264 MARK L. LAWALL
Stockpiling and withholding surplus may also be indicated by the range
of dates of amphora stamps attested on individual shipwrecks. The Kyrenia
ship, for example, which sank in the early third century BCE carrying just
over 320 Rhodian amphoras and much smaller numbers of other Aegean
and Levantine types, includes Rhodian stamps that span at least four years of
Rhodian eponyms (Lawall 2011c). By contrast, the Cnidian area stamps of the
slightly later (ca. 280 BCE) Serçe Limanı Hellenistic wreck include only one
eponym abbreviation (Koehler and Wallace 1987 ). Few other Late Classical or
Hellenistic shipwrecks have been studied in sufficient detail yet to consider the
minimum range of years attested by the stamps.Problems with Amphoras
And yet, amphoras in general terms bring many challenges to the details of
the transaction process, and these negatives are of great significance in shaping
and defining ancient markets. Amphoras obscure their contents. Once sealed,
the contents are invisible; the specific quantity of the contents is unknown; the
very identity and quality of those contents is likewise hidden. Tasting, smelling,
or otherwise checking the contents of the amphora to be purchased, therefore,
seems to have been a common – yet time consuming – activity in the market-
place (Figures 11.1 and 11.2; on such images see Massar and Vierbanck-Piérard
2013 : 275–7).
Some jars might indicate the nature of their contents through their shape or
appearance. For the most part, however, such information was of very limited
reliability and depended heavily on the specific circumstances. Indeed, in a
recent paper (2011c), I describe the many different degrees to which amphoras
did, or more commonly did not, indicate their point of origin and how such
indications would have operated in different marketing or exchange contexts.
Likewise, the evidence for re-use, re-filling and reshipment of Greek ampho-
ras (Lawall 2011a; 2011b) would have further challenged the consumer to know
what he/she was actually buying. While some scholars remain skeptical of the
extent to which such re-use occurred and hence the scale of this problem (e.g.,
Debidour 2011 : 36), it seems to me that if the occurrence is clear in even a few
archaeological cases, the ancient reality must have been even more significant.
This account of problems related to information risks implying that I imag-
ine the amphoras themselves to be the only possible means for gaining the
knowledge about products needed for the transaction. Quite to the contrary,
as noted earlier in this chapter, one must admit that any number of now-lost
means could have helped convey such information: labels or tags of perishable
material or ‘paperwork’ not even attached to the amphora itself. And yet, some
amphoras did provide information more reliably than others. Since this is the
case, we must assume that there was believed to be some advantage to making