ABSTRACT
Sarcophagi are an ancient form of corpse-container. The Egyptians used them frequently: a large (2,000 lbs) terracotta sarcophagus, decorated inside and out, of the sixth century BCE (now in the British Museum), is one of over 200 attested similar great tombs manufactured in and around Smyrna (Izmir). From about the second century CE there was a substantial growth in the Roman use of lavish, expensive, marble and highly decorated sarcophagi. Sarcophagi were a Greek funerary style, as were the osteothekai, the smaller chests or boxes made to receive the bones which survived from cremation. In ‘origin’ such funerary artefacts probably come from the Etruscan and Minoan (and perhaps even Egyptian) cultures which preceded and lay behind Greek and Roman societies. The quarrying, carving
and transport of heavy marble sarcophagi made them expensive objects, although economies of scale, standardisation of ornament and a degree of ‘finishing work’ carried out at the point of sale to ‘customise’ the sarcophagus may have made them available to more and more ‘ordinary’ Romans (Walker 1985:18). The use of Greek marble from the quarry at Proconnesus in the sea of Marmara is attested in a tombstone in the Ephesian cemeteries described above. Greece had for centuries used, and exported, marble of various types from this and other quarries at the Phrygian city of Docimeum (the Phrygian sepulchral speciality was a tombstone carved out as a door), at Belevi, near Ephesus; and at Mount Pentelicus, near Athens. This marble had been imported by several emperors to rebuild Rome itself: Greek sculptors and funerary masons found their skills in great demand in the Early and Middle Empire.
