Roman Tomb Research Articles

The Story of the Architectural Documentation of Hagia Sophia’s Hypogeum

Abstract Hagia Sophia’s hypogeum is a group of subterranean Roman tomb structures located in the area between the northeastern side of the structure and the imaret (“soup kitchen”) of Hagia Sophia. Consisting of three chambers connected by a passage, the hypogeum is dated to the fourth century and older than the current Hagia Sophia. The story of the architectural documentation of the hypogeum is also interesting. As a matter of fact, exposed findings during the museum research still contribute to the dating studies of the structure. The first digital architectural visualisation of the space was made in 2020 within the documentation of the subterranean structures of Hagia Sophia. After the partial cleaning of the inner space at the end of 2021, a relatively more favourable environment allowed for its visualisation. This study presents the most recent architectural documentation of the hypogeum carried out, the first reconstruction plan proposal, and a virtual superposition of the structure with its superstructure. Completely cleaning the interior and top will enable this space to be thoroughly documented and dated. By including the narrative of the documentation story to the present, this study is expected to be the last visualisation of the hypogeum until it is completely cleaned. The lack of architecturally similar structures in Istanbul requires special attention to this subterranean structure.

Archaeometric Identification of a Perfume from Roman Times

Although archaeological excavations have recovered a large number of vessels used to hold perfumes or ointments in ancient Rome, little is known about the chemical composition or origin of the substances they contained. Most available information pertains to ointment and/or cosmetic bases rather than to essences. The discovery in 2019 of an ointment jar (unguentarium) made of rock crystal (quartz) that was sealed with a stopper and contained a solid mass in a Roman tomb in Carmona (Seville, Spain) was a rather unusual finding. This paper reports the results of an archaeometric study of the unguentarium stopper and its contents. Based on them, and on comparisons with commercially available patchouli and nard oil standards, the perfume held in the unguentarium was probably patchouli. To our knowledge, this may be the first time a perfume from Roman times has been identified, which is a major advance in this field. The unguentarium stopper consisted of dolomite, a material also unknown in this type of use, and bitumen was used to seal the unguentarium with the stopper.

Petosiris in his Tomb at Dachla: Venerating the Deceased in Roman Egypt.

The paper investigates the interesting classical figure of Petosiris in his Roman tomb at El-Mazawaka necropolis of Dakhla, who wears the traditional Greek garment of the chiton and the himation. It explores the high appeal of Petosiris to appear in this costume in his tomb? Is this a kind of a fashionable Hellenistic’s influence or it still has its Egyptian concept? Also, the paper highlights the funerary cult for the deceased in his tomb, through the offering-priests who venerate Petosiris on the walls of his tomb. Furthermore, the article analysis the ritual meaning of the objects in the hands of Petosiris. The classical figure of Petosiris confirms his high status as one of the elites in the community, as well as the mixture of Egyptian and Hellenistic - Romano art, and in fact,itdoes not resemble the ethic of the patron of the deceased either Egyptian, Greek, or Roman.

«Pictures at an Exhibition» by Modest Mussorgsky: the correlation of melos and colourfulness

«Pictures at an Exhibition» by Modest Mussorgsky: the correlation of melos and colourfulness

Draft Genome Sequence of a Granaticin-Producing Strain of Streptomyces parvus Isolated from a Roman Tomb in the Necropolis of Carmona, Spain.

Streptomyces parvus strain C05 was isolated from the walls of a Roman tomb located in Carmona, Seville, Spain. Subsequent studies determined the capability of this strain for producing granaticins. Here, we report the 8.7-Mbp draft genome sequence for this bacterium.

Nature and origin of the violet stains on the walls of a Roman tomb

The Circular Mausoleum tomb (Roman Necropolis of Carmona, Spain) dates back from the first century AD and is characterized by a dense microbial (phototrophic) colonization on the walls and ceiling. However, some walls exhibited an important number of violet stains of unknown origin. The microbial communities of these violet stains are mainly composed of cyanobacteria, streptomycetes and fungi. A strain of Streptomyces parvus, isolated from the walls, produces a violet pigment in culture media. High performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry of the culture extracts obtained from this Streptomyces revealed the presence of a few granaticins, pigments with a benzoisochromanequinone structure. When metabolically active in the tomb, S. parvus synthesizes the pigments that diffuse into the mortar. During rain and/or wetting periods, the pigments are solubilized by alkaline waters and elute from the starting position to the surrounding mortar, enlarging the pigmented area and thus contributing to this exceptional biodeterioration phenomenon.

Church of Deir Mar Tuma: A Roman Tomb Turned into a Church at Saidnaya (Syria)

Located in a rock-cut cemetery from the Roman period, a house-type burial was converted into a church most probably in the 5th century. Upon gaining fame, it attracted monks, hence it became a skete type monastery. Approximately 30 kilometers north of Damascus, there is a small town of Qalamoun. This town is known for its churches. Amongst them the Church of Our Lady and Hagia Sophia have special places. The Church of Our Lady in Arabic is Sida Naya, but as time passed it was corrupted and started to be pronounced as Said Naya. In and around this town, there are several historical monuments, especially from Roman and Early Byzantine periods. The local construction material is sand stone.The subject of this article is a misidentified Roman burial turned into a church. Syria was one of the most important provinces of the East. For that reason, the presence of Roman military, settlements of soldiers withfamilies and their burials are scattered around the country. Depending on the status of the deceased, burials had different types. One of the most common types was known as “house type” which was mostly used bythe upper middle class. Examples of these can be observed in the places such as Ataman, Qreiyyeh, Jmarrin, Feki, Ghariyyeh Sharqiyyeh, Rimet al Lohf, Majdal, Murduk, Nahit, Amrah, Khazimeh. Outside the city of Qalamoun, on the skirts of the hills in the North, approximately 400 m away from the Church of Our Lady,there are burials hewn out of main rock in the form of a chamber and several freestanding sarcophagi. There is a clear indication in at least one burial, the Roman eagle, which stood for a former military member. The highestposition was reserved for a “house type” Roman burial, probably from the 2nd century AD. Upon legalizing Christianity this structure which measures 7.1 × 4.2 m was converted into a church. Because of its large size, it was mistaken by scholars for a pagan temple. In fact, it was a burial given newfunction upon adding an apse in its eastern section. Later, this structure became part of a monastic complex where monks stayed for seclusion. According to tradition, it also housed the grave and the relics of the saint who spent years there, namely Mar Touma. My intention has been to show an art piece created for one reason, but acquiring a new function and value in later times. This work intends to broaden geographical and time scale and show other examples of similar structures, thus creating a database.

The Servilia tomb: an architecturally and pictorially important Roman building

One hundred and eleven samples from the important Servilia Roman tomb have been analysed for the first time by Raman spectroscopy, resulting in a complete characterisation of the pigment palette used for its remarkable wall paintings: 73 different pigment mixtures have been identified for the composition of its 11 colours and their tonalities. Dyer’s weld, an ancient organic yellow pigment, which was described by Vitruvius, has been identified and characterised for the first time in Roman wall paintings. Distinctive Raman spectroscopic signals which differentiate between haematite and caput mortuum (a violet colour from haematite which has been subjected to thermal treatment) are also reported. The use of the very expensive lazurite for a balance relates the importance of this otherwise ordinary instrument with psychostasia (the human soul weighing process) and is not found elsewhere in the tomb. The distribution of white minerals alone or in admixture is not related to any particular colouring pigment or figure; this possibly indicates that there was no specific use for each white mineral and that several craftsmen worked on the paintings, perhaps in different periods, or that the frescoes have been subjected to unrecorded restoration. We conclude that Raman spectroscopy is a valuable analytical technique for the unambiguous identification of mixtures of both organic and inorganic compounds, to study the degree of mineral crystallinity and for identifying treatment. These data are relevant for the holistic interpretation of the artwork in its historical, economical and social context.

Analytical pyrolysis evidences the presence of granaticins in the violet stains of a Roman tomb

The walls of the Circular Mausoleum tomb (Roman Necropolis of Carmona, Spain) exhibit an important number of violet stains of unknown origin. Analytical pyrolysis detected in the tomb walls granaticin A, a violet pigment with an isobenzochromanequinone structure, as well as in the extracts of two bacterial strains isolated from the walls. The bacterium was tentatively identified as Streptomyces sp. High performance liquid chromatography confirmed that this Streptomyces synthesized as major pigments dihydrogranaticin A, granaticin A and granaticin B.

AN(OTHER) EPITAPH FOR TRIMALCHIO: SAT. 30.2

Trimalchio's fabulous epitaph, recited in full by Petronius’ colourful host towards the end of the Cena (Sat. 71.12), has long attracted abundant comment. Similarly, allusions to the underworld in much of the decoration leading to and in Trimalchio's dining room have been the object of intense scholarly discussion of the freedman's morbid characterization. In consequence, it is now accepted that epitaph and funereal allusions make for a deliberate mirage of the netherworld – so much so that ‘… Trimalchio's home is in some sense to be regarded as a house of the dead’. As John Bodel has shown, ‘Petronius signalled his intention to portray Trimalchio's home as an underworld earlier in the episode’. Examples for this include the procession from the baths to Trimalchio's house that preceded the banquet (Sat. 28.4–5) – ‘resembling nothing so much as a Roman cortege’, and the wall paintings in the porticus of Trimalchio's house which made Encolpius stop and pause, as Aeneas had done at the Temple of Apollo at Cumae (Sat. 29.1). The example of the pairing of the Cerberus-like watchdog encountered by Encolpius and friends during their escape (Sat. 72.7) and the painted dog in Trimalchio's vestibule that frightened Encolpius upon his arrival (Sat. 29.1) makes it moreover clear that Petronius engaged in some elaborate ring composition concerning Trimalchio's portrayal as a dead man walking. It is surprising, then, that Petronius should have failed to square the circle as regards Trimalchio's epitaph: Sat. 71.12 appears to lack an earlier match – and this despite the fact that a visitor to a Roman tomb might well expect to be informed about the name of the deceased, and perhaps a few other details, at the moment of entering the tomb.

Review: King Sigismund Chapel at Cracow Cathedral (1515–1533), by Stanisław Mossakowski

Stanislaw Mossakowski King Sigismund Chapel at Cracow Cathedral (1515–1533) Cracow: IRSA, 2012, 376 pp., 277 b/w and 89 color illus. €120, ISBN 978838983114 The importance of Cracow as a center of Renaissance humanism during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has long been recognized by Anglophone historians and linguists interested in the early modern achievements of scholars at the Jagiellonian University and their contacts with Italian counterparts. Among the more familiar figures are the humanist Filippo Buonaccorsi, called Callimachus (1437–1496), who served as tutor to the sons of King Casimir IV Jagiellon (r. 1447–92), and Nicolaus Copernicus, who studied ancient Greek, mathematics, and astronomy at the Jagiellonian. In spite of Cracow’s renown as a humanist center, there is a paucity of English-language scholarship dedicated to the architecture of Poland-Lithuania, which at its greatest extent, in the early seventeenth century, was the largest state in Europe. This lacuna is in part due to factors such as the linguistic inaccessibility of secondary scholarship written in Polish, as well as geopolitical circumstances between 1939 and 1989. Thus Stanislaw Mossakowski’s erudite monograph King Sigismund Chapel at Cracow Cathedral (1515–1533) , first issued in Polish in 2007, is a significant scholarly achievement. Mossakowski, the well-known and prolific former director of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, presents here the mausoleum that most clearly embodies some of the earliest Italian Renaissance visual forms to appear in the European borderlands of Poland-Lithuania. The study underlines the relevance of the Sigismund chapel to classically inspired architecture, and by extension to the rich traditions that inform East-Central European architectural history. In nine highly detailed chapters examining the monument’s site, patronage, ideology, and iconography, Mossakowski asserts the uniqueness of the commission and its significance to the broader history of early modern European, and particularly Italian, art and architecture. The centrally planned, elliptically domed monument, located on the south side of the Wawel cathedral nave, decorated and vaulted …

Τέσσερις νέες επιγραφές από την Έδεσσα και την Αλμωπία

Two new inscribed tombstones, dating from the Roman and Early Christian periods , were found in the Agios Nikolaos area in the lower town of ancient Edessa and were added to the already substantial local collection. Inscription no. 1 introduces a new Roman family, while inscription no. 2 acquaints us with the soldier Ioannis from the unit of Secundani, who was also an actuarius. Another Roman family, this time from the southern Almopia, is presented in inscription no. 3. The inscription was subsequently broken in two parts which formed the west and east wall of a Late Roman tomb. Three additional marble pieces originating from the same pedestal were also used to cover the tomb. Apart from the family members, the inscription also introduces Kointos Neikonois , a citizen of Edessa, who was responsible for the construction of the pedestal. Finally, inscription no. 4, which is the oldest one, comes from an important settlement north of the modern village of Neromyloi in northeastern Almopia; it dates to the Hellenistic Age and refers to the erection of an altar.

Roman Tomb Gardens: The Construction of Sacred Commemorative Landscapes

Roman tombs were often beautified by commemorative gardens. These loci were the result of a synthesis of religious attitudes towards burials and gardens, and they signified the ancient connection between commemoration and land ownership. These gardens were often termed “farms”, “orchards” or “estates” in epitaphs implying that the cultivated space was as important to the commemorators as the tombs were. The presence of these gardens around tombs offered a pleasant locale for an eternal dwelling, but more importantly they provided a productive garden to help pay for its upkeep. Roman necropoleis were not lonely places, but landscapes filled with exuberant plantings of flowers, fruit trees and vines emblematic of the ideal Roman locus amoenus.

Rereading of Judgment scene in a Roman tomb at Akhmim

Rereading of Judgment scene in a Roman tomb at Akhmim

The Mozarabic Cardinal: The Life and Times of Gonzalo Pérez Gudiel. By Francisco J. Hernández and Peter Linehan. Pp. xxvi + 666. Florence: Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2004. isbn 88 8450 042 7. €75

The subject of this immensely learned and scholarly study has been known by the name of Gudiel only since the early sixteenth century, apparently owing to a misinterpretation of the arms on his Roman tomb in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. In his lifetime and after he was known as Gonzalo the son of Peter Juanes, thus as Gonzalo Pérez (or in Latin Gundisalvus Petri). None the less, as Gudiel he is likely always to be known. Not that he has hitherto been widely known, even by those concerned with thirteenth-century Spanish history; Hernández and Linehan justly complain about ‘the perfunctory treatment that the paltry and error-riddled entries in the historical dictionaries have accorded him’. There has been no major study of him. Yet he richly deserves such a study because he shows how Spanish society was changing during his lifetime. As Hernández and Linehan write at the beginning of their book, for a Mozarabic clerk in the decade of Gudiel's birth—the 1230s—to have entertained ambitions regarding the archbishopric of Toledo was still almost unthinkable. But Gudiel rose to this height and beyond. From an archdeaconry in the diocese of Cuenca he rose to be dean and archdeacon of Toledo; in 1273 he was elected bishop of Cuenca and from 1275 he was bishop of Burgos. From 1280 he was archbishop of Toledo. Finally, in 1298 Pope Boniface VIII translated him to the cardinal-bishopric of Albano which, however, he occupied for only eleven months until his death.

Picta imago martyris: obrazy jako źródło inspiracji peristephanon IX i XI Prudencjusza

Jest powszechnie znanym faktem, że klasyczna literatura grecka i rzymska wielokrotnie odwoływała się do motywów sztuki jako do źródła inspiracji. Bez wątpienia niektóre sceny w wielkich utworach epickich, jak np. w Eneidzie Wergiliusza czy w Metamorfozach Owidiusza powstały pod wpływem dzieł sztuki - obrazów, rzeźb czy płaskorzeźb.

Ancient glass vessels in Eskişehir Museum

The aim of this study is to introduce the glass vessels housed in Eskişehir Archaeological Museum. Thirty vessels are housed in the museum, out of which 19 are currently exhibited. Most of the vessels entered the collection by purchase. One vessel (no 5) was found during a rescue excavation of a Roman tomb in Bilecik in 1985, although unfortunately we do not have detailed information about the tomb. Another vessel found during a rescue excavation at the tumulus of Alpu Kocakizlar and a further one from the Pessinus excavations are not included in this article.The vessels in the museum are very limited in their forms and decoration, and it is possible that these plain vessels were produced for daily use. The glasswares are classified by typology, and five major groups are recognised. The vessels are first considered by their usage, and then typological differences are considered within each group. Underneath the vessel-type headings the groups are discussed and then their catalogues are given. The examples in the museum are dated from the first to fifth centuries AD.

A preliminary Raman microscopic exploration of pigments in wall paintings in the Roman Tomb discovered at Kertch, Ukraine, in 1891

Raman microscopy was applied to pigments microsampled from the 1891 tomb (first century Early Roman Empire) at Kertch, Ukraine, in an attempt to assess the viability of this technique when used alone. Three phases were definitively identified non-destructively with no sample preparation: cuprorivaite (blue), amorphous carbon (black) and minium (orange–red). However, new points are raised in each case concerning the details of their Raman spectra (e.g. extra bands or shifted bands); these will help in the establishment of databases of standard reference spectra of pigments and other geo- or biomaterials of relevance to archaeology and art. The discovery of minium at this site is significant as it is one of the earliest known locations of its use. All the new data will be of benefit for the restoration programme. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Roman tomb at Abila of the Decapolis

A Roman tomb at Abila of the Decapolis

The Roman-Period Necropolis of Ariassos, Pisidia

New evidence of Roman tomb architecture from the necropolis at Ariassos in Pisidia demonstrates distinctive features of funerary architecture in the east. Over fifty built tombs are in different states of preservation, allowing identification of some features paralleled at other sites in Pisidia, while some features seem unique to Ariassos itself. The similarity of form of one elaborate tomb to the western podium temple reflects the influence of Roman religious architecture, while other tombs reflect features grown out of indigenous Anatolian traditions.Ariassos was founded in the Hellenistic period, and is locatedc.50 km. north of the modern city of Antalya. It minted coins in the late Hellenistic period and contains buildings of Hellenistic date, including a prytaneion, bouleuterion and small temple. The majority of the ruins at the site, however, date to the Imperial period, including an extensive nymphaeum and bath complex, a triple arched gateway dating to the third century A.D., and a substantial domestic area. The site was visited in the 1880s by the Austrian team headed by K. Lanckoronski, who thought that the ruins were those of the site of Cretopolis. A few years later the site was correctly identified by a French epigraphical expedition headed by V. Bérard. The Pisidian Survey project, under British directorship, completed a new city plan, focusing attention on Ariassos after years of neglect. [See Fig. 1.]