Region | Turkey > Southern Turkey | American Journal of Archaeology

Plaster Casts of the Portico from Aphrodisias: Archaeology, Politics, Museology

website — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:12:35 +0000

This article presents a case study that demonstrates three essential uses—archaeological, political, and museological—of plaster casts in Graeco-Roman studies. The case is the Portico of Tiberius at Aphrodisias, which the Italian archaeological mission in Anatolia excavated in 1937. Casts of the architectural elements of the portico (entablature, capital, and column) were made immediately, shipped to Rome, and employed to create a one-to-one plaster reconstruction (7.5 m tall, 5.8 m wide, and 1.6 m deep) for a Fascist-period exhibition in Rome, the Mostra Augustea della Romanita. Notwithstanding its Tiberian-period inscription, there the portico was deliberately interpreted as an Augustan monument, with a clear political intent. Both the plaster fragments and the reconstruction today belong to the collection of the Museo della Civiltà Romana in Rome. These objects are extraordinary in their versatile functions—as three-dimensional documentary replicas, propagandistic tools, and a decontextualized museum exhibit—and in their capacity to represent and misrepresent their sources.

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Repositioning the Sea on the Great Altar of Pergamon: A Demonstration of Hellenistic Boat Construction on the Telephos Frieze

website — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 04:00:00 +0000

The Telephos frieze of the Great Altar of Pergamon contains a rare testimony of boat construction in the Hellenistic period, portraying specialized tools and working practices in an ancient boatyard. The sculpture documents the building of a small boat, offering rare insight into ancient boatbuilding. The vessel of Auge, mother of the Trojan hero Telephos, is a symmetrical skiff with two rounded ends resembling a coffin, a typology barely evidenced archaeologically. This article notes iconographic idiosyncrasies on the frieze that depart from the principal sources of the Telephos myth in the depiction of the infant accompanying his mother Auge to her watery tomb. To build the boat-coffin shown on the frieze, the trained craftsmen use the bow saw, bow drill, two-handled adze, and mallet and chisel, tools known from shipwrecks but documented only rarely in visual representations. Beyond a close technical examination of these implements, our discussion considers relevant maritime funerary rituals and examines several different ship typologies in relation to the boat depicted on the Telephos frieze. From his mother’s tiny skiff to her son the mythical hero’s mighty warships, their careful portrayal on the altar symbolizes the expansion by Eumenes II (r. 197–159 BCE) of his kingdom into the Aegean.

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A Ptolemaic Hoard from Patara

website — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 04:00:00 +0000

The recent excavations in Patara, Turkey, one of the important port cities of the Lycian region, enabled access to new important data about the Ptolemaic presence in the city and the region. The subject of this study is 19 gold trichrysons found in a bundle formed by two lead plates wrapped together. Fifteen of these coins were struck in Alexandria, and four others were from Cyprus, probably Salamis or Kition. It is the first Ptolemaic hoard found in an archaeological excavation in the Lycian region. It comes from the Tepecik settlement in Patara, which served as a garrison for Ptolemaic soldiers. The hoard in all likelihood belonged to a military officer or commander. We propose that it was buried during the First Syrian War, before ca. 272/1 BCE.

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