Hidden in the Shadow of the Stamps: Discovering the Variety and the Economic Importance of Hellenistic Transport Amphorae in Nea Paphos

Agata Dobosz, a researcher at the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, presents interim findings from her research project on Hellenistic transport amphorae from Nea Paphos, drawing on excavations at the Agora, Maloutena and the House of Orpheus.

Dobosz begins with the historical position of Nea Paphos after its late fourth-century BC foundation and the Ptolemaic conquest of Cyprus, and explains the function of transport amphorae and their handle stamps. Because past scholarship in Paphos and elsewhere concentrated on stamped handles for their epigraphic and iconographic value, roughly ninety per cent of the amphora record was left aside. In published reports from Paphos, about two thousand of the two thousand four hundred recorded amphorae are stamped handles, a bias that exaggerates the share of centres that stamped regularly, above all Rhodes. To correct this, her project records all stamped and unstamped fragments from Hellenistic strata, combining macroscopic fabric grouping with petrographic, chemical and organic residue analyses.

Walking through over three hundred fragments from the Agora, Dobosz divides the material into Early, Middle and Late Hellenistic phases. In the Early Hellenistic period, alongside North Aegean imports from Thasos and South Aegean vessels from Samos or Paros, Chios, Kos, Knidos and Rhodes, she identifies Cypriot groups. One comes from Kourion, the kouriaka keramia of the mid-third-century BC Zenon papyri, first identified by Virginia Grace in 1979. A second group, previously attributed through sigma-alpha stamps to Salamis, shares its fabric with local Paphian colour-coated ware studied by John Hayes, and Dobosz suggests it may instead represent the paphia keramia named in the Zenon papyri. A third fabric matches Hayes Type 1 early Roman amphorae and local roof tiles, pointing to continuity in Paphian ceramic workshops.

In the Late Hellenistic well S.173 at the Agora, Coan amphorae and Coan-type vessels from various centres outnumber Rhodian ones, reversing the picture given by published stamps; Knidian, Tripolitanian and Italian Lamboglia 2 amphorae also occur, with Palestinian and Egyptian vessels elsewhere on the site. In the discussion afterwards, Dobosz addresses the end of Cypriot basket-handled amphorae, the problems of attributing stamps with Cypriot Syllabary signs to Kition, and the Late Classical to Early Hellenistic transition.