Salt caravans in Africa and China
A salt caravan across the Sahara Desert By 252 BC, a Chinese governor named Li Bing also figured out how to mine salt. People dug deep pits down to where [...]
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06, 2017
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06, 2017
Chocolate and Africa
A white man beating an enslaved African man in Brazil African-American slavery and chocolate As more and more people wanted chocolate, farmers had to grow more and more cacao beans. [...]
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06, 2017
Clay, sand, and loam – Soil types
Soil types triangle What is dirt made of? All dirt is basically made of three different kinds of particles, as Aristotle and his student Theophrastus saw in the 300s BC. [...]
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06, 2017
Farming in Ancient Egypt – Egyptian farming
Egyptian farming: Ancient Egyptian cattle plowing (Louvre Museum, Paris) When did Egyptians start to farm? The Egyptians started farming a little later than their neighbors in West Asia and about the same [...]
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06, 2017
What is a wet nurse? History of wetnursing
What is a wet nurse? An ancient Egyptian wet nurse nursing a baby (From the tomb of one of the daughters of Akhenaten) What is a wet nurse? A wet [...]
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06, 2017
What is usury? Economic history
Code of Hammurabi (1700s BC) Usury (YOU-sure-ee) is when you lend money to someone else and charge a percentage as interest for that money. For instance if you lend me [...]
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06, 2017
Who invented taxes? History of taxes
History of taxes: Subjects bring tribute to Persepolis (Iran, ca. 480 BC) What are taxes? Taxes have been around for a long time. They are the main way people pay [...]
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06, 2017
What is straw? History of straw
History of Straw: loose straw in a pile What is straw made of? Straw is the dried stalks of tall grasses like wheat, millet or barley. After people harvested the [...]
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06, 2017
Seals and sealings – Economic history
Early sealing from West Asia About 3000 BC, as people started to live in cities and the world got more crowded, they also started to want a way to mark [...]
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06, 2017
History of pigs, pork, and bacon
History of pigs: A wild boar Where do pigs come from? The first pigs evolved in Southeast Asia from earlier, smaller mammals, about two million years ago, and spread out [...]
