ABSTRACT
The subject matter of business history is the business past. It follows that business history is as old as civilisation and much older than the first accumulations of business archives. Humans always earned a living (first by foraging and hunting, later by farming and trading) and tales told in families and social groups have long been an efficient way of passing on the lore of how to do so. The Bible, the Norse sagas and the Confucian analects were not centrally focused on the more advanced agricultural, crafts and trading businesses of their day, but they contain stories and analytical reflections on making a living by providing goods and services to others. Accounting records on stone date back thousands of years, and archaeologists and classical scholars have proved far more adept at reconstructing the business past of pre-modern eras than scholars in those fields once considered either possible or desirable. The oldest accounts of the activities of businesses that still survive today have been preserved by courtesy of the precocious literacy and above-average longevity of religious organisations and businesses that served them in both Europe and Asia. 1 In the light of these and millennia of previous business storytelling, it is unwise to attempt to identify the ‘first’ business history.
