The square-and hexagonal- shaped jugs with thick walls were ideal for packing and shipping, and they were one of the more common glass forms of the early Roman Empire. Evidence for their function and dating comes from the discovery, in the ruins of a shop at Herculaneum (destroyed 79 C.E.), of a set of square jugs packed in straw in partitioned boxes ready for shipping. Archaeologists have not yet found any shipping bottles with their contents intact, and so we cannot be certain what was being sent around the eastern Mediterranean.