Abstract:

Hellenistic and Roman grave steles in Asia Minor were usually produced and put in place for a unique, specific purpose and intended for eternal display at the tomb. We can see, however, that even long before the Late Antique period when the recycling of spolia became frequent, these grave steles were reused and repurposed as grave steles. The main procedure was to simply add a new inscription or to erase the old inscription in order to overwrite it with a new one; minor details of relief decoration might be changed or it even might be left as it was. In this article, I explore and describe this multifaceted phenomenon, which can be traced by examining the actual state of the monuments to detect the presence of one or more inscriptions, erasures and incongruities between pictures and text, as well as the chiselled-off or lowered parts and remodelled relief decorations. This contribution sets this phenomenon within a larger context between the two poles, one of which is the practical and economic object recycling, a familiar procedure that several materials underwent in antiquity, and the second of which is the predilection for antiquities and the re-use of old and valuable things in meaningful ways. The main procedures used to rework grave steles are illustrated by presenting some examples from across Anatolia; this selection remains, of course, far from exhaustive. If we consider the repurposing of funerary steles and other archaeological objects by applying the theoretical approaches of object biography and life cycle-management, i.e. taking into account all single phases of the use of a specific object, we will uncover new ways to understand those Anatolian grave steles hitherto believed anomalous. These approaches enable us to accept, handle, and integrate the different phases of perceiving and reconstructing ancient realities.

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