Commerce and Culture

The palace bureaucracies were no more. With no royal accounts to record, the technology of writing was lost. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 126.

That's Josiah Ober on the destruction of the mighty Mycenaean civilization and the Greek Dark Ages (1100-750 BCE) that soon followed. It's also a very salient observation on the role of commerce in the production of culture. Here, without the need to account for royal trade and business, writing would, probably, not have existed so early around the Aegean Sea. Clearly, since it ceased to exist after the collapse of Mycenaean culture. This is one reason, to my mind at least, why we ought to praise commercial culture. In fact, it's the reemergence of large scale commercial enterprise that supported the flourishing of classical Greek antiquity:

By the eighth century, Greece was growing rapidly; there were more people and more wealth. Higher quality of luxury goods were, once again, being produced by Greek artisans. Athenian potters were, for example, now capable of turning out huge vases, beautifully decorated in the Geometric style and used in elaborate funerary rites by prominent families with enough surplus wealth to expend some part of it for dramatic public display. Literacy returned to Greece, after the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians - the dynamic, trade-oriented city-state culture centered in what is now Lebanon. The Greeks modified the Phoenician alphabet by adding vowels; the Greeks' writing system would eventually be adopted and adapted to a wide variety of purposes by Etruscans, Romans - and us. Unlike the Bronze Age, when literate scribes used an arcane writing system to keep palace accounts, the new alphabet-based Greek literacy was used widely by creative writers and political innovators: by poets, lawmakers, and later by historians, philosophers, scientists, traders, and many others. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 132.