Rhodian Amphora Stamps: New Methods, New Results

In Antiquity, amphorae were used for the transport land or sea transport of all kinds of goods and minerals, sometimes on very long distances. Since the 5th century BC, some Greek cities in the Mediterranean and the Black Seas region started to affix control marks onto their amphorae. The function of these amphorae stamps is still discussed nowadays, even if the most possible reason is that they may have been used to tax the production of the containers. The importance of amphora stamps is mostly quantitative: about 300,000 exemplars were unearthed, from England to Ethiopia, and from Morocco to India. But it is also qualitative: they are an accurate way of dating on most archaeological fields; they also allow the tracing of the movement of goods carried in amphorae; they reveal indirectly the economic and social organisations of the ceramic industry in the ancient Greek world. Amongst the seventy stamp centres we know, Rhodes is undoubtedly the most important. This city one of the most powerful in the Hellenistic Period (323-31 BC) produced half the amphora stamps from Rhodes providing the current corpus, which are more than 150,000 specimens. I have already gathered and translated about 1,500 publications on Rhodian amphora stamps that have been written in twenty languages since the middle of the 16th century. My goal is to enhance this exceptional heritage, make it accessible to the largest number and to optimize its future development. For a long time, Archaeologists have underlined the necessity to create a corpus of the Rhodian amphora stamps and deplored the inadequacy of the means of publication for such a project. Thanks to new technologies and the last methodological progresses, this goal can be achieved by gathering in a computer database all the material already published. But we can do even better by creating a tool that will permit 1) to enhance the chronology of the amphorae stamps; 2) to understand better their signification and purpose; 3) to study antic trade over a period of several centuries and on a global scale. In fact, the idea is to create a new type of corpus that will be dynamic and serve as a model for the study of other mass-produced artefacts. Thus, I think I can significantly contribute to the creation of a genuine economic archaeology. Next to the corpus, I will write a monograph of about 150 pages that will permit first to assess the research from the Renaissance until now, and offer new perspectives for the future.

I have devised a website to record and study Rhodian amphora stamps, one of the most important sources for the history of Antiquity, especially economic history, and one of the best aids to dating available to archaeologists excavating in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. The website has been built by the Centre Nouvelles Technologies of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. It will facilitate the development of international research on the subject. In addition, I have prepared a book about the medical doctor and explorer Johan Hedenborg, who between 1840 and 1857 collected on Rhodes a large number of inscriptions and stamps on amphoras and tiles. This hitherto unpublished evidence enables us to clarify the purpose of ceramic stamps, a subject of much debate since the middle of the 19th century. It seems that they were used to record the payment of taxes on the production of amphoras and tiles. Finally I have worked on a book about the amphora stamps of Rhodes which will form a compendium and analysis of all the evidence collected on the subject since the Renaissance.