Two millennia before the tanker, caravans were already moving thousands of tonnes a year

Eleven landmark long-distance trade corridors from roughly 300 BCE to today, each mapped between its benchmark endpoints with an estimated volume at a representative moment. Volumes come in incomparable units — tonnes, ships, transits, barrels per day, and, in one grim case, people — so they are labelled, never scaled against each other.

World trade routes through time: BCE to today

Ancient (begins BCE) Medieval Early modern Industrial & modern Forced migration — people, victims, not cargo

300 BCE

Arcs are great circles between benchmark endpoints, not exact historical paths; way stations are named in the tooltips. A faded arc means the route's era has passed at the selected year. Line width carries no meaning.

What the map cannot say alone

Ancient overland trade was heavy industry: the trans-Saharan network moved an estimated 10,000 tonnes of salt a year into West Africa (studyguides.com), more than three times the incense route's estimated 3,000 tonnes a year at its height (smithsonianmag.com).

The Silk Roads carry no number on this map by design: the network was so fragmented across caravan routes that no defensible route-wide annual figure exists, and any single number would mislead (gateway.ipfs.cybernode.ai).

One corridor here moved people, not goods: 12.5 million victims were embarked on transatlantic slave-trade routes between 1501 and 1867, a cumulative total over the whole era, not an annual flow (neh.gov).

Today's flows concentrate at chokepoints: 23.2 million barrels of oil a day passed the Strait of Malacca in the first half of 2025 (ednews.net), while roughly 15,000 ships a year transit the Suez Canal (egypttoursportal.com).

All eleven routes

Route	Active	Benchmark volume	Via	Confidence	Source

Method: a curated, selected historical overview of 11 long-distance trade corridors — 3 beginning BCE, 10 with a numeric benchmark volume — chosen from 57 candidate route-volume extractions scanned before curation; research current to 2026-08-28. Volumes are point-in-time benchmark estimates in heterogeneous units (tonnes/year, ships/year, transits/year, barrels/day, and total people embarked) and are never plotted on one quantitative scale. Dates and endpoints stand for broad networks or representative corridors, not single fixed paths; arcs are endpoint great circles and intermediate way stations are listed textually. Confidence rates source and definition quality, not whether a route existed. This is not an exhaustive atlas.