Stele funerarie in poros di età ellenistica da Tebe: nuove acquisizioni

Funerary Hellenistic stelai in limestone from Thebes: new acquisitions. A large number of funerary stelai have been so far brought to light thanks to rescue excavations carried out by the IX Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities of Boeotia in the last decades cemetery areas situated to the northeast, to the east, and to the northwest of the Cadmeia. Most of the funerary stelai were uncovered during excavations carried out from 1999 to 2001 for the construction of a bridge in the new Piraeus-Thessaloniki railway line, in the so-called OSE necropolis, at a distance of about 2 km northeast from the town’s center. The excavation took place in two different sectors, to the north and south of the railway bridge on the Thebes-Mouriki way. 843 tombs of various types (enchytrismoi, pyres, cist-graves, tile-covered and pit or shaft graves, and larnakes), dated from the Final Neolithic/Early Bronze Age to the Hellenistic era. The funerary stelai, discovered in recent excavations, were made of local poros (tufa). The gravestones are now stored in the Archaeological Museum of Thebes Most of them belong to a type of funerary monument that is very characteristic of Thebes, especially in the period from the end of the 4th to the 2nd century B.C. They share the following common features: a) the surfaces, except for the rear sides, are covered with a thin layer of white plaster; b) the decorative elements are either rendered in relief and subsequently painted or merely painted; c) most of the stelai have small rectangular holes, usually three or four, pierced symmetrically into the upper surface. They occur both on beam-shaped pieces, and on rectangular and pedimental plaques. They were probably used for attaching spits or the like to scare away birds, or possibly for suspending wreaths or garlands; d) all extant pieces have in the center of their underside a rectangular dowel-hole, whose dimensions (length and depth) vary considerable. These dowel-holes were used to receive the supporting-piece (the “central support-holes”). As far as shape is concerned, the new tombstones from Thebes fall into groups well defined by Fraser and Rönne in studies published in 1957 and in 1971. The stones published by Fraser and Rönne have been divided in three groups: A) narrow, beam-shaped stones; B) stones with pediment, narrow type; C) larger, elaborated type plaques of rectangular shape, with surface articulated in three or more panels. In recent years, some pieces that had not been included in the aforementioned corpus have been published. These include: three stelai kept in the Museum of Louvre, one in the Benaki Museum, and some others that were more recently discovered and published in the Chronicles of the Archaiologhikon Deltion. The discovery of new examples of stelai in recent Theban excavations is very important. For, only few of the pieces examined by Fraser and Rönne have a known provenance from necropolis that were in use from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. However, none of these pieces had been found in context. The paper examines new gravestones of Fraser’s and Rönne’s Classes A, B, C. To Class A belong three pieces were found in tomb 151 of the cemetery. Two of them bear the name Herakleitos. The first (inv. no. 33415) preserves the ionic kyma on ridge painted with white and red colour. On the second stele (inv. n. 33601), we find a representation of two eight-petalled double flowers in relief and between them the inscription. On the third stele (inv. no. 33668) the two double flowers are incised and painted in red. The inscription is not legible. To the Fraser’s-Rönne’s Class B, belongs the slab from tomb 166 (inv. n. 33413). The stele preserves the decoration in white, red and blue colours. It is difficult to say if the name is the masculine Dáphnis or the feminine Daphnìs since both are attested in Boeotia . To the Class C belongs the stele (inv. no. 33417) from the tomb 154, which bears the name Pythagoras attested for the first time in Boeotia.. Eight gravestones have enriched the corpus of stelai with Doric frieze. Some of them are inscribed examples. First of all, the two stelai from tomb 358, inv. nos. 33434 (class B) and 33460 (class C)), which bear the name of the dead: Aimnastos. Finally fragment (inv. 32922) from tomb 90 preserves only the initial letter of the name of the dead: “Z”. This piece also preserves a piece of lead. The stelai with Doric frieze are typical of Boeotia and particularly of Thebes. With regard to the model of inspiration I have hypothesized that the architectural decoration of the facades of the Macedonian tombs were the main influence behind the decorative style of the Boeotian poros-gravestones with a Doric frieze. It is to be noted that Fraser and Rönne did not know of any supports belonging to Boeotian funerary plaques. Such pieces, although found in Theban cemeteries, were never collected. The two scholars were based on the T-shaped stelai represented on Theban gravestones for their reconstruction. A small, rectangular poros capital decorated with simple palmettes in stucco and pierced with a vertical hole of rectangular shape, found in 1964 with a fragment of a beam-shaped tombstone, suggested to the two scholars that the pieces stones were related to each other and therefore that the capital was part of the supporting pillar. The capital is similar to the one inv. 36711 from Tomb 151. The excavation of the OSE cemetery brought to light a large number of supports, reused as material for the construction of tombs. Cist-grave 358, in which two stelai bearing the name of Aeimnastos were reused (33434, 33460), contained the support inv. 33430, 33660, 33643. Other several supports were found and height is ranging from 52,3 cm (inv. 33428) to 1 m and 8 cm. The stelai and their supports were not found in situ, but were reused in a pit-grave (Tomb 154), in cist-graves (Tombs 151, 86, 388) and in a tile-covered tomb (Tomb 24). Their reuse in cist-graves is attested already in the first half of the 3rd century BC. (Tombs N 84,151) and continues until the 1st century AD, with an observable increase in the second half of the 3rd c. BC.