The Memphite Region and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1st Millennium A.D.: More on Provincial Trade of the Roman and Byzantine Empires

Abstract

Archaeological research in Memphis and its environs (including the necropoleis of Giza, Saqqara, Abu-Roash) has revealed a significant number of ceramic imports from the Eastern Mediterranean dated to the 3rd–7th centuries A.D.: Palestinian LRA 4 amphorae, Cypriot and Cilician LRA 1 amphorae and their prototypes, “Cypriot sigillata” tableware. The main object of “ceramic” trade between Roman and then Byzantine provinces was wine, olive oil, and sporadically – tableware. Having become a part of the Pax Romana, Egypt was “the granary of Rome”, a market for goods of the metropolis and other provinces, a transit point for the imperial trade with Axum, Arabia and India. Archaeological finds of amphorae in Egypt demonstrate that wines from the metropolis and western Roman provinces were not widely distributed in the Nile Valley, concentrating in Alexandria and key points of trade routes. “Crisis of the 3rd century A.D.” contributed to the disappearance of Italian, Gallic, Aegean wines from the Egyptian market, their place was again taken by Cilician, Cypriot and Syro-Palestinian wines. The collapse of the empire in 395 A.D. consolidated this situation: Levantine wines were everywhere in Egypt, not only in the capital, but also in provincial settlements. In the 5th century A.D. the export of wines from Cyprus and Cilicia in LRA 1 amphoraе experienced a real boom, but the negative events in Cilicia in the 6th century A.D. reduced its scope, and the Arab conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt in the 7th century A.D. became fatal for the wine trade.