Crystal Season

John Long, Flinders University - We think of ancient civilisations as operating very differently from the way our economy works today. Yet the Bronze Age Assyrians living in Mesopotamia, around 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, began the basis of modern capitalism, in a region spanning most of modern-day Iraq, eastern Syria and southeastern Turkey. The Assyrian empire was the root of what many scholars would now call “the West”. Cuneiform writing, the oldest in the world, records evidence of credit, loans and debits as “virtual money” and the rise of elite merchants holding monopolies on trade. They traded Afghanistan tin from the city of Kanesh (in modern Turkey) throughout their...

By Maria-Alexandra Christodoulou ~ AKROTIRI, CYPRUS (SOVEREIGN BASE AREA) — Along the Akrotiri red hills, old olive groves softly swelling in the Mediterranean sun—mute witness to ancient agrarian culture tradition. The agrarian culture lines are now seeing something of a resurgence as small farmers marry old-world folk tales with world-market sophistication to ship finer olive oils to the farthest reaches of the globe. "Akrotiri groves are old—but export-quality," declares Sofia Papadopoulos of Oleastro, an Akrotiri producer of organic olive oil. "Our oil owes this earth's heritage to selective consumers worldwide." From Bronze Age Roots to Contemporary Plates Olives were cultivated here since the Bronze Age—archeological proof documents that they were discovered in ancient...