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A small glass bottle excavated at Tanner Row in York 40 years ago has been identified as a kohl bottle – a type of eye make-up container that was very common in Roman Egypt, but is extremely rare outside this region and previously unheard of in Britain.
The bottle, which was identified during a recent re-examination of archaeological archives from the Tanner Row excavations, was originally found during York Archaeological Trust’s investigations of this area of the Roman civilian settlement between 1983 and 1984. It lay within the footprint of a timber building alongside a mix of pottery deposits dating to the late 2nd century, but the site also produced artefacts with military associations, leading to suggestions that, after going out of use, the structure functioned as a rubbish dump for the legionary fortress that was located on the opposite side of the river.
Kohl bottles similar to the Tanner Row discovery are commonly found throughout Egypt and Sudan, but only a small number of examples are documented outside that region. They have been recorded in Libya, Syria, and Lebanon, and, while two such containers have been found in Rome, they are otherwise virtually unknown in the western and northern parts of the Roman Empire. In Egypt, the bottles are commonly found within Roman military contexts, so the presence of the Tanner Row example near a legionary fortress might offer a possible clue – but how did it find its way to York?
Given the paucity of examples outside Egypt, kohl bottles do not seem to have circulated widely through trade. Instead, it is suggested that this one could have travelled to York as a personal possession and, as kohl seems to have only been fashionable in Egypt/Sudan, it may have belonged to someone from that region. In the late 2nd century, the Legio VI Victrix was garrisoned at York’s legionary fortress, and one of its commanding officers in the AD 190s was Claudius Hieronymianus, a senator known for building a temple to the Graeco-Egyptian deity Serapis in the city. Previous discoveries of other artefacts linked to eastern Roman territories add to a picture of 2nd-century York being a cosmopolitan hub populated by people from across the empire. Whatever its origins, this small bottle had travelled an extraordinary distance and must have been important to the person who carried it so far from home.
The full re-examination of the kohl bottle was recently published in Britannia: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068113X26100737.
Text: Kathryn Krakowka / Image: Hilary Cool
