226 TANIA PANAgOU
activity. However, the dispersal of the stamps indicates that at least for a period
these cities did not limit their exports to a small number of trading partners.
They attempted to participate in a wide trade network even though most of
their amphoras were distributed locally.
At a lower remove, the find spots of the stamps from twenty-two smaller
productions (category 1) attest to limited productions and trade connections.
Here, in most cases, we may speak about broadly regional trade links. At the
same time, some of these productions appear also in distant markets, proba-
bly as a result of chance. Writing about trade in Roman Egypt, Alston states
that ‘one document attesting a transaction may represent an ancient reality of
hundreds of such transactions or just one’ ( 1998 : 165). In the case of subgroups
1a and 1b, it seems that we are closer to the latter conclusion. The reason for
this may be the paucity of reported finds, despite the unambiguous identifi-
cation of these stamps through the ethnic. Thereupon rests the assumption
that stamping transport amphoras in these cities must have been a short-term
practice without an important impact in the local economy. It appears that
these amphoras were not produced for a continuous, wide-range export. Their
products circulated for a short period and mainly at a regional range. They
were never fully integrated into a broader exchange network.
However, it is crucial that most of these productions, which are found
regionally, are minor. They indeed have minimal participation in markets. But
the absence of a series of stamps does not betoken an absence of trade; it sim-
ply means that there was no trade in stamped amphoras. The use of stamps
remained in these cases probably experimental or just a form of imitation of
the larger classes.
On the other hand, the larger stamp classes always travel beyond local and
regional borders. Once a production was growing, it did not confine itself to
the immediate vicinity. But it can also have occurred in the opposite way: there
was demand for the products abroad and as a result the production grew. It is
also possible that greater productivity and wider diffusion went hand in hand.
Evidently, these aspects of ancient economic life (production growth and dif-
fusion breadth, that is, supply and demand) seem to be intimately related, partly
as cause, partly as effect. In any case, stamping was obviously regularly applied
when the production was large and the distribution wide.
In theory we would expect to be able to split the distributions into patterns,
simply according to the distance of the importing centers from the produc-
tion centers and thus identify strictly localized distributions (i.e., within the
same city-state), from regional (i.e., within the broader geographical entity
where the production site belongs or neighboring areas), and from widespread
distribution.
In practice, however, there seems to be no such pattern. From the informa-
tion offered by the stamps, there is no evidence for strictly localized circulation