464 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1957 



the way a sculptor would naturally lay out a pattern of this sort on the 

 surface of the stone before starting work. 



Whatever the circumstances in which the type of the garland sar- 

 cophagus was first established in the marble yards of Proconnesus, 

 there can be no doubt of its subsequent popularity, especially in the 

 provinces of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. Well over a hun- 

 dred examples are known from this area, and this can only be a 

 tiny percentage of those that once lined its crowded cemeteries. Of 

 the 30 recorded marble sarcophagi from Alexandria, 29 were of this 

 type (10) ; and Professor Hansel's recent excavations in the cemeteries 

 of Perge, in Pamphylia (11), are a vivid reminder of how much has 

 been lost on other, less favored sites. Outside Egypt they are found 

 principally in Syria and the coastlands of Asia Minor, in both of 

 which areas they constituted by far the largest single group of 

 imports. They are not found at all in mainland Greece, and only 

 a single example in Cyrenaica, where the Attic workshops seem to 

 have secured a monopoly comparable to that of the Proconnesian 

 workshops in Alexandria. In the West, the distribution was rather 

 different. The plain gabled sarcophagi of Proconnesus found a good 

 market in northern Italy, and a few garland sarcophagi reached 

 Rome itself. On the whole, however, the exporters of Proconnesus 

 seem to have found it wiser to conform to Italian practice, and the 

 very large quantities of Proconnesian marble that were used in the sar- 

 cophagi of Italy and southern Gaul, and to a lesser extent in the other 

 western provinces, seem to have been imported almost exclusively in 

 plain form, without any prior shaping in the quarry workshops. 



To the art historian these sarcophagi have a value quite apart from 

 the glimpse that they afford of the sculptor at work and of the factors 

 that controlled his output. The essential unity of the series offers an 

 invaluable connecting thread for the study of a whole range of other- 

 wise disparate objects, scattered over territories whose detailed artistic 

 development within the Roman period is still all too little known. The 

 garland sarcophagi were not only imported; they were copied, and 

 copied widely, by local craftsmen working in local materials. In the 

 Syrian coastlands the commonest form of decorated sarcophagus in 

 the Roman period is derived so closely from these imported marble 

 models that their earliest commentator, mistaking the nature and di- 

 rection of the relationship, was led to claim the garland sarcophagus 

 as a specifically Syrian creation (12) . Nor was it only the more elabo- 

 rately carved pieces that were copied. Local craftsmen found the 

 simplified quarry version of the design both congenial and easy to copy, 

 and it, too, passed into the local repertory — a remarkable and possibly 

 unique instance of a purely abstract design passing into provincial 

 Roman art from a purely classical source. Much the same thing hap- 



