Empire.

Pottery

Pottery handled both tableware and storage in the ancient world, much as it does today. The earliest known pottery dates to around 20,000 years ago, with fragments from Xianrendong Cave in southern China showing burn marks from being placed over fires. Pottery making spread widely through East Asia and reached the Near East and Europe by around 8000 BC. By 3000 BC, artisans across Mesopotamia were using the potter’s wheel, and kilns capable of high-temperature firing were in regular use. About 1,500 years later, glazing techniques developed in China added durability and aesthetic depth to the finished work. Athenian pottery came to dominate the Mediterranean market during the city’s classical period, with ceramics traveling as far as southern Russia, central Europe, Spain, Persia, and the coast of North Africa. The most successful Athenian potters became wealthy enough to leave significant offerings on the Acropolis, the political and religious center of the city. Pottery’s commercial dominance faded with the mass production of the Industrial Age, though craft pottery has continued to the present.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Despite the vast differences in culture and society between then and now, most of these industries have continued into modern times in different forms and means of production. A jewel-encrusted necklace, an ornate ceramic bowl, or a dish flavored with imported paprika each traces back to mankind’s earliest recorded economic activity. From those early beginnings, these industries became financial powerhouses in their own right, and their influence will likely be felt for millennia more.