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Old Smyrna: The Clazomenian Sarcophagi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

R. M. Cook
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Extract

During the campaigns at Old Smyrna in 1948–51 several Clazomenian sarcophagi came to light. The directors of the excavations, Professors E. Akurgal and J. M. Cook, kindly asked me to publish them, but by some mischance the completed notes and drawings did not reach me and I was not importunate. Drawings of decoration and shape and most of the measurements came from Miss E. A. B. Petty (now Mrs. G. U. S. Corbett), details of discovery and photographs from Professor J. M. Cook. Mr. J. S. Cole most obligingly checked many points for me in Izmir. I have myself examined only nos. 2, 3, 5, and 11.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 69 , November 1974 , pp. 55 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1974

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References

I. Fragment of foot, PLATE gc, FIG. I. Ht of FP c. 14 cm. From west end of necropolis, LC, meander (type uncertain). FP, panther, floral, panther.

1 No. 5 was found afterwards in 1952 by Dr. Hakki Gültekin, who kindly agreed that it should be published with the other sarcophagi from the site. He also generously permitted me to include no. 11, another later find.

2 BSA liii/liv. 3 and pl. I.

3 Cf. Miltner, F. and Miltner, H., ÖJh xxvii Beiblatt 153–7Google Scholar, fig. 78: their tumuli ranged from 5 to 20 (or 24) m. in diameter and some were ‘several metres’ high. A similar tumulus in Chios which contained an undecorated clay sarcophagus was about 16–5 m. in diameter and 2 m. high (Kourouniotis, K., ADelt i (1915) 69–70Google Scholar). There were tumuli at Samos too, (J. Boehlau, Nekr. 26).

4 By ‘twin’ cable I mean the type composed of two single cables of which one is the mirror image of the other (as in AD i pl. 44).

5 I have not seen this plece, but the note describes the horse's leg as ‘white’. If the background had been painted dark (in the rare r.f. technique), this would probably have been noted. So it seems more likely that through bad preservation the figure has lost its paint and the background its slip, as in parts of the lower figure field of the HP of the sarcophagus, Brussels A. 1988. Professor J. M. Cook agrees.

6 Cook, J. M., BSA liii/liv. 29–30Google Scholar and J. Boardman, ibid. 83.

7 Other finds of Clazomenian sarcophagi have been reported. W. R. Paton described part of a decorated sideplece and noted ‘numerous fragments of terracotta sar cophagi’, though he does not say whether these had decoration (CR 1887, 82); F. and H. Miltner published what seems to be a fragment of a decorated lid or box (ÖJh xxvii Beiblatt 158–9, fig. 79), and J. Boehlau wrote to me in 1938 that when in Smyrna, some forty years earlier, he had heard from a reliable source that sarcophagi bought by A. O. van Lennep, who supplied Leyden, also came from Old Smyrna. Further, Professor J. M. Cook tells me that in 1949 he observed numerous fragments of painted sarcophagi scattered about the necropolis, but so corroded that only faint traces of their original decoration could be made out.

8 E. Akurgal, Erster Vorlauf. Ber. über die Ausgrabungen in Alt-Smyrna, 79; Cook, J. M., BSA liii/liv. 32.Google Scholar