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Italy
Italy
ITA.Rome.AAR
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American Academy in Rome
Via Angelo Masina. 5 00153, Rome Italy
USA
These are pieces that were in transit at auction, last known to be in U.S. collections.
California
CA.Berk.UC.HMA
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Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology
University of California Berkeley, CA 94720
Formerly the R.H. Lowie Museum, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley has an extensive collection of ancient Greek vases and some sculpture. It also includes sixteen Latin epitaphs on stone, two Greek gravestones, an epigram painted in Greek on plaster, a marble statuette with a Latin inscription, and one lead water pipe, one fragment of brick, and two Roman lamps stamped with Roman names. All but one have been published. Most of the pieces were purchased for the Museum in Rome by Dr. Alfred Emerson on behalf of Mrs. Hearst during a two or three year period around the turn of the century and were shipped to Berkeley in 1902. Three others (CA.Berk.UC.HMA.#97.3.1-3), once the personal property of Professor A.E. Gordon, were given to him around 1945 by a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley who reportedly purchased them (in one case, at least, sometime after 1913) from antiquities dealers in Rome. These pieces are presumed still to be in the Hearst Museum at Berkeley. Where not otherwise indicated, all the objects seem to have been acquired in Rome and may be presumed to have originated there.
The Greek collection received a handsome publication in 1982 by J. Nickel, A. Harlow, and A. Stewart entitled Poseidon's Realm, Ancient Greek Art from the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, Berkeley (Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento). The inscriptions have been edited separately by R. J. Smutny, Greek and Latin Inscriptions at Berkeley, California Classical Studies 2 (Berkeley 1966). The summary recorded in the Checklist is based exclusively on these publications and on two records of objects bearing inscriptions and mythological scenes supplied by the American office of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae.
CA.Malibu.JPGM
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The J. Paul Getty Museum
17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
The Getty Museum in Malibu has within a few years assembled one of the most distinguished and extensive collections of ancient art in the United States. The inscribed materials include sculpture, bronzes, architectural elements, vases, pottery, gems, and much else. Since 1974 many individual pieces have received treatment in articles in the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, and in the late 1980s and 1990s there have begun to appear a series of fine volumes, Catalogues of the Collections, The J. Paul Getty Museum, that will eventually provide a complete publication of the holdings. Those most useful for inscriptions are: G. Koch, Roman Funerary Sculpture (Malibu 1988), J. Spier, Ancient Gems and Finger Rings (Malibu 1992); and M. Pfrommer, Metalwork from the Hellenized East (Malibu 1993).
CA.Pas.NSM
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Norton Simon Museum
411 West Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91105
The Norton Simon Museum has a grave epigram from the fourth century CE.
CA.SF.SFSU
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Department of Classics, San Francisco State University
1600 Holoway Ave., San Francisco, CA 94132
The five fragmentary Latin inscriptions listed below were found in 1965 in the basement of a private home in Flushing, Queens, New York City, where they had been abandoned by a previous owner of the house, and were given by the new owner of the residence to Robert J. Smutny, who published them in 1969 (Mnemosyne 22: 191-94) and who subsequently donated them in 1995 to the Department of Classics of San Francisco State University , where they are preserved today. Nothing is known about the original provenance of the stones, when, or how they arrived in the United States, but the man who left them in Flushing was known as a collector of European art, and it is likely that he acquired them during one of his frequent trips to the continent and personally brought them to his home in New York. That each of the four includes the epitaphic formula in pace popular with urban Christians during the third and fourth centuries perhaps suggests that they were acquired from, and possibly originated in, the same place, most probably somewhere in the vicinity of Rome.
CA.SJ.Egypt
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The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum & Planetarium
1660 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA 95191
The Egyptian Museum in San Jose has an unpublished limestone funerary bust with a short inscription.
CA.SS.HHM
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Hearst Castle
750 Hearst Castle Road, San Simeon, CA 93452-9741
The Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument , a public facility of California's vast Department of Parks and Recreation, houses two handsome Roman sarcophagi which were once part of the private collection of the publishing magnate and now belong to the State of California. One of the sarcophagi, which seems not to have been published, was purchased at auction in 1921; the origin of the other is unknown.
Connecticut
CT.NH.YU.YUAG
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Yale University Art Gallery
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520
The Yale University Art Gallery is the oldest university or college art museum in North America. Founded in 1832, the Gallery specializes in early Italian painting, African sculpture, and modern art but includes also a substantial collection of more than 13,000 artifacts from the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world, including many drawings or facsimiles of graffiti from the Roman military camp at Dura-Europus on the Euphrates (Syria), which was excavated in the 1920s and 1930s by teams of archaeologists from the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and Yale University under the leadership of Franz Cumont and Mikhail Rostovtzeff.
The more than 15,000 objects from Dura held by Yale University are dispersed among three collections in New Haven, including those of the Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (papyri), as well as the Yale University Art Gallery. These materials are being coordinated and aligned by the International (Digital) Dura-Europus Project (IDEA), which is using Linked Open Data "to reassemble and recontextualize" archaeological data from Dura.
CT.Stamf.XC
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Xerox Corporation
800 Long Ridge Road, Stamford, CT 06902
The Xerox Headquarters houses a gold phylactery of the fourth century BCE.
DC
DC.DO
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Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
1703 32nd Street, NW Washington, DC 20007
The Greek and Roman antiquities at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. The collection was published in 1956 by Gisela M. A. Richter, Catalogue of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (Cambridge 1956). There is also an extensive collection of late Classical and Byzantine Greek objects, some of which need to be listed in the present checklist. These have been handsomely published in three volumes entitled Catalogue of the Byzantine and Early Medieval Antiquities in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. Volume 1 (Metalwork, Ceramics, Glass, Glyptics, Painting) was published in 1962, volume 2 (Jewelry, Enamels, and Art of the Migration Period) in 1965, both by Marvin C. Ross. Volume 3 by Kurt Weitzmann dealt with Ivories and Steatites and appeared in 1972.
DC.SM
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The Smithsonian Museum
PO Box 37012 SI Building, Room 153, MRC 010 Washington, DC 20013-7012
The Smithsonian Museum (formally the Smithsonian Museum of National History) in the nation's capital has a small collection of Arretine ware, well published by Howard Comfort in AJA 42 (1938) 506-511, which includes three stamps from the workshop of P. Cornelius. All the pieces are part of a large collection of miscellaneous Gallo-Roman antiquities purchased in 1904 from Thomas Wilson and reported to have come from Italy.
Florida
FL.SP.MFA
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Museum of Fine Arts
255 Beach Dr. N.E., St.Petersburg, FL 33701
The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg possesses a mosaic from Antioch published by D. Levi, Antioch Mosaic Pavements (Princeton 1947) and a stone grave monument of the second century CE from Thessaly .
FL.WP.RC
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Olin Library
Rollins College, 1000 Holt Ave., Winter Park, FL 32789
Rollins College in Winter Park owns a marble grave relief from Antioch given by the widow of Reverend P. O. Powers, who acquired it during service there around the year 1860.
Georgia
GA.Atl.EU.MCM
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Michael C. Carlos Museum
Emory University, 571 South Kilgo Street, Atlanta, GA 30322
The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University has a small collection of antiquities, among which are a Greek marble votive relief of the fourth century BC ?) a fragment of a Latin honorific inscription from Tunisia, and, on loan from William C. and Carol W. Thibadeau, a well-preserved Roman ash urn. Only the last has been published.
Hawaii
HI.Honol.HMA
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Honolulu Museum of Art
900 S. Beretania, Honolulu HI 96814
The Honolulu Museum of Art (until 2012, the Honolulu Academy of Arts) houses a small collection of classical antiquities, including the right side of a Roman floor mosaic of the third century CE depicting an Eros riding a dolphin surrounded by marine life and, spelled out in marble tesserae, the end of a dedication to [Aphro]dite. Said to have originated in Rome, the panel was donated to the Museum by Clare Booth Luce in 1983.
Illinois
IL.Chi.AIC
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The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603
IL.Chi.UC.SMA
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Smart Museum of Art The University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Chicago, Illinois 60637
IL.Urb.UI.SM
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The Spurlock Museum of World Cultures
Spurlock Museum of World Cultures, University of Illinois, 600 South Gregory Street, Urbana, IL 61801
The Spurlock Museum of World Cultures (formerly World Heritage Museum) at the University of Illinois in Urbana has a small collection of inscribed antiquities, including two ancient Greek artifacts, three Latin epitaphs, two fragments of stamped lead waterpipes, one bronze dedicatory plaque, and a clayware jug with the maker's stamp. Only one text, a Greek juror's token, has been published. The Museum also possesses a teaching collection of plaster casts of well known or representative Greek and Latin inscriptions, including several panels of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti from Ankara, Turkey.
Indiana
IN.Bloom.IUAM
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The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art
1133 East 7th St., Bloomington, IN 47405-7509
The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art (from 1941-2016, the Indiana University Art Museum) in 1963 a collection of ancient art assembled by V. G. Simkhovitch that includes much sculpture and bronze work as well as many fine vases. It receiveda fine publication by W. Rudolph and A. Calinescu: Ancient Art from the V. G. Simkhovitch Collection (Bloomington) in 1988 (AASC).
IN.Crawf.LWSR
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General Lew Wallace Study & Museum
200 Wallace Avenue P.O. Box 662, Crawfordsville, IN 47933
General Lew Wallace acquired during his diplomatic service an inscription found in the catacomb of San Callisto at Rome. It remains in his study in Crawfordsville.
IN.ND.UND.SMA
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The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556
The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art (until 2023, the Snite Museum of Art) at the University of Notre Dame has a handsome Roman marble epistyle with beautiful monumental lettering naming a Roman knight. A homonym is found in a list of names at Herculaneum, and the style of the lettering and character of the inscription are compatible with a Campanian location and a first century date, but the origin of the piece is unknown.
Iowa
IA.Grin.GC
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Grinnell College
P.O. Box 805, Grinnell, IA 50112
The Department of Classical and East Asian Languages at Grinnell College has a small collection of ancient artifacts acquired from two principal sources: purchases in Italy during the first thirty years of this century registered under the name S(pencer) and purchases and donations from Egypt, Cyprus, and Rome in the 1940s and 1950s associated with the name Rehling. The inscribed objects include a dozen texts on stone, forty-five pieces of instrumentum (mostly amphora handles from Monte Testaccio in Rome) and a dipinto sherd with a long and elaborate text painted in Greek (Spencer 688) which is said to have been given to a Grinnell professor by a Frenchman sometime during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. All of the Latin texts were purchased in Rome and may be presumed to have originated there.
Kansas
KS.Lawr.UK
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The Wilcox Classical Museum
Lippincott Hall 103, 1410 Jayhawk Blvd, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045-7095
In 1909 the Department of Latin and Greek of the University of Kansas came into a sizable collection of Roman antiquities sold by the Italian government in order to raise money for the survivors of the earthquake at Messina and purchased for the University by Ralph V.D. Magoffin. Among the objects were nine inscriptions on stone, eight in Latin and one in Greek, and a fragment of brick bearing a Roman brickstamp. One of the inscriptions had been included by Chr. Hxxlsen in CIL VI among the tituli sepulcrales of Rome; another was published by Magoffin in AJA 14 (1910) 53. All of the texts were subsequently edited by L. R. Lind in AJA 59 (1955) 159-62. Although the provenance of only two of the pieces--those published by Hxxlsen and Magoffin--is reported (in one case, with conflicting testimony), all the inscriptions may be presumed to have been acquired, and probably to have originated, in Rome. In all likelihood most of the columbarium tablets came from the vast cemetery outside the Porta Salaria being uncovered for the first time around the turn of the century.
Kentucky
KY.BG.priv
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Private Collection
Bowling Green, KY
A private collector in Bowling Green owns three inscribed lead sling bullets (glandes) and a bronze plate (tabula anasata) engraved with an interesting and unusual Latin text. Silvio Panciera is preparing the last for publication.
KY.Lou.SAM
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J. B. Speed Art Museum
P.O. Box 2600, Louisville, KY 40201
The J. B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville houses an unusually large and homogeneous collection of some 130 Latin epitaphs and 500 fragments of epitaphs, all reportedly deriving from a small group of columbaria uncovered between 1897 and 1902 during construction of a Carmelite church and convent of Santa Teresa d’Avilia beside the Corso d'Italia outside the Aurelian wall between the Porta Salaria and the Porta Pinciana in Rome. The vast majority are small tablets of the sort originally set beneath loculi, but the collection also includes 11 marble ash urns (4 uninscribed) more than 60 terracotta urns; 2 inscribed children’s sarcophagi; an inscribed funerary altar; several mensae sepulchrales; and 70 intact and fragmentary terracotta lamps. All these, along with various ceramic bowls, plates, and unguent bottles, were donated to the Museum in 1929 by a prominent local benefactor, R.C. Ballard Thruston, whose agent had purchased them in Rome in 1911 and shipped them to Louisville, where they arrived the following year.
The inscriptions come from a large necropolis outside the Porta Salaria that flourished in several phases between the first century BCE and the early third century CE and that was first uncovered during the last decades of the 19th century in the course of development of the new residential quarter of Salaria in the northern section of the newly designated capital of the recently founded nation state of Italy (Cupitò;cf. Bodel 2014: 179-81). During the years when the zone was being uncovered, T. Ashby photographed a few of the columbaria at the time of their discovery (Ashby 1989), and G. Gatti and others published brief transcriptions of many epitaphs in a series of reports in Bullettino Comunale and Notizie degli Scavi that were surveyed and summarized in 1905 by Gatti, who provided a useful inventory of the relevant texts: CIL VI 33364-33367, 33392-33397, 33413-33420, 33398-33412, 33428, 33472, 33535, 33453, 33532, 33421-33706, 33466, and 33544. More recently, L. Gigante and G. Houston have published 27 previously unedited inscriptions, 5 previously published epitaphs with new joins, and 144 previously unpublished or unidentified fragments now in the Speed museum collection, and they have furthermore placed more than 200 of the Speed inscriptions (identified by their CIL VI numbers) in specific tombs, including three columbaria belonging to the families of the Vergilii (Cupitò: UC 10.95); Cestilii (Cupitò: UC 10.96); and Livineii (Cupitò: UC.10.97).
T. Ashby, Archeologia a Roma nelle fotografie di Thomas Ashby 1891-1930, Rome, 1989.
J. Bodel, “The Life and Death of Ancient Roman Cemeteries. Living with the Dead in Imperial Rome”, in C. Häuber, F. X. Schütz, and G. M. Winder, eds., Reconstruction and the Historic City: Rome and Abroad (Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsgeographie München 6) (Munich 2014) 177-95.
C. Cupito et al., Il Territorio Tra la Via Salaria, L’Aniene, Il Tevere, and La Via Salaria Vetus (Rome 2007).
G. Gatti, “Sepolcri e memorie sepolcrali dell’antica via Salaria,” BCAR 33 (1905) 154-188, Tavv. VII-VIII.
L.M. Gigante, “Two Cineraria in the J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky,” Vergilius 40 (1994) 69-75.
L.M. Gigante, “Roman Funerary Monuments in Louisville, Kentucky,” Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress of Classical Archaeology: Common Ground (London 2006): 124-27.
L.M. Gigante and G.W. Houston, “A Collection of Inscriptions from the Via Salaria Necropolis now in the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky,” MAAR 53 (2008) 27-78.
Maine
ME.Bruns.BC
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Bowdoin College Museum of Art
9400 College Station, Brunswick ME 04011
The Walker Art Building at Bowdoin College houses a diverse collection of more than a thousand classical artifacts, among which are eight inscriptions on stone (four Greek and four Latin), seven stamps and signatures on gold, bronze, brick and other terracotta, and two inscribed gemstones. All the inscribed objects were donated to Bowdoin College by bequest of the noted collector of ancient art Edward P. Warren (1860-1928), an American expatriate resident for most of his life in Oxford, England and one of the major benefactors of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (see O. Burdett and E.H. Goddard, Edward Perry Warren: The Biography of a Connoisseur [London 1941]). The entire collection is described by K. Herbert in his descriptive catalog of 1964, Ancient Art in Bowdoin College (Cambridge, Mass.).
Maryland
MD.Balt.BMA
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Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218-3898
The Baltimore Museum has several mosaic inscriptions published in Antioch-on-the-Orontes II and III, the Excavations of 1933-1936, 1937-1939 (Princeton 1938 and 1941). There is also a single inscribed funerary stele.
MD.Balt.JHU
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Department of Classics
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218
The Johns Hopkins University has one of the oldest and richest university collections of classical artifacts in the United States. Established in 1882 with the purchase of an extensive group of Egyptian antiquities collected by Colonel Mendes Israel Cohen, the collection received its first Graeco-Roman material (several clay lamps and Etruscan vases) by gift in 1884 from Arthur L. Frothingham, Jr., who went on in the following year to found the American Journal of Archaeology.
The epigraphic materials comprise some one hundred fifty Latin inscriptions, mainly epitaphs from Rome, which were acquired for the most part during the first decade of this century, when the large ancient necropolis outside the Aurelian Wall between the Porta Salaria and the Porta Pinciana was being unearthed in the course of development of that new region of the modern city. Most of the stones were purchased from antiquities dealers in Rome in 1906 and 1907 by Harry Langford Wilson, Professor of Roman Archaeology and Epigraphy at the university, who published his acquisitions between 1907 and 1914 in a series of articles in the American Journal of Philology, volumes 28 (1907) 450-58; 30 (1909) 61-71, 153-170; 31 (1910) 25-42, 251-64; 32 (1911) 166-87; 33 (1912) 168-85; and 35 (1914) 421-34 (nos. 122-140, on pages 427-34, were published posthumously by Ralph van Deman Magoffin).
In these same years Magoffin included a number of inscriptions now in the Hopkins collection in an article on unedited inscriptions from Latium examined by him in Rome in 1906 and 1907 (American Journal of Archaeology 14 [1910] 51-59), and W. Sherwood Fox published a group of lead curse tablets purchased by Wilson in Rome in 1908, of which five could be deciphered: The Johns Hopkins Tabellae Defixionum (AJP 33 Suppl., Baltimore 1912).
Six of the stones published by Wilson subsequently found their way to New York University, where they were studied and published by M. Peachin in 2014 (see NY.NY.NYU). Magoffin's article registers as well a few monuments in private hands in Baltimore and New York whose present whereabouts are unknown (nos. 4, 9, 11, 14). For a more complete history of the collection of antiquities at Johns Hopkins, see Ellen R. Williams, The Archaeological Collection of the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore 1984) 3-12.
MD.Balt.WAG
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The Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21201
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has several fine Attic reliefs--four funerary, one from an honorary decree--a gold magical text from Arabia, probably from the city of Bostra, and a handsome Roman ash urn. In addition, the collection contains a dozen magical amulets (Bonner, SMA nos. 63, 68, 72, 133, 170-171, 233, 251, 279, 359, 364, and 368).
Massachusetts
MA.Amh.AC.MAM
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Mead Art Museum, Amherst College
Mead Art Museum 41 Quadrangle, Amherst, MA 01002
The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, named for its founder, William Rutherford Mead (an 1867 graduate of Amherst College and partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White responsible for building many neo-classical buildings in the American Northeast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), houses a small but select collection of American and European paintings and world art. Its collection of Greek and Roman artifacts includes several Roman terracotta lamps and Greek vases gifted to the Museum in 1942 by Charles H. Morgan, a Roman-Palmyrene bust, and a variety of objects of daily life (instrumentum domesticum). More recently the Museum has acquired a white marble sarcophagus of the Antonine period decorated with sea creatures framing an epitaph dedicated by a mother to two children who died at an early age. Known at Rome since the sixteenth century, when it stood in the Palazzo Colonna, the sarcophagus was acquired by purchase in the early years of the twentieth century by Princeton University and remained there in the Princeton Art Museum until 2012, when it was purchased by the Mead Art Museum and was transferred to Amherst.
MA.Bos.Gardn
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Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
2 Palace Road, Boston, MA 02115
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has an extensive collection of ancient sculpture and a few Greek vases. The inscribed pieces in this collection include six Roman ash urns (one inscribed in Greek), a marble throne, and two sarcophagi. These have been well-published by C. C. Vermeule, W. Cahn, and R.V. Hadley, in Sculpture in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston 1977) as well as on the museum website.
MA.Bos.MFA
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Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has an extensive and distinguished collection of antiquities, among which are more than two hundred artifacts inscribed in Greek and Latin. The reported inventory comprises eighty-three texts on marble and stone; sixty-five precious and semi-precious gems; nine texts inscribed on gold, six on silver, twenty-three on bronze and twenty-three on other metals; two mosaics; two terracottas; and one wood object--not to mention numerous Greek vases bearing painters' signatures and labels, dozens of pieces of Roman terra sigillata with makers' stamps, and two incised magical amulets (Bonner, SMA nos. 73, 234).
Many of these pieces derive from the fine collection of Greek sculpture acquired for the museum at the end of the nineteenth century through the activities of its agents Edward P. Warren and John Marshall; the inscriptions are mainly on grave reliefs and votives of various kinds. In addition, the Archaeological Institute of America in 1884 presented to the museum its collection of finds from Assos, among which are many inscriptions; these have all been published by R. Merkelbach in Die Inschriften von Assos (Bonn 1976). Individual pieces have from time to time been published in the Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and elsewhere, and most of the major works are included in one or another of a series of catalogues compiled by Cornelius Vermeule with the help of various collaborators.
Since the unedited inscriptions have not been fully reported, the inventory below is incomplete, but it is hoped that none of the major pieces in the collection has been overlooked.
MA.Camb.HU.Sack
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The Arthur M. Sackler Museum
Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
The collection of Greek and Latin inscriptions housed in the Sackler Museum at Harvard University comprises two distinct groups of objects: Greek texts on works of art owned by the Harvard University Art Museums and Latin texts illustrating private life and religion acquired, and in some cases still owned, by the Department of the Classics. Both groups have been enhanced by various acquisitions over the years, but each owes its essential character to a primary benefactor and source.
In 1905 and 1906 Clifford H. Moore, a Professor of Latin at Harvard, purchased in Rome thirty-one Latin inscriptions for the Department of the Classics. Of these almost half had been included by Chr. Huelsen in CIL VI among the tituli sepulcrales of Rome. Moore republished these, along with twenty-four unedited Latin texts (including five stones then recently donated to the department by Professor Minton Warren and a young Dr. Arthur Stanley Pease), in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 20 (1909) 1-14. This Classical Collection, which included as well a number of plaster casts and a sizeable assortment of instrumentum (mainly brickstamps) donated to the Department in 1905 by Dr. George Pfeiffer in memory of his wife, Rachael Hartwell, was housed for many years in a classroom in Sever Hall at Harvard College before being transferred at first, in the 1950s, to the basement of Widener Library, then subsequently, in the 1960s, to a storage corridor off the Smyth Classical Library in Widener, and finally, in the summer of 1988, to the Department of Ancient Art in the Sackler Museum, where the stones are kept today.
Fifty years after Moore published his small collection of Latin inscriptions from Rome, Harvard's epigraphic holdings were greatly augmented when the Fogg Museum in 1960 received by bequest from the estate of David M. Robinson about half of his extensive ancient Greek collection. His coins went to the American Numismatic Society and the rest of the collection was purchased by the University of Mississippi (see MS.Univ.UM.UM). The 410 objects that came to Harvard were exhibited from May to September of 1961 with a descriptive catalog, The David Moore Robinson Bequest of Classical Art and Antiquities(Cambridge, Mass. 1961).
In addition to these two main acquisitions and their original publications, eleven of Moore's inscriptions were newly edited in 1992 in the American Journal of Archaeology (96: 71-100), and individual pieces accruing to both collections over the years have been separately published. Two ostraca from Egypt with painted Greek inscriptions were edited by E. J. Goodspeed, AJP 25 (1904) 45-58 at nos. 11 and 15 (= Preisigke, Sammelbuch nos. 4362 and 4366). Mason Hammond in 1964 published three Latin inscriptions purchased by the Department of the Classics in 1961 for the Alice Corinne McDaniel Collection of Roman antiquities, of which two are now on display in a glass case in the Smyth Classical Library (HSCP 68: 74-97). Three years later N. L. Hirschland and M. Hammond edited thirty-two stamped pottery fragments from Carthage (fourteen texts in Punic, eight in Greek, three in Latin and three unidentified), six Roman brickstamps, two stamped Greek loom weights and one stamped Greek amphora handle in the McDaniel Collection (HSCP 72 [1967] 369-82). Herbert Bloch elucidated the Augustan era epitaph of a doctor of Caecilia Metella, once part of the private collection of Henry Lanford Wilson of Johns Hopkins University (see MD.Balt.JHU) in HSCP 86 (1982) 141-50, and J. Bodel in AJA 96 (1992) 95-100 republished an opisthographic funerary relief from Liguria long believed to be lost and an unedited bipartite columbarium tablet from Rome. The inscribed sculpture at Harvard has recently been published by C. C. Vermeule and A. Brauer, Stone Sculptures: the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Museums (Cambridge, Mass. 1990).
In addition to eight moldmade terracotta lamps in the Robinson collection, the Classical Collection includes thirty-seven lamps with makers' stamps (not yet catalogued and therefore not included in the list below) and a full-scale plaster cast of the inscribed cippus found beneath the Lapis Niger in the Roman Forum--one of two or three in the United States (another, incomplete, is at Princeton University; a third, reported by E.H. Warmington, Remains of Old Latin IV [Cambridge, Mass. 1940] 245, at Johns Hopkins University, could not be verified. According to Warmington three similar casts can be found in England, at the British Museum, the Asmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Museum of Archaeology, Cambridge). At present Harvard's cast is stored in a corridor off the Smyth Library.
MA.Camb.priv
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Private Collection
Cambridge, MA
Mr. Rodney G. Dennis, Curator of Manuscripts in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, in 1974 purchased for his private collection from a London antiquities dealer an unpublished Latin epitaph from the estate of Captain Raymond Johnes . Mason Hammond of the Department of the Classics of Harvard University published the text a few years later.
MA.Deer.DA
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Deerfield Academy
7 Boyden Lane, PO Box 87, Deerfield, MA 01342
The Deerfield Academy, an independent secondary school founded in 1797 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, holds a fragmentary Latin inscription of the early third century CE recording an ex-voto dedication by an equestrian military officer. Originally found near Misenum and first published by Mommsen in 1883 in volume 10 of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the inscription was subsequently transferred at an unknown date to Deerfield, where it is believed to have been displayed in the Classics department since the 1930s.
MA.Glouc.HCM
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Hammond Castle Museum
Hammond Castle Museum, 80 Hesperus Avenue, Gloucester, MA 01930
Located in the Magnolia section of Gloucester, Hammond Castle Museum, once the home of John Hays Hammond, Jr., an electrical engineer born to wealth and further enriched by numerous inventions (he held more than 435 patents, including one for the guided missile), houses a remarkably eclectic collection of classical and European architecture. Hammond himself designed and built the castle between 1926 and 1930 with stonework and architectural elements collected by him personally from little known places in Europe, particularly Italy, Spain, and France. Among the antiquities built into the walls and variously displayed throughout the castle are some sixty Latin inscriptions and copies of inscriptions, mostly epitaphs and funerary altars, originating for the most part, it seems, from central Italy.
In 1996 Allen Ward of the University of Connecticut shared with USEP an invaluable but incomplete set of drawings, transcriptions, and a few photographs of the collection. These were supplemented and enhanced by the students enrolled in a Roman epigraphy seminar at Brown University in fall 2003, who examined much of the collection by autopsy and were able to confirm that some of the immured inscriptions are plaster copies, in some cases of originals known to exist elsewhere. The entire collection is in need of a systematic review and republication.
MA.Gran.priv
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Private Collection
Granby, MA
A private collector in Granby (previously in South Hadley) owns a small fragment (top right corner) of a Latin epitaph of unknown origin.
MA.Med.priv.
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Private Collection
Medfield, MA 02052
Private collection located in Medfield, MA.
MA.Newt.Gulotta
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Private Collection
Newton, MA 12460
A Boston area book-promotor, author, and collector, Victor Gulotta, owns an opisthographic funerary plaque of unknown provenance inscribed on both sides with Latin epitaphs of the early imperial period. According to the editor of the inscriptions, the tablet first appeared on the antiquities market in London in 1990 (Christie’s auction, December 12, 1990, no. 119) and was subsequently sold at auction in New York in 2002 (Sotheby’s auction, June 13, 2002, no. 130) to the David Dami Collection of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, whence it was acquired by the Victor Gulotta Collection in 2018. In all likelihood, the tablet originated in Rome.
MA.North.SC
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The Van Buren Antiquities Collection
Department of Classical Languages and Literatures, Dewey Hall II Smith College Northampton, MA 01063
The Department of Classical Languages and Literatures at Smith College owns a small collection of six Latin inscriptions, which were acquired around the turn of the century by Albert William Van Buren from antiquities dealers in Rome and were subsequently purchased from Van Buren by F. Warren Wright of the Smith Latin Department, along with a handwritten catalogue of the collection, in 1925. Three of the stones collected by Van Buren were published by Huelsen in CIL VI among the sepulchral inscriptions of Rome.
The Smith College Museum of Art has a small marble ash urn from Rome and a stamped moldmade terracotta lamp on display.
MA.SH.MHC.AM
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Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
Lower Lake Road South Hadley, MA 01075
MA.Well.WC
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Wellesley College Classical Studies Department
106 Central Street Wellesley, MA 02481
The Departments of Greek and Latin at Wellesley College own a small collection of Roman antiquities comprising two small Latin epitaphs, an opisthographic fragment of a marble slab, two Roman brickstamps, eight amphora handles, and about a dozen fragments of Arretine ware. When, where, and how they were acquired is not known. In addition to these pieces the Departments have a sizable collection of some seventy-five squeezes of Latin inscriptions made from originals in the Olcott collection at Columbia University and at the National Museum (delle Terme) in Rome.
MA.Wor.WAM
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Worcester Art Museum
55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, MA 01609
The Worcester Art Museum, founded in 1898, houses an eclectic collection of over 38,000 works of art dating from antiquity to the present and representing cultures from across the world. Highlights of the collection include a collection of Japanese prints, the John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection, the second largest collection of arms and armor in the Americas, and a rich collection of Roman imperial era floor mosaics, including the largest Roman domestic floor mosaic in North America.
The Roman mosaics and two Greek grave stelae were recovered during excavations at Antioch on the Orontes conducted between 1932 and 1939 by an international team led by American archaeologists and sponsored by Princeton University, the Musées Nationaux de France (Louvre), the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Worcester Art Museum. An inscribed marble ash urn, probably deriving from a columbarium monument from the early imperial cemetery outside the Porta Salaria at Rome, was acquired by purchase in 1915.
Michigan
MI.AA.UM.KM
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The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology
434 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1390
The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor houses the largest collection of Greek and Latin inscriptions in the United States. Though enhanced over the years by miscellaneous acquisitions from various sources, the collection was essentially built upon four foundations: the University of Michigan excavations at Terenouthis in Egypt in 1935 and three major purchases in Italy around the turn of the century by knowledgable agents of the university whose goal was to assemble a teaching collection for the training of American classicists. In 1899, Walter Dennison, then Instructor of Latin at The University of Michigan, secured on behalf of the university the purchase of 276 Latin inscriptions from the extensive collection of antiquities owned by Giuseppe De Criscio, the parish priest of Pozzuoli in Campania. Three subsequent purchases, from De Criscio himself in 1905 and 1909 and from his heirs in 1922, added another 32 pieces from the same region. In 1900 and 1901, Francis W. Kelsey, who had included a small fragment of stamped brick from Capri among the original purchases he made in Italy in 1893 to found the university's archaeological collections, acquired 477 examples of urban brickstamps from workmen and dealers in Rome. Seven years later (in 1908 and 1909), through six separate purchases at Rome, Dennison obtained another 100 epitaphs of urban provenience, most of which originated in tombs along the Via Appia or from the necropolis north of the Porta Salaria that had recently been uncovered during the laying out of a new residential zone of the modern city. Finally, in 1935 the University of Michigan excavations at the cemetery of Terenouthis added 194 funerary stelae, many inscribed in Greek, to the collection.
Most of the inscribed objects in the De Criscio collection had already been published by Mommsen in CIL X in 1883; many others were subsequently edited in cursory fashion by Walter Dennison in the American Journal of Archaeology 2 (1898) 373-402 and more thoroughly by John H. D'Arms in American Journal of Archaeology 77 (1973) 151-67 and by D'Arms and others in Puteoli IX-X (1985-86) 41-78. Finley A. Hooper published the grave stelae from Terenouthis in 1961 (Funerary Stelae from Kom Abou Billou, Ann Arbor). Dennison's purchases in Rome in 1908 and 1909 were first edited in their entirety seventy years later by the participants in a graduate seminar in Latin epigraphy led by Mario Torelli in 1978 and published by Martha W. Baldwin and M. Torelli in 1979: Latin Inscriptions in the Kelsey Museum: The Dennison Collection (Ann Arbor). John Bodel published the Roman brickstamps acquired by Kelsey and others in 1983 (Roman Brick Stamps in the Kelsey Museum, Ann Arbor). Steven L. Tuck published a comprehensive edition (excluding brickstamps) of the extensive holdings of Latin inscriptions in the De Criscio and Dennison collections, as well as a few miscellaneous fragmentary Latin inscriptions from Africa and Asia on stone, at Terenouthis (inv. no. 21194, a military epitaph), Carthage (inv. 85 and 86, two epitaphs), and Antioch in Pisidia (inv. 93880, 93894, and 93896, three fragments of a framed text); and bronze at Karanis (inv. 21412, two fragments of a military diploma of ca 158-161 CE), in 2005 (Latin Inscriptions in the Kelsey Museum (Ann Arbor 2005).
In addition to the pieces itemized below, the Kelsey Museum collections include some forty unpublished Greek inscriptions from Seleukeia (inv. 35748-35785, 35854-35856), two fragments from Antioch, perhaps from the same inscription as those published by Tuck as no. 400 (inv. 93882-93883), and one inscribed architectural fragment from Corinth (inv. 2371). Other than inventory numbers, we have no specifics about these pieces and so they have not been registered individually.
MI.BatCr.Post
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The Clubhouse
C.W. Post Company, Battle Creek, MI 49016
The C.W. Post Company (a producer of breakfast cereal) owns a small collection of art, which includes three Latin epitaphs of the Socconii from a columbarium uncovered in 1906 in the necropolis outside the Porta Salaria at Rome (see BCAR 34 (1906) 321-25; NSc 1906, 336-38). The inscriptions were purchased by Mr. Post during the last four years of his life, 1910-1914, when he travelled widely in Europe, and are now immured in the clubhouse of the Post cereals factory in Battle Creek.
MI.Detr.DIA
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Detroit Institute of Arts Museum
5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit, MI 48202
The Detroit Institute of Arts possesses a small collection of inscribed antiquities acquired by purchase and gift mainly during this century. Among the Latin inscriptions are three funerary altars, an ash urn, and a cippus (all with sculpted reliefs), eight lamps, and a small selection of stamped Arretine and Gallic ware, of which one specimen appears to present a new variant of a well known stamp. The Greek collection includes four terracotta lamps of the Roman and Christian period with short inscriptions, a Panathenaic prize amphora (Beazley, ABV, Oxford 1956, 412 no.3), a fragment of a mosaic floor with the label "Tigris" from Seleukeia Peiria in Syria (Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 20, 1940, no.2), and a bronze lamp of the Christian period.
Minnesota
MN.Minn.MIA
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Minneapolis Institute of Arts
2400 3rd Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55404
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a small collection of ancient art, which includes three inscribed pieces: a grave stele and a bronze ladle inscribed in Greek and a Roman ash urn with a Latin epitaph.
Mississippi
MS.Univ.UM.UM
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The University of Mississippi Museum
University Avenue and 5th St., Oxford, MS 38655
The University of Mississippi Museum at the University of Mississippi holds a number of Greek and Latin inscriptions from the David M. Robinson Memorial Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities; other large holdings from Robinson's extensive personal collection wound up at Harvard University (see MA.Camb.HU.Sack). In addition there are many other uninscribed objects and many vases at the University Museum, some with painted inscriptions. Two of the Latin inscriptions on stone from the Robinson collection have been published by Robert A. Moysey, in Parola del Passato 40 (1985) 387-92.
Missouri
MO.Col.UM.MAA
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Museum of Art and Archaeology
1 Pickard Hall, Columbia, MO 65211-1420
The Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri at Columbia houses a large collection of antiquities, among which are five inscriptions on stone, a half dozen stamps or signatures on metal objects, and a selection of some fifty fragments of stamped clay products (mainly amphora handles) illustrative of Roman daily life. In addition to the items listed below, the classical holdings include a few sling bullets and lead weights inscribed in Greek; a number of stamped amphora handles from Tel Anafa in Israel, all published by S. Herbert, in Tel Anafa I, i (Ann Arbor 1994) 189-231; a bimetallic medallion of the Roman emperors Trebonianus Gallus and Volusian (aa. 251-253), published by A. Benjamin, Muse 2 (1968) 21-24; a gold medallion of the emperor Constantius II (ca. 340), published by J.C. Biers, Muse 23/4 (1989-90) 87-88, fig. 4 (ph); and a series of clay molds for Roman bronze folles of the emperor Galerius minted between the years 305 and 311 at Cyzicus (MO.Col.UM.MAA.L.70.331), Antioch (70.332), and Alexandria (eight varieties: 70.333-340).
MO.KC.NAMA
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The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, MO 64111
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has some fine pieces of ancient sculpture and two inscribed grave monuments from Attica, a marble lekythos and a stele.
MO.SL.SLAM
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Saint Louis Art Museum
1 Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park, St. Louis, MO 63110
The St. Louis Art Museum possesses a very fine grave relief almost certainly from Attica and a number of excellent vases. The only published account of the collection seems to be by A. Furtwängler, "Neue Denkmler antiker Kunst III. Antiken in den Museen von Amerika," SBAW 1905 241-245.
New Hampshire
NH.Han.DC.HMA
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The Hood Museum of Art
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755
The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College has a small collection of antiquities including a red-figure kylix by the Epidromos Painter, a Panathenaic Amphora by the Berlin Painter, and an inscribed sarcophagus fragment from Italy of the early Antonine period.
New Jersey
NJ.New.NM
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The Newark Museum
P.O. Box 540, Newark, NJ 07101
The Newark Museum owns a small collection of Roman antiquities, which include a handsome marble tombstone, three lamps stamped with the makers' names, and three inscribed pieces of pottery tableware.
NJ.Princ.PU.AM
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The Princeton University Art Museum
McCormick Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544
The Art Museum at Princeton University has a distinguished collection of antiquities, including many vases and marble sculptures, built up mostly by gifts, beginning in 1900. The university was involved in the excavations at Antioch on the Orontes and a number of inscriptions on stone came to Princeton as a result; of these several fragmentary pieces are currently inaccessible in remote storage. In addition, there are a number of mosaics with short inscriptions, all published in R. Stillwell, Antioch-on-the-Orontes II The Excavations of 1933-1936 (Princeton 1938). Forty pieces of sculpture have been published by B. Ridgway et al. in Greek Sculpture in the Art Museum, Princeton University (Princeton 1994) and various other inscribed objects have been published from time to time in the Princeton Art Museum Record.
NJ.Princ.PU.Class
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Department of Classics
Princeton University, 141 East Pyne Princeton, NJ 08544
The Department of Classics at Princeton University owns a small collection of thirteen inscriptions on stone (four Greek and nine Latin), of which eleven are published. Most of the stones are stored on the top of bookshelves around a departmental seminar room in East Pyne Hall, along with a dozen plaster casts of Greek inscriptions and two casts taken from the archaic cippus beneath the Lapis Niger in the Roman Forum, which were a gift of the Italian government in 1935 (a cast of all five sides of the monument is at Harvard: see MA.Camb.HU.Sack). One of the Latin stones is currently displayed on a window sill in the Graphic Arts room of Firestone Library. In addition to the stones and casts mentioned above, the seminar room in East Pyne houses an excellent collection of some three hundred Greek and Latin squeezes (about half in each language), taken mostly from stones in Rome and Athens. These were once part of the university's (now dismantled) Epigraphical Museum, which was founded in the 1930s by Professor William Kelly Prentice (on whom see Briggs 509-10). In 1951 Prentice revised an earlier survey of all the stones owned by Princeton University in an unpublished Catalogue of the Epigraphical Collection in the University Library, which can be consulted in typescript in the Rare Books room in Firestone Library.
New York
NY.Brook.BM
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Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
The Brooklyn Museum has a large collection of antiquities, with a special emphasis on Egyptian artifacts. The majority were acquired in Egypt by Charles E. Wilbour, a journalist, lawyer, and gentleman scholar, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and were subsequently donated to the Museum in his name by the heirs to his widow's estate in 1914. Two of the Roman tombstones were bequeathed to the museum by the widow of George N. Olcott, who assembled the large collection of Latin inscriptions at Columbia University. In 1972 Kevin Herbert published a fine study of the forty-three Greek texts and the four Latin stones in the Brooklyn Museum collection in his Greek and Latin Inscriptions in the Brooklyn Museum.
NY.NY.CU.Butl
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Butler Library Rare Book Room
535 West 114th St., New York, NY 10027
The Rare Book and Manuscript Room of the Butler Library of Columbia University houses a large collection of Latin inscriptions on stone and lead and a few Greek texts. Latin inscriptions on bronze andlead and stamped terracotta (bricks, tiles, Arretine ware) are held by the Art Properties Department of the university elsewhere on campus. Both groups of inscriptions, along with an extensive collection of ancient coins (some 3,9000 specimens), were bequeathed to the university in 1912 by George N. Olcott, at the time of his death Associate Professor of Latin at Columbia. The bulk of the collection was purchased by Olcott in Rome, beginning in the years 1896 to 1898, when he was a student and Fellow at the newly founded American School of Classical Studies (subsequently joined with the American Academy in Rome), partly with his own funds for his private collection and partly, later, on behalf of Columbia University. Olcott's premature death from pneumonia at the age of forty-two thus cut short not only his ambitious magnum opus--the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Epigraphicae of which he had published a first fascicle ('A-Aser') in 1904 (a second fascicle, 'Asturica - Avillianus', was published in 1935-36 before the project was abandoned)--but a productive and active career as a collector of Roman antiquities. The collection he left comprises mainly epitaphs of the first two centuries from the cemeteries outside the Porta Salaria and along the modern Via Ostiense and a large selection of Arretine ware and stamped amphora handles from Monte Testaccio; there are very few public documents. It thus fairly reflects Olcott's aim of compiling a teaching collection to illustrate ancient Roman private life.
Many of the inscribed objects collected by Olcott have been dispersed. At the time of his death in 1912 Olcott was on sabbatical leave in Rome and had with him at his house there (the "villetta Olcott") a considerable part of his collection of stamped Arretine ware, which his widow subsequently donated to the American Academy in Rome (MAAR 7 [1929] 179). At the same time, several of the inscriptions on stone in his personal collection were put up for sale in New York. Even during his lifetime Olcott had not been averse to selling pieces from his private collection, and individual pieces seem to have found their way by private sale to Wellesley College in Massachussets and into private hands. Part of his collection (Roman lamps, glass, bronzes, and Arretine ware) was purchased in 1916 by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was transferred to the World Heritage Museum in Urbana. (See further about Olcott and his collections, I.E.M. Edlund, The Iron Age and Etruscan Vases in the Olcott Collection at Columbia University, New York [Philadelphia 1980] 6-8).
Many of the Latin inscriptions on stone were published by Chr. Huelsen in his supplement to CIL VI in 1902 and by Olcott himself in an abbreviated series of articles in the American Journal of Archaeology: vol. 3 (1899) 229-39; 10 (1906) 154-58; 12 (1908) 39-46. Nine others were edited in 1988 by J-J Aubert, J.R. Lenz, J. Roth, and J.A. Sheridan in ZPE 73: 91-97. In 1948 H. Comfort published an Arretine ware plate from Olcott's bequest bearing a potter's stamp and graffito (AJA 52 [1948] 321-22), and many of the stamps on amphorae handles and Arretine ware are identified by Olcott in a handwritten catalogue that can be consulted in the Rare Book and Manuscript Room of Butler Library. Almost all the inscriptions were acquired in Rome. In most cases (and in the list that follows except where otherwise indicated), they are known or may be presumed to have originated there as well.
NY.NY.FU
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Fordham University
The Bronx, NY 10458
A small collection of Latin and Greek inscriptions owned by Fordham University, a private research institution in New York City, Bronx.
NY.NY.JM
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The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10128
The Jewish Museum in New York City houses an eclectic collection of nearly 30,000 works of art, ceremonial objects, and media reflecting the global Jewish experience over more than 4,000 years. These include a dozen or so stamped amphora handles from the eastern Mediterranean and four epitaphs of the Roman period, three written in Latin, one in Greek, exhibiting various symbols of Jewish culture (shofar, etrog, iulav, menorah).
NY.NY.LW
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The Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection
Private Collection, New York, NY
Shelby White and Leon Levy , private collectors since 1970, have acquired a superb collection of ancient Greek and Roman antiquities , including a number of inscribed objects, mostly grave monuments. The collection has received an excellent publication in Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection, ed. by Dietrich von Bothmer (New York 1990).
Beginning in 2008, the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection has begun to be dispersed, with many artifacts being returned to Greece and to Italy. The present location of the inscribed objects in the collection is unknown.
NY.NY.MLM
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The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
The Morgan Library and Museum (originally the Pierpont Morgan Library), a public museum and research library in midtown Manhattan, was built in 1906 as the private library of banker and financier John Pierpont Morgan. After his death the library was made a public institution by his son in 1924 in accordance with Morgan’s will. Renamed the Morgan Library and Museum in 2006 following a major expansion, the institution currently houses more than 350,000 objects, mostly European manuscripts, printed books, drawings, music sheets, maps, paintings, and photographs but including also more than 800 Greek and Coptic papyri, a large collection of Mesopotamian seals, and a few Greco-Roman antiquities, including a pair of silver cups from the Roman villa at Boscoreale buried by Vesuvius and, exposed in an open air courtyard, an opisthographic Roman funerary altar bearing two epitaphs of the second century CE.
NY.NY.MMA
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198
The Metropolitan Museum in New York has a large and distinguished collection of Greek and Roman sculpture and vases, bronzes, gems, jewelry, terracottas, and pottery, to name only the most prominent media. It has been assembled since the establishment of the museum in 1870, mostly by purchase, under the direction of successive heads of the Greek and Roman collections, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Edward Robinson, Gisela M. A. Richter, Christine Alexander, Dietrich von Bothmer, and Carlos A. Picon. The inscriptions occur mostly on grave monuments, but the Roman collection includes a number of notable bronzes.
The Attic black figure vases have been published in the CVA and the red-figured ones by L. F. Hall and G. M. A. Richter, Red-figured Athenian Vases in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven 1936). For a discussion and illustration of many of the signatures, see B. Cohen, "The Literate Potter," MetMusJ 26 (1991) 49-95. B. F. Cook, Inscribed Hadra Vases, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Papers no. 12 (1966), published an important group of incised and painted funerary vases from ancient cemeteries near Alexandria. The Greek and Roman material up to ca. 1953 was published by G. M. A. Richter in a series of volumes devoted to bronzes, sculpture, and gems. They are listed in the bibliography. The magical amulets, most inscribed with unintelligible Greek letters, have been published by Bonner in SMA (nos. 8, 35, 38, 42, 59-61, 71, 102, 152, 154, 167, 191, 197, 199, 211, 229, 231, 252, 262, 266, and 356).
The huge Cypriote holdings of Luigi Palma di Cesnola came early as a separate collection. Acquired by the Museum from Cesnola between 1874 and 1876, they include many inscriptions not only in Greek but in Cypriote and Phoenician, as well as a few in Latin. Cesnola himself published much of the collection in his Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples (London 1877) and oversaw the publication of an atlas in three folio volumes entitled A Descriptive Atlas of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, vol. I (Boston 1885), vols II-III (New York 1894, 1903). J. L. Myres' handbook of the collection (see bibliography) includes extensive publication of the inscriptions on pages 299-326 and 521-557.
NY.NY.NYU
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Department of Classics, New York University
New York University, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East, Room 503, New York, NY 10003
The Department of Classics at New York University has a collection of some fifty Greek and Latin inscriptions, mostly gravestones from the city of Rome. Six of the stones once belonged to the collection of the Archaeological Museum of the Johns Hopkins University and were published by H. L. Wilson between 1909 and 1914 in the American Journal of Philology (see MD.Balt.JHU). Half a dozen others (including a Greek epitaph from Rome) were purchased by Professor Casper J. Kraemer of New York University for his private collection from an antiquities dealer in Rome and were edited by Donald Prakken in the American Journal of Archaeology 58 (1954) 321-22 before passing into the possession of the Department of Classics.
A few miscellaneous inscriptions - an Etruscan bucchero aryballos of the 7th century BCE, a fragmentary Roman funerary altar recording dimensions of a small burial plot, and four terracotta molded lamps with maker's stamps - were published by Larissa Bonfante and Blair Fowlkes(-Childs) in Classical Antiquities at New York University (2006). Michael Peachin published the remaining forty-eight inscriptions, which had been prepared by students in a Roman epigraphy seminar he taught at New York University in fall of 2010, in Greek and Latin Inscriptions at New York University (2014). These include two medieval inscriptions (one a brickstamp), one apparent forgery of a Latin epitaph inscribed on a genuine Roman ash urn, and what appears to be an exact copy of the fragmentary consular fasti from Teanum Sidicinum in central Italy, of which the original, once preserved at the American Academy in Rome (where, presumably, the copy was made), was returned to the comune of Teano in 2002. A second copy of the same fasti is preserved in the collection of Columbia University (see NY.NY.CU.Butl.). Three inscribed stones once in the possession of the department (all published) are now lost. All of the inscriptions were evidently acquired in Rome and may be presumed to have originated there.
Professor Emil Polak of New York City owns a fragment of Roman brick stamped with the legend of the legio XIIII Gemina Martia Victrix reportedly (and plausibly) found at Carnuntum in Austria, where the legion was stationed after 114. (To inquire further, write to John_Bodel@brown.edu)
NY.Pough.VC
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Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College
124 Raymond Ave., Box 733, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604–0733
Immured in a classroom in Avery Hall at Vassar College are six Latin inscriptions donated to the college by Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, a loyal alumna and Professor of Latin at Vassar for most of her life and much of this century. Miss Haight, who owned and regularly visited an apartment on the Esquiline hill in Rome, founded the Vassar Classical Museum and personally furnished it with many of its artifacts, several of which she must have purchased in Rome during the first decades of this century (see further on Haight, D. Lateiner, CW 90 [1996-97] 153-66).
In addition to the stones in Avery Hall, the Loeb Art Center at Vassar owns the front panel of a Roman child's sarcophagus inscribed with an epitaph and a cylindrical bronze cista from Praeneste with figure labels accompanying two mythological scenes etched around the sides. Only the last has been published.
NY.Roch.MAG
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Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester
500 University Ave, Rochester NY
The gallery in Rochester has a fine grave stele from the island of Salamis.
North Carolina
NC.CH.UNC.WL
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The Wilson Library
Campus Box #3948, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27515-8890
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill owns two Latin gravestones and a lead tablet with a Greek inscription in Sicilian dialect. All three are housed in the Rare Book Room of the Wilson Library.
NC.Dur.DU.NMA
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Nasher Museum of Art
2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27705
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina possesses a small collection of inscribed objects located in two places, the Nasher Museum of Art (NMA) and the Perkins Library (PL). In the collection of the Nasher Museum are an ephebic stele from Egypt and three Attic grave markers.
NC.Dur.DU.PL
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William R. Perkins Library
Duke University, 411 Chapel Drive Durham, NC 27708
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina possesses a small collection of inscribed objects located in two places, the Nasher Museum of Art (NMA) and the Perkins Library (PL). The Perkins Library houses two unpublished lead tablets from Egypt, an unpublished silver plaque with a magical text inscribed in Greek, and a Roman military diploma.
NC.Ral.NCMA
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The North Carolina Museum of Art
2110 Blue Ridge Road, Raleigh, NC 27607
The North Carolina Museum of Art has a small collection of ancient art, including three handsome marble funerary monuments, two Greek and one Latin.
Ohio
OH.Cin.HUC.SM
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Skirball Museum
Hebrew Union College, 3101 Clifton Ave., Cincinnati, OH, 45220
http://huc.edu/museums/cn/
OH.Clev.CMA
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The Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, OH 44106
The Cleveland Museum has a small, excellent collection of Greek vases, two Egyptian textiles (inv. nos. 75.6, 83.136) which have single late Greek or early Byzantine labels woven into the design, and two grave monuments. See on the holdings Arielle Kozlov, Classical Art: A Brief Guide to the Collection, The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland 1989).
OH.Clev.CPL
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Cleveland Public Library
325 Superior Avenue Cleveland, Ohio 44114
The Archives maintains the annual reports, blueprints, board minutes, statistics and agency records. The Archives is also the source for the branch photographs represented in our digital collections. Other types of materials in the Archives include lantern slides, photographs of the Main Library, scrapbooks, audio and video recordings, summer reading club buttons, plaques, posters, post cards, book plates and brochures. There are runs of library serials such as The Open Shelf, Staff Newsletter and the Cleveland News Index. In the John G. White Collection, housed in the main branch of The Cleveland Public Library, there is displayed the upper part of a Thasian amphora handle.
OH.Dayt.DAI
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The Dayton Art Institute
456 Belmonte Park North, Dayton, OH 4540
The Dayton Art Institute has one inscribed grave monument from Istanbul.
OH.Ox.MU.AM
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The Miami University Art Museum
801 South Patterson Avenue, Oxford, OH 45056
The Art Museum of the University of Miami in Ohio has a small collection of five Latin inscriptions: two marble columbarium tablets from outside the Porta Salaria in Rome, two terracotta lamps, and a section of a lead water pipe. It is likely that all of them came from Rome.
OH.Tol.TMA
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The Toledo Museum of Art
2445 Monroe Street, Toledo OH
The Toledo Museum of Art has a bronze Etruscan hand mirror from the fourth century BCE.
Oklahoma
OK.Norm.UO.SM
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Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
2401 Chautauqua Ave., Norman, OK 73072-7029
The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman has a small but significant collection of classical antiquities, established in 1939-40 and built up principally over the next fifteen years, which includes many inscribed artifacts. Among them are some eighty archaic and classical Greek, Cypriote, and South Italian vases; three Etruscan bronzes; a dozen terracotta figurines; some twenty moldmade lamps, fifteen glass vessels, more than 150 ancient coins, and an opisthographic Roman gravestone bearing two epitaphs of comparable date. Most of the collection has been well published by A.J. Heisserer and others in Heisserer, ed., Classical Antiquities: The Collection of the Stovall Museum of Science and History, the University of Oklahoma (Norman 1986).
Pennsylvania
PA.BrynAth.GM
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Glencairn Museum
1001 Cathedral Road, Bryn Athyn, PA 19009
This small museum has one inscribed Greek funerary monument almost certainly from Attica.
PA.FW.Highl
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The Highlands Mansion and Gardens
7001 Sheaff Lane, Fort Washington, PA 19034
The Highlands , originally a colonial farm, then a private estate of the Sinkler family, now a public monument of the State of Pennsylvania, has a marble funerary relief of an eques singularis from Moesia, presumably collected by Miss C. Sinkler in the course of her European travels during the early years of this century. It is now immured in one of the walls of the manor.
PA.Phil.UP.UM
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Penn Museum
3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
The Penn Museum, formerly known as The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, holds a large collection of ancient artifacts from the Greco-Roman world, including a number of Greek inscriptions on stone and many vases and sherds with texts painted in Greek. The Latin inscriptions on stone, though fewer in number, include a handsome series of inscribed marble amphorae deposited as dedicatory offerings at the sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis at Lake Nemi south of Rome. A rather more extensive collection of instrumentum inscribed in Latin comprises forty-seven amphora handles and pottery fragments from Monte Testaccio in Rome (and one from elsewhere), nine stamped architectural terracottas, three Roman brickstamps, one stamped pottery bowl, one pottery sherd from Orvieto, and a bronze strigil. In total the number of inscribed artifacts from the classical Mediterranean world comes to over 175, including several objects inscribed in Etruscan. Far better represented in the Museum's extensive holdings are inscriptions carved in Egyptian hieroglyphs (more than 1800), Akkadian scripts (more than 600), and Sumerian languages (some 185).
PA.Read.RM
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The Reading Public Museum
500 Museum Road, Reading, PA 19611
The Reading Museum , formerly the Oberlaender Museum, has a fine grave monument from the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens. This stone was the gift of the Greek government to M. Oberlaender for his generous support of the excavation.
Rhode Island
RI.Prov.BU
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Brown Univeristy
Providence, RI 02912, USA
The Department of Classics at Brown University has a small collection of about sixty squeezes of classical-period Greek inscriptions, mostly made from stones in the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, including portions of the Athenian Tribute Lists. The U.S. Epigraphy Project possesses six squeezes of Roman Greek inscriptions from Sultandağı, Turkey, which were donated to USEP in 2001 by Lloyd Jonnes, who had made them in preparation for his publication in 2002 of The Inscriptions of the Sultan Dagi I (Philomelion, Thymbrion/Hadrianopolis, Tyraion) in the Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien series (no. 62). All these squeezes were catalogued and partially transcribed (in xml EpiDoc) by Scott DiGiulio in 2012. A checklist of the squeezes identified by their numbers in Inscriptiones Graecae and with metadata about the sections of text preserved is available upon request from the U.S. Epigraphy Project.
The main building of the Classics Department, MacFarlane Hall, houses in its front hall two full-scale plaster casts, one of a section of the Parthenon relief frieze, the other of a well-known Athenian grave stele of Hegeso, daughter of Proxenios (ca. 410-400 BCE). These once belonged to Pembroke College and were transferred in the 1960s to Brown's University Hall, where they were rescued from destruction in 1998 by then Dean of the College (and current Professor of History and Classics at Brown) Ken Sacks, who had them transferred to the Classics Department and installed in MacFarlane House, where they remain. Unlike the original stele, which is currently on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (NAMA 3624) and is virtually intact, the Brown cast is broken away at the lower right corner and is chipped on the face in various places. When and by whom the casts were made remains unknown.
RI.Prov.RISD.MA
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The RISD Museum of Art
224 Benefit Street, Providence, RI 02903
The Art Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design has a distinguished collection of ancient Greek vases, some with painted vase inscriptions. All have been published in Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum US fascicule 1 (Cambridge, Mass. 1933) or in a supplementary catalogue of the collection by A. H. Ashmead and K. M. Phillips, Jr., Catalogue of the Classical Collection: Classical Vases (Providence 1976). It also has an interesting rescript of the emperor Hadrian, two bronzes inscribed in Greek, a Roman marble ash urn, and a fragment of an elaborately decorated marble slab.
Tennessee
TN.Mem.MBMA
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Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
1934 Poplar Avenue, Memphis, TN 38104
The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art houses a small collection of objects from the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, including an inscribed Athenian grave relief of the fourth or third century BCE and an inscribed limestone funerary stele from Egypt of the third or fourth century CE, both on long-term loan from the Clarence Day Foundation.
Texas
TX.Aust.UT
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Department of Classics in The College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin
WAG 123, Mailcode C3400, Austin, TX 78712-0308
Department of Classics in The College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin houses an honorific marble slab from Asia Minor.
TX.Dal.DMA
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Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, TX 75201
The Dallas Museum of Art houses a large collection of contemporary art but only a small collection of ancient artifacts, among which is a gold fibula of the 7th century BCE inscribed with an Etruscan text declaring ownership.
TX.FW.KAM
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Kimbell Art Museum
3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard Fort Worth, Texas 76107
Since its founding in 1965 with the sizable art collection left by Texas businessman Kay Kimbell, the Kimbell Art Museum has followed his testamentary mandate to create "a museum of the first class" by prioritizing quality over quantity and not attempting to cover all areas. The choice collection of some 350 works of art includes objects from the third millennium BCE to the mid-twentieth century, the date at which the collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth begins, and omits American art, the focus on the neighboring Amon Carter Museum. The few antiquities include an Attic red-figure cup of the late antique period by the Douris painter depicting in a tondo on the interior a maenad with an acclamatory label.
TX.Hous.Men
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The Menil Collection
1533 Sul Ross Houston, TX 77006
The Menil Collection belongs to collectors John and Dominque de Menil. Its antique holdings focus on the pre-Classical period, stretching to Asia Minor, and include a Greek grave stele and a marble epitaph found in Tunisia.
TX.SA.SAMA
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The San Antonio Museum of Art
200 West Jones Avenue, San Antonio, TX 78215
The San Antonio Museum of Art houses a sizeable collection of Greek vase painting, as well as Greek and Roman funerary monuments. It includes the Grave Stele of Kallistrate from early-fifth century BCE Athens and an Augustan Funerary Relief for Three Former Slaves.
Utah
UT.Provo.BYU.HBLL
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BYU
Brigham Young University Collection
The general collections include items in a variety of formats (books, audio/video, maps, databases, journals, etc.) and languages. Items can be found on the shelves, online, or in compact storage. Special Collections preserves fragile or rare books, manuscripts, and papers, as well as materials in selected collecting areas. Materials may be accessed in the Special Collections Reading Room or, for digitized materials, online.
UT.SLC.UU.JWML
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J. Willard Marriot Library
295 1500 E, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
The J. Willard Marriot Library at the University of Utah houses, along with a substantial collection of Arabic papyri and parchments, a small collection of Arabic, Coptic, and Greek artifacts, including an opisthographic Greek epitaph of the third or fourth century CE. The stone was acquired by Professor Aziz Atiya (1898-1988) during one of the frequent trips he made to his native Egypt during the 1960s and 1970s, when he was Professor of Languages and History at the University of Utah, where he served from 1959 until his death. The inscription was bequeathed to the J. Willard Marriot Library following his death and was added to the collection in 1989.
Virginia
VA.GladeSpring.PHHS
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Patrick Henry High School
31437 Hillman Hwy., Glade Spring, VA 24340
The Patrick Henry High School in Glade Spring, Virginia has a small teaching collection consisting of two plaster replicas of known Latin inscriptions illustrating daily life, a dedication to Mithras from Roman Britain and an epitaph of a girl from Rome. The replicas were purchased in 2006 at a curio shop near West Jefferson, Virginia by Mr. John Walker, a Latin teacher at the high school, who reports (from the owner of the shop) that the casts had been made some years previously by a professor of classical archaeology at a local university (possibly the University of North Georgia).
VA.Rich.MFA
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Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
200 N. Boulevard., Richmond, VA 23220
Washington
WA.Seat.AM
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The Seattle Art Museum
1300 First Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101
The Seattle Art Museum holds a Greek grave marker from the fourth century BCE.