The Lowly Amphora (and ancient contact across the oceans)

The Mathisen Corollary ^ | Monday, February 6, 2012 | David Warner Mathisen

[SunkenCiv]

Professor Elizabeth Lyding Will (1924 - 2009...) was one of the world's leading authorities on amphoras, an ancient two-handled container that her research demonstrated to be vitally important for tracing ancient trade patterns and for opening windows on tremendous amounts of information about ancient life and commerce.

In a 2000 article entitled "The Roman Amphora: learning from storage jars," she discusses the diverse uses of "the lowly Roman amphora -- a two-handled clay jar used by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans to ship goods," describing both its main usage for the transportation of liquids including wine, olive oil, and fish sauce, and its many other auxiliary uses, from funerary urn to acoustic enhancement device in theaters.

It makes fascinating reading, but the most intriguing aspect of the article, perhaps, comes in the final paragraph, in which Professor Lyding states that she has in her possession a fragment from one of the controversial amphoras found in Guanabara Bay outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and that she believes its characteristics may indicate a date of the third century AD.

This 1985 article from the New York Times explains that the bay is littered with shipwrecks, but that a particular submerged reef within the bay is known for the ancient jars that local fishermen have reported hauling up in their nets for years (hence the informal moniker, "Bay of Jars"). In the 1970s, the article reports, "a Brazilian diver brought up two complete jars with twin handles, tapering at the bottom, the kind that ancient Mediterranean peoples widely used for storage and are known as amphoras."

This piqued the interest of Florida author Robert Marx, who obtained permission to dive at the site in late 1982, and found the remains of over 200 broken amphoras as well as several complete amphoras.

[SunkenCiv]

This is one of the most interesting topics we've had in GGG for a long while, in particular the discussion, so, sorry I'm a day late, but back in message 5 I said I would make this the Digest ping, so here it is.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3295687/posts?page=22#22

[SunkenCiv]

You’ll notice there is *no* method of stowing — the surviving wood of the ship doesn’t include those boards they’re using in the display to keep the jars from tipping. That’s because there *were* no such boards. :’)

There was a pile of soft cargo, such as grain; even in Greek times the amount of grain imports from Egypt was remarkable. By the time Rome got going, the grain boats were so large — this is according to the late Lionel Casson — that only a few ports in the Med could even receive them. Rhodes was one, the Pireaus of Athens, and Rome itself could handle them for unloading, but their point of origin was the Nile.

[SunkenCiv]

While I'm at it, I want to re-ping discussion participants regarding the other half of this amphora question -- was it a sustainable technology? Turns out, not so much. This has been on my mind for years, seems like a good time to bring it up:

• Google Search -- Mount Testaccio

[SunkenCiv]

Roman rubbish dump reveals secrets of ancient trading networks
Telegraph UK | June 4, 2015 | Nick Squires
Posted on 06/07/2015 9:12:42 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3297812/posts

[TigersEye]

I love Testaccios! Especially the hot chile testaccios. ;^)

Thanks for the ping, this old tech stuff is fascinating to me.

[colorado tanker]

I did not know until the recent thread that amphorae were not reusable. That seems to make it a not so good technology.

I try to avoid the world sustainable. It's come to mean everything and nothing. I have figured out, however, that whenever a liberal uses sustainable they like it and when they use unsustainable, they don't like it. That said, it does not seem a sustainable technology when you have to destroy all the shipping containers after a voyage and make/buy new ones for the next.

[SunkenCiv]

Amphorae got reused after a fashion — broken pieces or ostraca were used like post-its are today; surviving letters to family members serving in the Roman legions show up at the sites of former forts and whatnot on the frontiers.

[SunkenCiv]

I love the ridiculous rubbish about how ancient coins from across the Atlantic found in the Americas were all lost by coin collectors. That's such an absurdly stupid claim, and as the *real* saying goes, absurdly stupid claims require absurdly stupid levels of evidence. There is ZERO evidence of any such coin collectors, much less careless ones. Anyone making such a claim is just a jackass.

Who Built New England's Megalithic Monuments?