Trade

Our picture of ancient economic history, and thereby also of trade, has for a long time been heavily influenced by Finley’s ‘primitivist’ view, according to which the ancient economy was underdeveloped, showing little tendency for, e. g., technological development, profit-oriented growth and long-distance trade in non-luxury items (Finley 1985). Although it is still largely accepted that trade probably never played a very important role in the ancient economy, the latest trend in the economic history of the classical period has been to stress that a more extensive integration and economic interdependence between different regions and poleis, and thereby also a greater volume of trade, must have existed than previously thought (e. g., the various papers in Parkins & Smith 1998). The development of research on ancient trade has to a large degree depended on the use of non-written, archaeological sources, the interpretation of which exemplifies the methodological problems involved in drawing conclusions on the basis of such source material.

Trade over land has usually been assumed to be limited as compared to sea-borne trade, because of the problems involved in transporting heavy freight overland. There is no need to doubt this in general, but the recent path-breaking contribution of Pikoulas on ancient Greek roads has shown that land links between individual communities must have been far more extensive than earlier assumed. Pikoulas has discovered the existence of a whole network of cart roads consisting of rock-cut wheel-ruts with a standard gauge of 1.40 m (e. g., Pikoulas 1999 for a summary of the road network in Arkadia). Roads of this type have so far been detected in the Peloponnese, in Attika, in central Greece and on several Aegean islands, seemingly connecting every single polis or larger settlement with its neighbours. Pikoulas believes that the roads were built mainly to facilitate the rapid movement of Spartan troops starting back in the archaic period. No matter who built the roads, it is clear that they must have greatly facilitated economic exchange between the communities they connected. An interesting parallel is the recent suggestion that the well-known Korinthian diolkos was built and used mainly for transporting cargo across the Isthmus and not for transporting warships, as earlier believed (Raepset 1993).

Scholars studying ancient economic trade patterns have to face several methodological problems. One is the ‘positivist fallacy’, which according to Snodgrass (1980: 126) is characterized by the assumption ‘that the importance of a class of evidence. . . stands in some relation to the quantity in which it survives to be studied today’. According to him, painted pottery is an example of such a class of evidence. It has been assumed that painted pottery was traded as objets d’art, or even that it played an important role in the Athenian economy during the classical period, partly paying for the importing of grain. However, an evaluation of the underfoot marks on Attic pots, frequently giving the price of the pots, has shown that painted pottery was not considered intrinsically valuable during antiquity (e. g., Gill 1994). The growing number of excavated shipwrecks in the Mediterranean has furthermore showed that fine pottery was exported alongside other commodities, perhaps as ‘space-fillers’, in a way resembling the role of Chinese porcelain in the ships of the East India Companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Gill 1991). But this does not invalidate the importance of painted pottery for understanding ancient trade patterns. Instead, its widespread distribution should be seen as an indicator of the vitality of trade in other commodities that are no longer extant.

Distribution patterns of transport amphorae provide a more valuable record of commerce than fine ware. The fact that such amphorae are found in large quantities in shipwrecks indicates that they played an important role in trade. Additionally, the fact that they, as opposed to painted pottery, which in the classical period was heavily dominated by Athens, were made in a large number of places (the Chian, Corinthian, Mendean and Thasian amphorae belonging to the most important at this time) expands the possibility of tracing different trade routes. Nevertheless, the contribution of the study of amphorae to our overall picture of classical trade is surprisingly small compared to the following Hellenistic and Roman periods. Finley, who made relatively little use of archaeological evidence in The ancient economy (Finley 1985), already called for more quantification of excavated finds of pottery in order to assess the scale of ancient trade. This again requires that the origin of pottery can be established. The origin of transport amphorae has traditionally been identified on the basis of stamps on the handles. There exist today several large stamp collections at large centres of importation, the ones from Alexandreia and Athens containing as many as some 85,000 and 20,000 stamps, respectively. However, several methodological problems are connected with the use of these collections as sources for economic history (e. g., Garlan 1983; Whitbread 1995).

A fundamental issue in connection with the study of trade in transport amphorae is to what extent stamped remains are representative of the total number of imported jars. Some types of amphorae were regularly stamped, the Rhodian ones even on both handles. Others were less regularly stamped. The figure for Thasian amphorae varies between c. 40 per cent and c. 80 per cent depending on the workshop, the earlier ones being stamped on both handles, the later ones only on one handle. Finally some types of amphorae were only rarely stamped, and it has been suggested that possibly as few as one out of 88 Koan amphorae were stamped, whereas Corinthian A and B amphorae were never stamped. This clearly shows that stamp collections cannot give a complete and unbiased picture of the commercial activity involving amphorae. This problem can be solved only by documenting all fragments of transport amphorae, establishing their origin with the help of fabric, shape and possibly petrographic analyses. However, as this is no easy task, studies involving unstamped amphorae often document only the presence or absence of a type without giving more detailed quantitative information, and it is not until lately that there have started to appear studies assessing the quantitative aspects also (e. g., Lawall 1998).

Another question is whether the presence of a large number of transport amphorae from place A in place B conclusively documents the importing of, for instance, oil or wine from A to B. Unfortunately there exist certain factors that may distort the picture. First, amphorae were commonly reused. This was, for instance, documented by Herodotos (3.6-7), who tells us that although wine was imported regularly to Egypt from Greece and Phoenicia, no empty amphorae could be found in Egypt because they were collected and reused to transport water to Syria! The contents of the amphorae could also be repacked into skins or smaller jars in order to be transported overland from the harbours. The large number of Greek amphorae found in Elizavetovskoe close to the mouth of Don have been explained in this way, suggesting that their contents were repacked there for further transport overland to the Middle Don or the Lower Volga (Garlan 1983; Whitbread 1995).

Trade is usually quantified in terms of the value of the goods, and when working with transport amphorae one has to remember that the value of the cargo depended on the contents of the jars and not on the jars themselves. Unfortunately we are mostly left without any hint of what the amphorae contained. It is often assumed that it was wine and oil, but finds in shipwrecks suggest the possibility of a wide range of other goods, such as vinegar, preserved fish, olives or even almonds and other kinds of nuts. The growing number of excavated shipwrecks has also helped to challenge earlier assumptions that the nationality of the traders could be identified by the origin of the pottery found on board, as it has been shown that the ships often contained a mixture of amphorae. Thus, on board the ‘Porticello’ wreck Mendean, Punic and a class of amphorae from the Bosporos were found, whereas the ‘Kyrenia’ ship contained amphorae of eleven different classes, the majority of which originated from Rhodes, Samos and Paros.