Traditional System
Though each neighbourhood within the city would have a local Souq selling food and other essentials, the main souq was one of the central structures of a large city. A central marketplace, it was where textiles, jewellery, spices, wooden sculptures and other valuable goods as well as the money changers were arranged in a line.
A quadrilateral of stone-vaulted streets parallel to or crossing each other or a tight mass of buildings too packed together for roads to intersect them.
The workshops were further away from this centre of exchange as were the main residential quarters – though the wealthier merchants or scholars might live within the centre of the city.
The souk was a level of municipal administration. The Muhtasib was responsible for supervising business practices and collecting taxes for a given suq while the Arif are the overseers for a specific trade.
In a souq, the final price of an item is reached by bargaining with the shopkeeper. Traders of a given commodity would all sell in the same souq, thus ensuring a competitive market. In some African countries the souq was a place where people could come and talk, or sit down to tell stories.
Read more about this topic: Souk
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