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352 13. specialized production and exchange
and exotic: superb local jewellery, defensive weaponry from Scandinavia,
gold coins and garnets from Francia, and silver- and bronze-work from the
Byzantine eastern Mediterranean. But amongst the grave-goods there was
also one very poorly made pottery bottle. The unimpressive quality of this
bottle, made on a slow wheel and highly irregular as it is, already tells us
much about the base of the economy which sustained the marvels of Sutton
Hoo. But it is, in fact, probably itself an exotic import, since it was made on
the wheel, and since there is no evidence that any native pottery was wheelthrown
in the early Anglo-Saxon period. Until the development in the
eighth and ninth century of the Ipswich potteries, the people of East Anglia
used only hand-shaped pots. 8
The king who was buried at Sutton Hoo had access to goods from all
over the known world, and had goldsmiths working for him able to
produce objects that perfectly exploited their expensive materials. But this
high-level activity was going on against the backdrop of a broader
economy characterized by only the most basic production.
The Near East and Egypt
The situation in the contemporary Near East and Egypt was strikingly
different, as we have already seen in chapter 12 (pp. 315–45 above). The
Egyptian papyri reveal a world in which complex financial and commercial
activity was both commonplace, and recorded in written documents; and
the tax returns for one area, Aphrodito, reveal steadily mounting government
demands for tax in coin, which were apparently met without undue
difficulty until the very end of the seventh century. The archaeological
surveys of the Near East show that the fifth and sixth centuries were a high
point in settlement. Settlement was not only extensive, reaching into areas
that were normally highly marginal agriculturally; it was also intensive and
dense. Furthermore, although one might expect signs of miserable poverty
at least in some of the more barren areas, with a large population pressing
on the margins of the cultivable land, these people seem rather to have
been prosperous, as evidenced by a mass of new churches and church decoration
and by the imposing and solid houses in which they lived. These
latter are so well built that they must have been produced by specialized and
paid craftsmen (see Fig. 13 and p. 954, Fig. 54). 9
The inhabitants of the late antique Near East were involved in the longdistance
exchange of agricultural goods (a subject to which we will return
later). They were also at the centre of thriving local and regional exchange
networks, testified to by the existence of abundant and diverse pottery and
8 Bruce-Mitford (1975–83) (vol. 3. ii.597–607 for the pottery bottle).
9 See ch. 12,pp.321 and 340 above, nn. 12 and 51. Aphrodito tax: Rémondon (1965). However, using
different evidence, Bagnall (1985) argues for stable levels of taxation in Roman Egypt.
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