Pithoi were used for bulk storage, primarily for fluids and grains; they were comparable to the drums, barrels and casks of recent times.

The external shape and materials were approximately the same: a ceramic jar about as high as a man, a base for standing, sides nearly straight or generously curved, and a large mouth with a lid, sealed for shipping.

Various numbers of handles, lugs, or some combination thereof, gave a purchase for some sort of harness used in lifting the jar with a crane.

Consequently, they became known to the modern public as pithoi when western classical archaeologists adopted the term to mean the jars uncovered by excavation of Minoan palaces on Crete and Mycenaean ones on mainland Greece.

On the one hand, it was a well-used word of the Iron Age in Greece, dating to as early as the works of Homer.

[6] Julius Pokorny and other professional linguists developed a derivation from Proto-Indo European *bhidh-, "container", that followed all the rules of language change and moreover was related to Latin fiscus, "purse", from which English obtains "fiscal".

The derivation would have been elegant, tracing fiscality back to prehistoric Greece, it was thought, taking its place with oikos, "house", the origin word for economic, and others.

Contemporaneously with Pokorny's epic dictionary, Linear B was first being deciphered, and various analyses were being put forward that Greek and Latin were not all that similar.

The pithos was proposed to appear as 𐀤𐀵, qe-to, in the Bronze Age records of Pylos and Mycenae, denoted by Ideogram 203 𐃢, a small picture very similar to some Knossos pithoi, but which could just as well be matched by smaller pottery.

According to the rules of reconstructing Mycenaean Greek from Linear B, qe-to must be a transcription of quethos or quhethos, from a "base" of *gwhedh-.

The Cretan pithos precedes by several hundred years any mentioned in Mycenaean Greek; moreover, many are inscribed with a line or two of Linear A.

Ventris and Chadwick do not exclude fiscus from necessarily being related to pithos, they only point out that, if such is the derivation, the process is more complex than previously thought.

[8] A study done in 2003 by John Younger used a computer program, "vase", to calculate the maximum capacity of an LM I pithos, catalog number ZA Zb 3.

If the large pithoi were sunk into the floor in the storage rooms, as the archaeological evidence indicates they were, their weight and bulk raise a question of how they were brought there.

They were perhaps brought in empty, set in place, and then filled from smaller pithoi with some of the numerous bucket-type pottery.

The ship carried the load easily, with a draft of 1 m. The pithoi were comparatively light, with an estimated total mass of 2.7 tonnes.

Pithos KW 255 could be modelled to obtain an estimated volume of 293 liters at an empty weight of 120.25 kg, the highest of the 8.

A Middle Bronze Age wreck of a small cargo ship off Sheytan Deresi (Devil's Creek), on the southwestern coast of Turkey, also was carrying pithoi, 3 "strap-handled" and 4 "handleless", of "ovoid-conical" form.

As far as pottery is concerned, he divided pots into spheroid and pithoid, all the larger ones being the latter type, taking this classification from work done previously and appearing in the writings of Archimedes.

The volume of a pithoid, which can be either a pithos or an amphora, is dependent, he asserts, on 11/14 of the product of the height and a number representing a squared average of minimum and maximum diameters.

If Younger's data can be taken as reflecting general truth, then the vases at Sheytan Deresi should have capacities that are greater than 40.6 liters by a factor of 1.8752.53, or 4.91, where 1.875 is 90/48.

All Bronze Age records of goods refer intentionally to the type, capacity and contents of ceramic storage and shipping vessels.

All the large pithoi featured circumferential bands of thicker clay strengthening the joints where sections of the pithos were lowered onto each other and fused together.

Multiple lugs, loops and handles indicate that for lifting purposes some sort of harness to distribute the weight must have been used.