Amphorae were used to store and transport liquids like water, wine, edible oils and honey before 4800 BCE in China and 3500 BCE in the Levant (Lebanon). Made from baked clay and typically glazed they were fragile. A wooden barrel was much more durable and easier to handle. A wall-painting in an Egyptian tomb built about 2600 BCE, shows a tub used to measure wheat. It was made with wooden staves, bound together with wooden hoops.
The Roman philosopher, Pliny the Elder (24 to 79 CE), noted that the Gauls stored liquids in wooden barrels bound with hoops. The Romans also used empty barrels to make pontoon bridges to cross rivers and started fires in besieged towns by using catapults to throw burning barrels of tar over the town walls.
Wooden tubs, buckets and drinking mugs were probably the forerunners of the barrel. These were made with carefully fitted tapered pieces of wood arranged around a circular disc of wood and clamped together with tightly braided strips of wood or iron bands to form a slightly tapered conical container.
A barrel or cask, a cylindrical container with a bulging centre, was made in a similar way. They were easy to handle as they could be stacked, rolled and turned easily and could be lifted onto carts or into ships with simple rope slings. They could be used to store almost anything from beer, ale, wine, whisky and mead to butter, honey, gunpowder, fish, paint, nails and tallow or salted pork and gold bars. Larger barrels were known as vats and smaller sizes as kegs.
Barrels were more expensive than sacks and crates but were far more durable and much easier to manhandle. Wooden barrels have been used for well over 2000 years and, although they have been largely replaced by aluminum, plastic and steel drums, they are still made for the wine and alcohol industries.
Barrel makers, known as coopers, also made buckets, butts, tubs, vats, hogsheads, firkins, kegs, tuns, butter churns and troughs.
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Migration
Non-FictionThe Roman Empire began to decline after Germanic tribes crossed the river Rhine in 406 CE. When Constantine III recalled the legions from Britain, three years later, the Angles and Saxons invaded and Britain became known as Angleland. The Visigoths...
