The Peristyle garden of the Getty Villa, Malibu. Photo: TMK, January 2007. On Thursday night, I was lucky enough to attend a talk by Ortwin Dally of the DAI at the Getty Villa. It was a great experience to see the villa at night as it’s actually quite rare to consider how buildings and monuments […]
Category archives: Case Studies
Mutilated and Re-Used Inscriptions in Gerasa
I have previously mentioned a couple of inscriptions that were desecrated by early Christians. A recent article in Journal of Early Christian Studies by Jason Moralee now presents some further examples from Gerasa (modern Jerash in Jordan – where a Danish-Jordanian project has been excavating an early mosque for a couple of years), especifically the […]
A Mutilated Aphrodite in Istanbul
I have previously mentioned the mutilated statue group of the Three Graces, now in the Antalya Museum, that is going to form part of the core argument of my chapter 5 “Before the Fig Leaf: Body & Society in Late Roman Perge.” The statue group is only one of several statues from Perge’s South Baths […]
Inscriptions Mutilated by Christians
Damnatio memoriae frequently involved the removal of the names of ‘bad’ emperors from public inscriptions. This was a relatively easy procedure, but usually left behind some awkward gaps in the texts. One of the most famous examples of this is the honorary inscription on the Arch of Septimius Severus, where the name of Geta was […]
Scythopolis II: A Mutilated Statue of Bacchus
Excavations in 1990 in the Eastern Bathhouse at Scythopolis, introduced in yesterday’s post, revealed a statue of Dionysos. It was found in the same layer as the mutilated and discarded statue of Venus. Here it is again the genitalia that have been attacked, whereas the damage to the head is more characteristic of that of […]
Scythopolis I: A Mutilated Statue of Venus
I have been looking for parallels to the mutilated sculptures at Perge, since they will be at the centre of a chapter on the body and society in late antiquity. One group of material comes from Scythopolis in modern Israel, where the excavations of the Eastern Bathhouse revealed a series of sculptures. I will be […]
A Severan Empress from Sparta
One of the most striking portraits in the Athens National Museum is that of a Severan empress, found in 1964 in Sparta. Its precise identification has been debated. The excavators suggested Julia Mamaea, the mother of Alexander Severus (emperor 222-235 CE), but recently Lee Ann Riccardi has suggested Julia Aquilia Severa, one of Elagabalus’ wives, […]
The Erechtheion and the Process of Christianization
I have previously talked about the Parthenon and the possibility that its metopes were damaged by early Christians. Just this week Bill Caraher (thanks!) put me on to the work of Alexandra Lesk, whose PhD dissertation was on the Erechteion and its reception over 2500 years. I was, of course, especially happy to read her […]
A Recently Excavated Niobe from the Villa dei Quintili
The July/August issue of Archaeology had a small notice reporting the find of a statue of Niobe in the Villa dei Quintili just outside Rome. What is quite exciting abot this find is that it is one of the few properly excavated pieces of sculpture from the villa, that was more or less emptied in […]
Statue Bases and Mutilated Inscriptions
Congratulations to Jakob (Munk Højte), whose PhD dissertation “Roman Imperial Statue Bases from Augustus to Commodus” now finally is available from Aarhus University Press in the new-format Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity (ASMA) vol. 7. As Philip (Harland) has shown in a series of recent posts epigraphy is an incredibly valuable source to the ancient […]