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Jewels and toys of an Athenian woman of the 1st century ad

Σύμμεικτα

• Ζερβουδάκη, Ηως

This article presents the grave offerings from a rich female burial in a plain sarcophagus found in 1865 during the digging of the foundations of the building of the National Bank of Greece. They were handed in to the Archaeological Society in 1875, were displayed in the Collection of the Varvakeion School and then that of the Athens Technical University, and finally came into the possession of the National Archaeological Museum as late as 1892. The finds were described by Stephanos Koumanoudis in the 703rd issue of the newspaper Παλιγγενεσία on 27th July 1865.The ensemble - apart from a number of silver pyxides and a silver incense-burner, a bronze mirror and some jewellery items of rock crystal, which were not handed in to the Archaeological Society - consists of jewellery: a pair of gold armlets (fig. 1), a gold finger-ring (fig. 2), a small gold shield (fig. 3), a glass finger-ring (fig. 5) and bone pins (fig. 6); funerary jewels: three-, four- and five-lobed gold leaves from the decoration of the dead woman’s garment (fig. 4); cosmetic utensils: two silver mirrors from an Italianworkshop (Lloyd Morgan’s type I) (figs 7- 8), a Syro-Palestinian glass pyxis (fig. 9) and ivory spatulas (fig. 10); toys (natural knucklebones, numbered dice in the shape of geese, a dice in the shape of a pig, an ivory hare (figs 11-14), two models of chestnuts and an icosahedron made of rock crystal (figs 15-16), as well as a variety of other items, such as fragments of ivory caskets (fig. 17) and a diptych. Finally, an ivory plaque of a well-known type with a relief representation of a Maenad in a scene of sparagmos (fig. 18), which accompanied the dead woman, probably indicates that she had been initiated into the Dionys- iac Mysteries.The burial is dated to about the middle or third quarter of the 1st c. AD, a date which coincides with that of the marble relief grave stele of the freedwoman Storge daughter of Pamphilos (Von Moock 1998, no. 400, pi. 55c) formerly in a private collection and now missing, which was found in the same excavation trenches. It is not improbable that the sarcophagus containing the offerings was that of Storge.

• History and Archaeology

• Αρχαιολογία

αρχαιότητες, Αθήνα

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