The weights in Thonis-Heracleion: an overview of the corpus and the implications of their spatial distribution for questions about trade and exchange.

In Thonis-Heracleion in Context, D. Robinson and F. Goddio (eds), 161–172. Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology: Monograph 8. Oxford.

The weights discovered in the IEASM excavations beneath Aboukir Bay offer a direct routeway into the issues concerning the trading community in this port and emporion on the Mediterranean coast. The use of weights in standardised systems enabled traders—sometimes operating at a distance far removed from home—to be confident in the weight of the goods they were buying, the tax they were paying and that the deal they reached was fair. The weights also clearly reveal the care that their manufacturers took to ensure that they were accurate and complied to standards. Excavations of shipwrecks throughout the Mediterranean have illustrated that merchants often travelled with their own sets of weights, perhaps for added peace of mind when trading in foreign or unfamiliar markets. Consequently, it will be of no surprise to discover that the corpus of weights from Thonis-Heracleion includes examples of both Egyptian and Greek—specifically Athenian–provenance. 

Furthermore, their place of deposition also offers insight into both the potential location of the marketplace for small-scale goods in the emporion and also into the ritual behaviour of the merchants, perhaps just before they took to the waves on their journey home. All of these issues will be investigated in this chapter and will follow on from an overview of the assemblage of weights that have come to light in Thonis-Heracleion. These interpretations demonstrate that the assemblage has the potential to contribute more than just a simple description of the weights and the standards, and that they allow us to understand some of the people’s concerns—notably that they would not be duped and also perhaps that they would travel and return home safely.