In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a marble sarcophagus panel from sixteenth-century Italy shows the ancient port of Rome in relief: harbor buildings rising from the waterline, ships under sail and oar working the channel, a colossal Neptune with trident presiding over the scene, an eagle spreading its wings above the central composition, figures on the quayside conducting the business of a working port. The label identifies the subject as the ancient harbor of Rome — Ostia Antica — depicted on a burial monument perhaps fifteen hundred years after the port it celebrates ceased to function. Someone in Renaissance Italy thought the harbor of ancient Rome was worth putting on a coffin. The choice tells you something about how the ancient port’s reputation persisted long after the silt had closed it.

In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a reproduction of a Roman maritime mosaic hangs above a scale model of a Roman grain ship. The mosaic — a copy of the type found decorating the floors of maritime collegia and wealthy houses at Ostia and other Roman port cities — shows the sea as Romans imagined it: dense with fish and marine creatures, alive with the visual abundance that the Mediterranean provided, a merchant vessel moving through a world of tuna, dolphins, an octopus, a whale. The sea in Roman mosaic art is not threatening; it is productive, teeming, the source of food and commerce and the medium through which the empire connected its parts. Below the mosaic, the grain ship model shows the vessel that made this connection real: broad-hulled, square-sailed, designed not for speed but for capacity, the workhorse of the most important supply chain in the ancient world.

The Romans mass-produced glass. This statement requires emphasis because it contradicts the common assumption that mass production is a modern phenomenon and that ancient luxury goods were necessarily handmade in small quantities by skilled artisans serving elite clients. Roman glass was made in those ways too — the cameo glass of the Portland Vase, the intricate millefiori bowls, the delicate cage cups — but alongside and beneath these luxury productions existed a glass industry of genuinely industrial character, producing standardized vessels in enormous quantities for the ordinary consumer market that constituted the overwhelming majority of Roman commercial glass transactions.

Rome and China never met. The two largest empires of the ancient world existed simultaneously — the Han dynasty and the Roman principate overlapped for roughly two centuries — and the goods they produced circulated between them across thousands of kilometers of overland and maritime routes. But no Roman diplomat reached Chang’an, and no Han envoy arrived in Rome, and what each knew of the other was filtered through so many intermediaries that the images were almost entirely mythological. Rome called China Serica, the land of silk. China called Rome Daqin, the Great Qin, imagining it as a mirror-image empire on the far western edge of the world. The distance between them was too great and the intermediary interests too profitable for direct contact to develop.