Pompeii shoppers followed a weekly market timetable scratched on a wall
Outside a large shop in Pompeii, someone scrawled the local market calendar. On Saturn's day, traders set up in Pompeii and Nuceria; on the Sun's day they moved to Nola and Atella; on the Moon's day, Cumae, and so on through the week. Traders rotated between towns on a fixed cycle, and a city of roughly 12,000 people kept several markets busy.
Pompeii's produce stalls clustered near the Forum, livestock was sold out by the amphitheatre on the edge of town, and a building called the macellum probably handled meat and fish. Stallholders paid a tax for the right to trade on market days. Rome went bigger: Trajan's Market, built around 100 to 110 CE, stacked shops across four levels, arguably the earliest permanent retail shopfronts. Greek cities had already sorted sellers by product, with fish in one spot and perfumes in their own building, and officials at the Athenian agora checked weights, measures and coins so buyers were not cheated.
Bazaars may be older still. Records suggest cities in Iran zoned trade into particular districts from about 3000 BCE, and Middle Eastern bazaars grew as long covered lanes running from one city gate to another, shaded from the fierce sun. The vaulted bazaar at Tabriz stretches for kilometres and is the longest of its kind. Herodotus, oddly, claimed the Persians never developed markets, and noted with surprise that in Egypt women did the trading while men stayed home weaving.
The English word descends from the Latin mercatus and first appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in an entry for 963, expressing a wish that there be a market in the same town. Medieval English kings granted charters from the 12th century that protected a town's trading days from nearby rivals. The Domesday Book of 1086 counts 50 English markets, and by 1516 there were 2,464, spaced so a farmer could walk to one and back in a day, about 10 kilometres. Some open-air markets have run without a break since the 1100s.
Climate shaped the form. Hot regions favoured roofed markets, milder ones stayed open-air, and much of Asia settled on morning markets for fresh food and night markets for everything else.
Source: Marketplace
