The ‘Polyxena’ Sarcophagus: A Revision

Presenters

Clemente Marconi, New York University; and Peter A. Thompson, New York University

Abstract

Since its discovery in 1994, a generation of scholarly literature on the Polyxena Sarcophagus from Gümüsçay has generated a striking diversity of interpretations regarding this remarkable monument, all with significant bearing upon crucial questions of the date of its creation, key details and explanations of its astonishing iconography, and the original social context of its commission, creation, and use. The range of speculation has led to a fractured and disparate spread of opinions, including a number of contradictory and unreliable claims that have yet to be sufficiently scrutinized, necessitating the comprehensive assessment of its imagery and significance that is provided in this paper.

We establish the high dating of the sarcophagus in the Late Archaic period, during the final decade of the sixth century, contrary to the mid fifth-century date that has recently been asserted by some scholars, and we characterize its makers as a group of itinerant sculptors of regional prominence rather than an unspecified and unevidenced local workshop that has been suggested by other authors. In order to clarify and resolve questions of iconography that have continued to yield the most disagreement and confusion in previous studies, drawing upon a new direct autopsy of the monument, artistic comparanda from western Anatolia, and archaic texts, we provide a close analysis of the individual figures carved on the sarcophagus, supporting a new iconographic discussion of the four relief scenes and providing a new solution to the hitherto problematic understanding of the relationships between the sculptural program and the identity and status of the deceased. Our revisions elucidate the history of this monument’s production and its social functions as one of the richest funerary monuments of late archaic Anatolia, a cultural landscape ripe with local competition and a fluorescence of artistic actualizations of wealth and authority.