Sea routes are the bee’s knees. Could you imagine shipping those vast amounts of grain over land routes in antiquity? Even today, freight ships are so efficient that using trucks to transport goods to a sea harbor is typically more expensive (both in monetary value and in pollution) than shipping across oceans, even if the street distance is maybe 500km and the ship is crossing literally half the world.
Exact economic numbers are hard to reconstruct, and always deeply contentious, but it was much the same in principle back then - something to the tune of ~100 miles by cart being more expensive than ~1000 miles (roughly the distance from Egypt to Rome) by sea.
Sea shipping is just incredibly efficient compared to us landlubbers.
Sea routes are the bee’s knees. Could you imagine shipping those vast amounts of grain over land routes in antiquity? Even today, freight ships are so efficient that using trucks to transport goods to a sea harbor is typically more expensive (both in monetary value and in pollution) than shipping across oceans, even if the street distance is maybe 500km and the ship is crossing literally half the world.
Exact economic numbers are hard to reconstruct, and always deeply contentious, but it was much the same in principle back then - something to the tune of ~100 miles by cart being more expensive than ~1000 miles (roughly the distance from Egypt to Rome) by sea.
Sea shipping is just incredibly efficient compared to us landlubbers.