The Barracks House Revisited. Ein Skulpturenfund aus Antiochia am Orontes

Time has dealt harshly with Antioch’s Hellenistic and Roman sculpture. Among the finds from the vibrant Syrian metropolis are none that can safely be assigned to public buildings, and even the excavation of dozens of houses in Antioch, Seleucia Pieria, and Daphne in the 1930s only produced a rather small number of sculptures for display in the private domain. The largest ensemble known from Antioch is a »cache of statuary« unearthed in 1934. According to the excavators, »the sculpture had been collected in antiquity and buried in a room of a rather poor villa of the late fourth or early fifth centuries A.D.«, situated just outside the southern city wall. The assemblage from the Barracks House consisted of twenty-two objects including three portraits of the 3rd century (among them a tetrarchic porphyry head of an emperor) as well as several, mostly broken or mutilated fragments of ›decorative‹ and ideal sculpture. With the only exception of a small size head, the heterogenous collection has been assigned to the 1st to 3rd centuries A.D.

Our reexamination of the finds in the Barracks House suggests a rather different picture. While the earliest pieces can actually be confirmed to originate in the early or mid empire, a third, if not half of the ideal sculpture, mainly small-sized, seem to indicate a dating in the second half of the 4th and the early 5th centuries. As this corresponds with the proposed chronology of the villa, it may well be assumed that the ambiguous collection is not the depot of a pillager or a building contractor, as suggested by previous scholarship, but was most probably assembled by the owner of the house and his family. After serious damage to the villa and its inventory, most probably in one of the many earthquakes known, the remainder of the collection was refurbished and stored for further use. Though none of the objects, dispersed today among Museums in Turkey and the United States if not completely lost, has undergone scientific analysis, most marbles seem to point to imports from Asia Minor.