Mediterranean maritime and connectivity sources

The Mediterranean was tied together for three thousand years by ships whose paperwork almost never survived the voyage. What is left instead is mostly material rather than textual: sunken cargo vessels still loaded with wine-jar amphorae, handles stamped by their makers, harbour installations, and coin finds scattered along the trade routes, all tracing an exchange system that must once have generated enormous routine paperwork -- registries, customs records, shipping notes -- almost none of which survives. One real exception shows just how large that missing paperwork must have been: the Cairo Geniza, a single synagogue storeroom that happened to preserve the merchant letters and delivery notes every busy harbour once produced and then lost. The conjectures gathered here use that rare survival, and the physical trade evidence that surrounds it, to test how tightly connected the Mediterranean's ports and traders actually were.

Tin percolation collapse tests whether a Mediterranean tin-trade network failed the way a physical percolation model predicts, collapsing once connectivity dropped below a threshold rather than degrading smoothly. Day-sail ports reads the spacing of ancient harbours as evidence that ships genuinely sailed by day and needed a port by nightfall, and Wright's law in clay tests whether pottery workshops improved in consistency as a power-law function of how much they had already produced, the same learning-curve pattern industrial economics finds in modern factories. Recycled-glass crisis index treats a documented glass-recycling crisis as a leading indicator of broader economic stress.