Hárshegyi Piroska: Kereskedők Sallában 2. (Zalalövő öröksége 4. Zalalövő, 2006)

The exact process of buying and selling is not known. We can often find stamps on certain amphora types that were stamped into the still soft clay before baking. As it has already been mentioned, large estates where wine and oil were produced often ordered themselves the "pack material" from potters, as it can be read in a few Egyptian contracts written on papyrus. The landowners agreed in the contracts to supply equipment and provide for these potteries, while the potter and his assistants had to produce a certain number of amphoras to an agreed date. Usually a steward (vilicus) controlled a large estate according to the land-owners orders. So it can happen that the stamp of the landowner is the same, while the vilicus stamp changes beside it, as in the case of the Laekanius Bassus family. Their stamps were found in Salla. The nicest item is a fragment of an amphora of Dressel's type 6B dated from the second half of the 1

st century AD, on which the stamp the landowner C(aius) LAEK(anius) and the vilicus CRESCENS can be seen- We known several stamps from Salla, which cannot as yet be linked with a certain estate or steward, but we know their analogues. Such are the fragments with stamps FEL.TVR, FELIX.PET and APHORVS, which can be dated from the period between Tiberius and Hadrian. The inscription painted on the amphoras in red or black open a view into another aspect of production trade. They can usually be found on amphoras without stamps. In Pannónia, they mostly occur on amphoras that contained fish sauce and fruits. These inscriptions can tell the name of the transported good, the name of the recipe after which it was produced, various advertising texts like e.g. "highest quality", "the best" etc, the capacity of the amphora, the weight of the content etc. Only a single amphora with a hand-written inscription is known from Salla (Schorgendorfer's type 558). It says OLIVA (ex)CEL(lens), which means that "high-quality olives" were transported in it. Sometimes, regrettably not in Salla, an amphora can contain more than one hand-written inscription: the first one is the usually one containing the above listed data, while the second or the third one can give a name, a body of troops or a weight. In these cases the first inscription was probably written on the amphora where it was produced or perhaps in the primary commercial depot, while the other ones were painted on the vessel at buying and selling. This could happen in the case of an amphora from Carnuntum as well. Here an amphora of fish sauce was sold to the centurio of a troop. As the products transported in the amphoras were luxury