Beyond Ceramic Unguentaria: A Closer Look at Late Antique Trade of Glass Unguentaria in the Roman Province of Egypt

The Nabataean perfume industry began ca. the first century BC, flourished in the second century AD, and declined due to the effects of the mid-third century crisis. The containers in which these unguents would have been carried are called unguentaria. Unguentaria were commonly ceramic vessels, and in particular the Nabataean piriform unguentarium was preferred so much so that these Nabataean vessels are attested in such places as Rome (Johnson, 1990). However, the author suggests that perfume trade did not simply cease to exist after this period. It is likely that glass unguentaria, in use contemporaneously with ceramic, extends beyond the use of ceramic into later antiquity. Egypt’s role in late antiquity, the fourth through sixth centuries AD, was crucial to the continuity of trade between the Mediterranean and the Levant. Egypt’s key industrial city, Alexandria, was the leading commercial center well before and beyond this period. As an industrial city, Alexandria would have manufactured many value-added products from raw materials that were being imported from the East. Perfumed oils were among these value-added products. Through an intensive study of Provincia Aegytus during the Late Roman and Early Byzantine periods (fourth through sixth c. AD), as well as utilizing archaeological and literary evidence this paper will suggest that there was a continuation of the perfume industry. Furthermore, the manufacture and distribution of perfume consolidated. The industry of bottling ceramic unguentaria declined at Petra, yet the bottling of unguents must have continued elsewhere at such sites as Alexandria and shipped within a different product i.e. glass.