Includes 114 illustrations, some in colour. Recent scholarship on the Roman Empire has focused on the nature of its economy, including sites that served as nodules of commercial exchange. Aila was such a port city on the Red Sea on the southeastern frontier of the Empire, now within modern Aqaba in Jordan. The city of Aila emerged in the late 1st century BC within the Nabataean kingdom, a client state of the Roman Empire. The port continued to flourish...