Ephesos: What made amphorae so important in antiquity?

When we talk about amphoras, we have to forget about the amphora and think about what was inside. In Ephesus, I am part of a project named Crossing the Sea. And the aim of this project is to study pottery material from Asia Minor in Athens. To see how these exchanges between these two very important cities and ports and a productive area like Asia Minor, exporting pottery, but not only pottery, but the things that were contained in the amphoras to other parts of the Aegean, especially to Athens. Ephesus is a huge metropolis. It's a very important port of consumption, but also of redistribution of products. These ones were found here. Most of them probably were consumed here. But especially in the port, we have to think that amphorae from the Black Sea could be put in a ship here and not only in the Black Sea. And that's why we have a very rich variety of amphorae. For example, we have this spectacular find, also from Ephesus. In here we can read the content of the amphora in Latin, scomber, which refers to a kind of fish. And here also we have the name of the person in charge of this trade. So this kind of information, this titului picti, gives us a lot of information about the actors, the contents and the economic implications of this trade. We can also use them to date, because we know with the forms, especially with the typology of the different features they have, we can more or less know in which century or even in which half a century, quarter of a century were produced. So they help us to know where we are in time. Are we in the 1st century AD or in the 7th century AD? The most common question regarding amphorae is why are they pointed? They don't stand, because they are, as we said in the beginning, designed to travel. Their functionality, the thinking behind the pot is the travel. And in antiquity this means ships mainly, especially in long distance. This is designed to fit inside the ship and also they are designed to fit between each other. Normally amphorae are stacked one on top of the other. To set the cargo of a ship is like an art. It's like a perfect puzzle that has to be super stable. And they used to put some kind of vegetal fibers or some kind of materials between them to compress all that and turn it into a unit. No things can move inside of a ship. The difference between an amphorae and a dish is that the amphorae is an economic transaction of high value, because it's many liters. It's an important cargo. When a ship departed from a port, that was a risk. There are many operators in the chain of an amphora traveling. Since the producer of the amphora itself, the workshop that makes the pot, to the owner and the producer of the content, the process of putting this content inside, the process of flitting that into a boat and sailing the boat. Merchants also take part of this process. It's like building a castle and then you put that all together with the other pottery, with other finds, human remains, glass, metal finds, archaeological material that constitutes all the archaeological context. And then you start to think about that specific room, that specific context in Ephesus where this comes from. But then you go beyond and beyond and you put this together with other finds in Ephesus, with other contexts in the Aegean or in the Mediterranean. And then you see trends, you see dynamics. To put all the evidence from the amphora in their bigger historical context, to talk about changes in economy, in demands and in life of the people who are consuming this. Because we can talk about macroeconomy, about big transport routes, but we are also talking about what the people from this shop or this house or this retail area in Ephesus were consuming at that point. So there's many ways to undo the puzzle of the information of an amphora or ceramic material and talk about many things.