Granite Funerary Stelae from Augusta Emerita (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Granite Funerary Stelae from Augusta Emerita Leonard A. Curchin Jonathan Edmondson. Granite Funerary Stelae from Augusta Emerita. Monografías Emeritenses, 9. Mérida: Museo Nacional de Arte Romano, 2006. Pp. 303; 39 plates (6 in colour). € 30. ISBN 84-8181-313-3. Epigraphic corpora typically include either all the inscriptions from a particular town, museum or region, or a specific type of inscription (e.g. juridical, metric, military, graffiti). It is highly unusual to focus on a particular type of stone support, especially one so unspectacular as granite. Yet that is precisely the theme of the present volume, which studies fifty-three granite stelae (the word “funerary” in the title is redundant) from Augusta Emerita, the capital of Roman Lusitania, as well as five epitaphs on granite blocks. However, the rationale for this selection is not entirely petrological. The granite stelae (as opposed to their somewhat later marble counterparts) appear to represent the first funerary monuments of the Augustan colony, reflecting the lives of the Italian veterans and their families who initially settled here. They thus shed light on the earliest history of the provincial capital. Edmondson, a well-known specialist on Lusitania, has set himself a difficult task, given the notoriously poor legibility of granite inscriptions (whose letters would originally have been vividly highlighted in red cinnabar, of which traces can still be seen on two examples). His [End Page 168] study consists of five introductory chapters (fabric and form; archaeological context; chronology; social context; personal names and geographical origins of the colonists) followed by a detailed catalogue of the material (123–218). The majority of the inscriptions are engraved on coarse grey granite from local quarries, though a few are of finer grain, and some have a yellowish or pinkish hue. Far from being an inferior material, granite was the stone of choice for some of the most important public monuments in the early days of Emerita, among them a statue base dedicated to Augustus’ daughter Julia before her demise (57). Nearly all the stelae are either round-topped, or rectangular but carved with a projecting arch at the top; only three have a triangular gable. Round-topped stelae were the commonest form of tombstone in central Italy in the late Republic, and were obviously a type with which the veterans would have been familiar. Edmondson conjectures that the colonists of Emerita “suggested [this shape] to the local stonemasons” (55). He does not entertain the possibility that Italian stonemasons, already experienced at producing round-topped gravestones with Latin inscriptions, could have emigrated to the new colony looking for work. This might explain the elegant lettering on some of the early examples (79), which would not be expected of indigenous craftsmen requiring instruction from the settlers. Stelae with triangular pediments may be equally early (51), but the rectangular shape with projecting arch does not appear in Italy until the second quarter of the first century AD “and so too late to have influenced the introduction of this form at Emerita” (55). Edmondson here seems to assume that these rectangular stelae at Emerita developed earlier than and independent of the Italian ones (cf. 88, where he dates several of them to the period 25 BC to ca. AD 25 on the ambiguous evidence of letter-forms and simplicity of funerary formulae), but I find it more believable that they are subsequent and derivative, dating to a later phase of the Julio-Claudian period. The shape is sufficiently distinctive as to make polygenesis unlikely, and it is even less likely that Italy borrowed it from Emerita. As for the dating criteria, letter-forms may well have changed more slowly in a distant colony than in Italy. Moreover, the distinction between “good quality square capitals” and “slightly irregular square capitals” (79) sometimes has less to do with the date than with the roughness of the granite surface. Edmondson also attempts to reconstruct how these stelae would have been positioned in the burial-ground, though his aim is frustrated by the fact that nearly all of them were later removed from their archaeological context, particularly as building material for the ninth-century Alcazaba. However, a rescue excavation in 2002 uncovered a...