31–34 of 34 posts
Would the distance in question be close to the distance from Glevum to Chersonesos? Then the fastest route between them would take 60 days. This "google map" of the roman world by Stanford is fantastic! http://orbis.stanford.edu/ If only such analysis was available realtime for all current economic variables.
There’s also a bottle just like this (well, extremely similar Roman fish bottle) in the archaeological museum of Burgas, on the Bulgarian coast - I spent about 15 minutes looking at it having my mind blown by the craftsmanship - which would corroborate the Black Sea hypothesis. They however listed it as being a garum bottle, IIRC. I’m not surprised they ended up finding the only known example across the Atlantic - Bu…
They probably would want to know about that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can buy garum today, from manufacturers that claim to follow recipes hundreds of years old. The process is claimed to be unknown, but this is in fact not true: A couple of descriptions exist of the process, for example how it was made in Caesarea, in Judea, which also manufactured murex purple dye.
What does it taste like?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can buy garum today, from manufacturers that claim to follow recipes hundreds of years old. The process is claimed to be unknown, but this is in fact not true: A couple of descriptions exist of the process, for example how it was made in Caesarea, in Judea, which also manufactured murex purple dye.
For me it is a mystery how a product made all around the Mediterranean in antiquity died out almost completely. Why didn't people in southern France, for example, keep eating garum until the modern day? Was it just changing tastes, sudden loss of necessary ingredients due to breakdown in trade, or recognition that parasites inside fish could survive the garum-making process?
It is true however that there are still Italian and Greek garum producers, as I mentioned, who claim to have been producing since Antiquity. Though this is 100% unverifiable, there's little reason to think it's not true. The thing about garum production is that IT IS SMELLY! Very, very smelly. Roman law actually forbade garum production within a certain distance to the city walls. And as the Western Empire began to evaporate, the production of most specialty / delicacy items (think wine, garum, honey, cheese, etc) moved to "wealthy manor homes" which -- because of the danger of the roads -- slowly became the armed fortress fiefdoms of feudal Europe. So probably it just fell out of favor as time wore on, except in a small few exceptional places.