Eine frühklassische Stele aus Samsun/Amisos

Abstract

In 2013 the Museum of Samsun has conducted a rescue excavation in Kurupelit near Atakum which is c. 3 km northwest of Samsun, ancient Amisus, and discovered a grave chamber as well as six grave stelae, made of local limestone, in its close proximity. These stelae are currently exhibited in the garden of the Museum of Samsun in the open air. One of them, the focus of this brief paper, displays two women who had been squeezed closely to together in a tectonic frame: The dead one was sitting in front of her handmaid who has a small box and a round hand mirror in her hands. The isocephalic composition of the stele, a certain sculptural arrangement, shows both of the figures’ heads lined up along the same horizontal plane to the cornice’s level. This new stele from Amisus belongs to the so-called »Severe style« and originates likely around 450 B.C. It exhibites a close typological relationship to a fragmented stele from Komotini in western Thrace, today in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece, which was assigned by H. Hiller to the sculptural school of Thasos and dated by her shortly before 450 B.C. A more developed version of this certain scene can be seen on a vertically chipped stele which was found in Sinope in eastern Paphlagonia and is being exhibited in the Museum of Sinop. On this stele two handmaiden and additionally a cock under the stool of the dead woman appear. A distinctive »regionalism« of the relief style can be ascertained from Thasos across Amisus to Sinope.