Marea Amphora Kilns

(figlinae, Marea)

KilnAegyptus · Lake Mariout, near Alexandria, EgyptBuilt 50 BCE

About

On the shore of Lake Mareotis, potters at Akademia fired the amphorae that carried Alexandria's celebrated wine across the empire, using kilns up to 12 meters wide capable of firing several hundred vessels at once. Strabo praised Mareotic wine as worth aging, and the trade needed a matching flood of containers, which these workshops supplied for the better part of a millennium. Waste dumps of kiln wasters and ceramic slag mark the site alongside the wine presses that fed it. This shore held one of Roman Egypt's densest concentrations of pottery and wine production west of Alexandria.

What happened here

The workshop runs as a production line. Clay is dug locally, weathered over winter, kneaded and thrown, or pressed into moulds for the decorated wares. Vessels are dried under cover, stamped with the potter's name, stacked in the kiln around a central flue and fired for days with the temperature judged by eye and by test pieces pulled from a port in the side. A big firing holds tens of thousands of pots and a bad one loses the lot. Wasters are dumped in heaps beside the works. Some workshops export across half the empire and their stamps turn up thousands of miles away. Fuel is the limit on everything, so kilns sit near woodland and move when it runs out.