Another recent project analyzed a completely different text collection: a trove of 23,000 cuneiform tablets discovered in Kültepe, Turkey, documenting the activity of a thriving Bronze Age trade colony (kārum Kaneš) from the 2nd century BCE.
The heads seem to bow especially low upon entering the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa, the ghost town of Baroque edifices that was once the splendid seat of Portugal's Indian trade colony.
European trading colonies were established in Saïda and other coastal towns, mainly to trade in silk, the major Lebanese export from the 17th to the 20th century.
"There was a reorganization of economics from Mesopotamia, going not to the east but to the north Assyrian trading colonies going into Anatolia," Crist said.
Thus, the Teotihuacán involvement with Tikal and the Central Subregion may have taken, as at Kaminaljuyú, the form of pochteca trading colonies that exerted some control over the lowland Maya.
These became the inheritors of whatever was left of the old civilization of the Central Subregion after 900 ce, having established trading colonies and even a few minor ceremonial centres on its peripheries.
The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II in 1453 was the first stroke of her death-knell as a maritime and mercantile nation; and as Turkish power spread, all Venice's trading colonies in the eastern Mediterranean were lost.
Culturally the tribes of the northeast and of the Valencian coast were greatly influenced by the Greek settlements at Emporion (modern Ampurias) and in the Alicante region, those of the southeast by influences from the Phoenician trading colonies at Malaca (Málaga), Sexi (Almuñéca), and Abdera (Adra), which later passed to the Carthaginians.
There can be very little doubt that, during the early centuries ad, Indian artists and craftsmen traveled to work in the distant trading colonies of Southeast Asia, for they would have been needed to set up local traditions with proper formulas and methods.
"Then, one of these cultures begins sending out ships to establish trading colonies and find fertile land around the entire Mediterranean because there isn't enough arable soil to sustain its ever-growing population.
