🍷 Amphora trade

The amphora trade was the ancient shipping of wine and oil in clay jars by sea. An amphora is a sturdy jar with two handles. Researchers read it like a document: changes of shape over time give a chronology, and stamps on the handles hint at where a jar came from and when it was made.

It shows best on the island of Thasos. Amphora handles were stamped there, and each stamp names an official who changed every year, so jars can be dated very narrowly. The system of control over amphora and roof-tile production ran from the early fourth century BC for more than two and a half centuries. There are over 4,000 stamp types, and more than 12,000 stamped handles have been found outside the island. Why they stamped is still unclear: perhaps tax, quality, standardisation or raw materials.

In the fourth and early third centuries BC Thasian wine went mostly north, to the Black Sea and Thrace. To the south, Athens was the only large market. It also served as a financial hub, where traders took credit to buy cargoes of wine.

Earlier still, wine was being made on the coast of present-day Lebanon. At the Phoenician site of Tell el-Burak, archaeologists found the first Iron Age wine press in Lebanon and linked it to Phoenician technology and wine production. For that culture see Phoenicians.

Amphorae carried oil as well as wine, so the subject touches Olive oil. What was left on the seabed is told on the page Shipwrecks with amphorae, and for the jar itself see Amphora.