Alan Johnston’s career has many periods: the fineware graffiti period, the Kommos period, the amphora graffiti period and most recently the Naukratis and other Archives period. The present volume neatly echoes Johnston’s recent and valuable analyses of the amphora stamps and other amphora fragments from Naukratis drawing heavily on Petrie’s notebooks.
A brief introduction describes Henry Hunter Calvert’s career in Alexandria as British Vice-Consul (1856–1882), his abrupt departure to escape rioting just before the outbreak of the Anglo-Egyptian war and his death in 1882 due to cholera while in Çannakale in the care of his younger brother Frank. The stamps were collected by Calvert and two colleagues: Sidney Smith Saunders, also a consul in Alexandria, and an otherwise unknown A.A. Arcadius. While the stamps themselves were lost in 1882, Calvert’s documentation of the collection provides sufficient evidence for reporting the material and hence contributing the broader data set of stamped amphoras imported to Alexandria.
Much of the volume is devoted to a catalogue of the stamps, or rather a catalogue of Calvert’s drawings of the stamps and his readings of their contents. Johnston’s additions are minimal. He leaves the recording of the letters as Calvert offered, with only occasional comment or correction. The suggested readings of names are provided in English without any revision or restoration of the stamp’s text in standard ‘epigraphic’ format. Bibliographic references are minimal, deliberately and appropriately so. The long Rhodian section would be improved where possible by references to G. Cankardeş-Şenol, Lexikon of Eponym Dies on Rhodian Amphora Stamps, vols. 1–4 (Alexandria 2015–2017). Johnston often refers to two unpublished corpora, one of Knidian stamps and one of Koan stamps. These two corpora were developed by Virginia Grace and her colleagues, and the relevant data are archived at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/virginia-grace-finding-aid). As more of Virginia Grace’s papers are scanned and made available, these corpus numbers will become more useful.
The volume closes with some observations on the numbers of stamps from different sources in comparison with other, similar data sets from Alexandria and Naukratis. While much is as expected, especially the dominant presence of Rhodian stamps, Johnston draws important attention to some anomalies, including the many examples of Baetican stamps, the poor representation of early examples from Knidos and the absence of Cypriot material.
The challenge of such a volume is the ‘Why?’ Alexandria imported many stamped Rhodian amphoras, a well-established fact. Abrief chapter on the Baetican material would have provided that useful correction to the pattern of imports to Alexandria. Ultimately, this book may play an important role in questions of a more historiographic nature: the roots of a still-lingering antiquarianism with respect not only to amphora handles but also to other small, portable artefacts; and the roles of consular staff, other foreigners and relatively recent immigrants in the collection and, often, export of antiquities in Egypt.
Johnston notes, as his past scholarship amply demonstrates, the importance of all parts of amphoras (whether preserving a stamp or not) to the study of ancient trade and economies. That such an obvious statement still needs repeating proves the long influence of these nineteenth-century collectors for whom an artefact with letters was valuable; the same class of artefact without letters was not. There is likely more to the matter, however, than simply an appreciation of text over plain clay. Amphora handles could be gathered and possessed. As Johnston notes elsewhere, they can even be modified for easier collection by trimming off excess clay without any loss of ‘value’ to the collector. For the Vice-Consul of Alexandria, someone with a predilection for collecting ‘specimens’, these little inscriptions would have been a satisfactory way of possessing the past.
Whose past was being possessed and why? For Calvert, the answer might have been that he was possessing his own heritage, restoring it to a status of being foreign to Egypt and rightly European. Collecting and organizing nature itself, as seen in Calvert’s botanical and conchological activity, fits this theme of possession. Such activity was not limited to the British foreign service. Ioannis Demetriou, an Alexandrian Greek of Lemnian birth and the primary donor of Egyptian antiquities to the National Museum in Athens, was likewise an avid collector of handles (V.I. Chrysikopoulos, ‘L’histoire des collections d’antiquités égyptiennes du musée national d’Athènes’, in J.-C. Goyon and C. Cardin (eds), Proceedings of the IXth International Congress of Egyptologists (Leuven 2007), 333–35; and for Demetriou’s collection, see T. Neroutsos, ‘Kεραμίων λαβαί ενεπίγραφοι ανευρισκόμεναι εν τη αρχαία Aλεξανδρεία’, Aθήναιον 3 (1874), 213–45, 441–62). The emigration of many Greeks to Alexandria in the nineteenth century, welcomed by the Ottoman government on economic grounds, renewed the centuries-old connection between Greece and Egypt. This population, too, played a key role in the intersection between the nascent field of Egyptology and European appropriation of Egypt’s past.
Works such as the present volume will have far-reaching impact if they inspire further studies of antiquities collecting in the context of modern nation-building and identity.
