[Symmetry]

Not literally forever but you could describe ships bought by private money for private profit by merchants in ancient Rome as capitalism. Capitalism is, fundamentally, the private ownership of the means for production with the owners receiving the fruits of that production directly and the workers being compensated by that owner, and the capitalists using their excess profits to create more means of production. I'm not sure how you could define capitalism such that it includes everything we describe as capitalist in the modern world while excluding Roman merchants.

Until recently capitalism has been a small fraction of production but it's existed much longer.