Neue Fragmente sepulkraler Reliefplastik im Archäologischen Museum Istanbul

Abstract

During restoration work on the Theodosian land walls in Istanbul in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, various burial chambers and ground burials were discovered in addition to a number of sarcophagus fragments. Among the latter, 16 fragments bear figural decoration, and are presented in the following article for the first time. Only one fragment is datable to the Imperial era; the remainder can be attributed to early Byzantine workshops. They considerably enlarge our knowledge of Eastern sarcophagus carvings in as much as they show that, in the East, sarcophagus production must have been as rich in thematic and formal variation as it was in Rome in late antiquity and the early Christian era.