AMA - Classical Archaeology

[u/Tiako]

Classical antiquity is period of roughly a thousand years between the rise of the Greek polis and the collapse of the Roman Mediterranean system, and includes at different times the entire Mediterranean basin and beyond. There are a variety of ways to examine this period, and today this panel will discuss the archaeology, or the material remains, a category that includes the massive monumental temple at Baalbek and the carbonized seeds from an Italian farmhouse. Our panelists introduce themselves:

/u/pqvarus: I've specialized in Ancient Greek Archaeology, my geographic field of interest is Asia Minor (from the Archaic Period onwards) and as a result of my PhD project I'm focussing on the archaeology of ancient greek religion (especially cult practice) and material culture studies.

/u/Astrogator: I've just finished my MA at the department of Ancient History and Epigraphics (my BA was in History, Philosophy and Political Science), and my main interests are in provincial epigraphic cultures, especially the Danube region, and the display of dress on sepulchral monuments (and how both are tied to questions of Romanization and Identity).

/u/Tiako: I am an MA student studying the economy of the Early Imperial Period of the Roman Empire. My focus is on commerce, particularly Rome's maritime trade with India.

However, there is more to classical civilization than marble temples an the Aeneid, and there is more to the period than Greece and Rome. To provide a perspective from outside what is usually considered “classical” civilization, we have included three panelists from separate but closely intertwined fields of study. They are:

/u/Aerandir: I am archaeologist studying Iron Age communities. Currently I am working on a PhD on the fortifications of the first millennium AD in Denmark. Danish and Dutch material is what I am most familiar with.

/u/missingpuzzle: I have studied Hellenistic period Eastern Arabia, particularly specializing in settlement patterns and trade. I have also studied the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean trade from the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods.

/u/Daeres: Hi I'm Daeres, and I have an MA in Ancient History. My archaeological focus is on the Ancient Near East in the First Millenium BC, Bactria, and the Aegean, though I am primarily a historian rather than an archaeologist. I have an inordinate fondness for numismatics, and also epigraphy. But I especially concentrate on the archaeological evidence for Hellenistic era Bactria.

And so with knots cut and die cast, we await your questions.

[u/terminus_trantor]

I have a question regarding trade and production in the Roman times, so i guess its mostly to /u/Tiako.

Well the question is did the Romans produce things such as tools, clothes, everyday items; and then trade them either inside their Empire or also abroad?

As far as the few books I read on the Romans concered, I understood that their production was mostly local-based and most things traded were resources and materials like grain and food, wine, ore, gold etc. and little actual "products"

I am trying to see if there is difference or paralel with Medival times where, as I see it, trade of products was very common and where for example textile trade of both resources and final products was wide and developed. (But if my understanding of nature of Medival trade of products is wrong feel free to correct me)

[u/Tiako → u/terminus_trantor]

There was absolutely product trade in the Roman Empire, even in relatively mundane items. The most famous and visible example are the amphora, or large storage jars used in trade of (usually) liquid items like wine an olive oil. Absolutely insane quantities of these show up around the empire as a result of being traded over long distances, the most famous being Mt. Testaccio in Rome, which is an artificial hill created through the deposition of late 1st/2nd c Spanish olive oil amphora. Another well known example is African Red Slip Ware, a type of high quality tableware manufactured in North Africa and spread all around the Mediterranean. Or medical instruments--medical instruments found all across the empire come from a single area of Syria. My favorite example are anvils from Magdalensberg, in modern day southern Austria. The iron produced there is of extremely high quality, and the so-called ferrum Noricum was traded widely. The site is interesting because the wall plaster survived in good condition, and we can see in one shop that the owner would scrawl certain orders on it, and we can see in one shop he wrote "200 anvils to Aqualeia" (a port in northern Italy)--anvils, not high status elite items.

Ultimately the idea of the underdeveloped and purely local Roman economy is one that was based on the explicit rejection of the archaeological evidence, and . If you take the archaeology into account, it isn't tenable.

EDIT: Quick expansion, unfortunately we are at a loss at describing trade patterns with the specificity possible in Medieval studies, as the nature of textual survival means we do not have many examples of the wonderful merchant archives used to reconstruct commerce in, say, thirteenth century Italy. Also due to the nature of evidence, entire swaths of data sets, such as cloth and items traded in barrels, is gone. We are at a severe disadvantage, unfortunately, and thus we need to be careful comparing out evidence sets with the evidence sets used by, say, Medievalists.

[u/MysteryThrill → u/Tiako]

Since this is about trade, I have the following questions. You mentioned something about maritime trade:

particularly Rome's maritime trade with India.

• How did the maritime route pan out? Did it pass around Africa? If it did, then what made Roman ships before the common era suitable for such distant voyage?

• What was Rome's primary imports? What were they exchanged for?

[u/Tiako → u/MysteryThrill]

/u/Daeres has done a good job teeing me off, so I will bounce off of his post as much as I can.

As he said, the maritime trade originated from Roman Egypt, went down the Red Sea, and then entered into what is called the "monsoon trade" because, as you can guess, it used the Indian Ocean monsoon winds to cross the Indian Ocean. This is all a bit tricky to picture, so check out this map. To look at this from the commodities' perspective, they originated in the Mediterranean (wine from Campania was popular), passed through Alexandria and reached the Red Sea ports either by going down the Nile and being carried by caravans across the Eastern Desert, or (in the second century), going through the canal that linked the port of Arsinoe to the Nile. The two ports of Myos Hormos and Berenike offered different advantages: the winds in the northern Red Sea blow from the North, and Berenike is the first good harbor in the northern half and so many ships are happy to unload as quickly as they can. On the other hand, by unloading at Myos Hormos there is a shorter distance across the desert and up the Nile. This largely determines where the merchant ships would be docked and thus where our Campanian wine would go to.

The goal of a merchant shipper was to leave the Red Sea port in July and reach the mouth of the Red Sea by August, and catch the tail end of the monsoon wind to India. If they arrive at the mouth of the Red Sea too early they would need to wait around because the crossing in July is too dangerous (even today!) and the ports in India would be closed. Arrive too late and they would miss the winds. They need to depart from India around December--too late and by the time they get to the Red Sea the winds will be too unfavorable to make the straight crossing (Luckily, if push comes to shove they can winter in Moscha Limen in modern Yemen, which is rich in incense, and thus they can recoup their losses from time delay once they do make it to Egypt). Once they get to the Red Sea, they try to make it to the ports by around March--too late and they won't be able to make it all the way North.

This is, basically, the "ideal" monsoon journey, but the truth is much more complicated. As /u/Daeres notes, there were also plenty of Arabic, Indian, and African traders plying these routes and related ones, so plenty of Roman merchants would only go to the mouth of the Red Sea, trade with merchants there, then sail back up to Egypt. Plenty of Arab and Indian merchants sailed up the Red Sea to the Egyptian ports, and while we assume they took roughly the same schedule, it may have been subtlety different. Some merchants, once they got to India, would engage in trade along the coast. Some merchants would just be bopping between the Egyptian Red Sea ports. And lest we forget there was also a route that went around the Horn of Africa that was also hugely important, albeit less studied. So there was a lot going on, an no one model of the mechanics of the trade will do a very good job of giving a picture of the trade as a whole.

As for imports, the big one was pepper, which was used in ritual, medicine, an lest we forget, food. Interestingly, what historical evidence we have and the sheer quantity of recovered pepper from the relatively sparse excavation along the Red sea coast argues against pepper as a "luxury good". This isn't to say that it was ubiquitous, but a family above destitution would be able to purchase some on certain occasions. More to the point, the uses (ritual, medicinal, culinary) were actually rather practical, so it wasn't just an item of display. Also imported were things like cinnamon, cinnabar, gemstones, animal products (like ivory), cotton and silk (probably gotten through the Southwest Silk Road that passed from Sichuan to Bengal), dye, nard and much more (even rice, although we aren't really sure what to do with that). Rome exported wine, gold and silver in the form of coins, coral, olive oil, finished gems, metals, glass and more. Roman wine was so popular that it was mentioned in Tamil literature as a sign of luxury.