#sebasteion

[uncleclaudius]

Claudius subduing Britannia, a panel from the Sebasteion, a temple dedicated to the Julio-Claudian dynasty in Aphrodisias, in the Roman province of Caria.

[ukdamo]

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: taken in the museum at Aphrodisias, Turkiye. One of the bas-reliefs from the monumental decorative frieze of the Sebasteion, showing Aeneas fleeing Troy.

[ancientcharm]

The Sebasteion, discovered in southwestern Türkiye in 1979, was a majestic temple dedicated to the emperors of Julio-Claudian dynasty and was decorated with a lavish sculptural program of which much survives.

[blueiscoool]

A Looted Bronze Statue That May Depict Marcus Aurelius Is Returning to Turkey

The repatriation comes after years of legal disputes over the true identity and provenance of the 6-foot-4 artwork, which has been housed at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

A headless bronze statue that may depict the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius will be repatriated to Turkey after an investigation determined that it had been looted, smuggled and sold through a web of antiquities dealers before arriving at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1986.

The Manhattan district attorney’s antiquities trafficking unit first identified and took possession of the looted statue in 2023. But the statue remained in Cleveland while the museum challenged the seizure.

Last week, the museum relented and agreed to return the statue to Turkey. According to a statement, “new scientific testing” had revealed that the second-century C.E. statue was “likely present” at the Sebasteion, a shrine near the ancient Roman settlement of Bubon.

“The New York district attorney approached us with a claim and evidence that we felt was not utterly persuasive,” William M. Griswold, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, tells the Art Newspaper’s Daniel Grant. Officials then requested scientific tests to determine the validity of the claim.

All parties agreed that the scientific investigation would be led by Ernst Pernicka, an archaeologist and chemist who serves as the senior director and managing director of the Curt-Engelhorn-Center for Archaeometry in Germany.

As Pernicka tells the Art Newspaper, his tests followed a “well-established scientific procedure,” which included soil samples, lead isotope analysis and 3D modeling of the shrine site. Soil from within the statue matched soils in Turkey, and lead at the foot of the statue matched lead residue on a stone base where it may have been attached at the Sebasteion. Investigators also traveled to nearby villages to conduct interviews with locals who remember the looting.

Per the New York Times’ Graham Bowley and Tom Mashberg, the story goes something like this: Built nearly 2,000 years ago, the shrine featured bronze statues of Roman emperors, including Lucius Verus, Valerian and Commodus. An earthquake later buried the site, which was discovered by farmers in the 1960s. Villagers plundered the shrine and sold the bronzes to antiquities dealers like Robert Hecht, who faced allegations of smuggling before his death in 2012. After covert restoration in Switzerland and Britain, the items were sold to collectors and museums around the world.

With the statue of Marcus Aurelius returning to Turkey, the antiquities trafficking unit has seized 15 items looted from Bubon, collectively valued at nearly $80 million, according to a statement.

Turkish officials are celebrating the news. In a social media post, Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy lauded the efforts to return the statue “to its rightful land,” per a translation by Türkiye Today. He added, “History is beautiful in its rightful place, and we will preserve it.”

In a legal sense, the case is closed. But mysteries about the bronze remain. The most glaring question: Who does the headless statue really depict?

When the Cleveland Museum of Art bought the statue from the Edward H. Merrin Gallery for $1.85 million in 1986, the receipt said “figure of a draped emperor (probably Marcus Aurelius), Roman, late second century [C.E.], bronze,” according to the Times. Standing at 6-foot-4, even without a head, it’s now thought to be worth around $20 million.

n its statement, the museum claims to have made a “relatively recent determination” that the statue is an unnamed philosopher rather than Marcus Aurelius. One stone base at the Sebasteion is inscribed with the ruler’s name, but the tests revealed that the statue was likely positioned on a different stone base without an inscription.

“Without a head or identifying inscription, the identity of the statue remains uncertain,” the museum adds.

However, Turkish officials dispute the museum’s claims, suggesting that the statue does depict Marcus Aurelius—both an emperor and philosopher—and may have been moved around between plinths, per the Times.

For now, the mysterious statue remains in the Cleveland Museum of Art. As Griswold tells the Art Newspaper, “The Turkish authorities are prepared to consider permitting the work to remain here in Cleveland for a brief period, so that our visitors may say farewell to the sculpture and so that we may explain to the public some of what we’ve learned in this process.”

By Eli Wizevich.

[a-personiftranslator]

roman defeated personif iconography that i like for normal reasons

regarding this woman:

from Simulacra Gentium: The Ethne from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias (anna’s archive has it)

and some coins (all of these except the crocodile are dacia)

oh also i don’t think this is strictly personif but here’s Victory straight up trampling a guy

two more. trajan standing over armenia and the euphrates and tigris rivers in the first and woman who may be sarmatia tied to the tropaeum in the second

(everything through wikipedia)

and generally being seated and wearing native dress indicates recent submission. standing in greco-roman dress indicates assimilation and faithfulness to the empire

uhhhhh it’s definitely in bad taste to do personifwhump with otjs so consider this to be an stj reference post

[hildegardavon]

Nike

Roman Sebasteion relief sculpture a winged goddess Victory (Nike)

Aphrodisias Museum, Aphrodisias, Turkey

[5reisende]

Welterbe (auf)gespürt und (er)fahren - TR - Aphrodisias

Die Stadt Aphrodisias und ihre Marmorbrüche stehen seit 2017 auf der UNESCO-Welterbeliste. Aphrodisias wurde im frühen 2. Jahrh. v. Chr. als Stadtstaat gegründet. Der Aphrodite-Kult war der wichtigste Kult in der Stadt, der Tempel mit der markanten Kultstatue der Göttin Aphrodite spielte eine zentrale Rolle. Die Aphrodite von Aphrodisias kombinierte Aspekte der lokalen archaischen Fruchtbarkeitsgöttin mit denen der hellenischen Göttin der Liebe und Schönheit. Die Stadt teilte den Kult mit Sulla, Julius Cäsar und dem Kaiser Augustus. Sie erhielt vom römischen Senat einen privilegierten Status und entwickelte sich während der Kaiserzeit, befördert durch die nahe gelegenen Marmorsteinbrüche, zu einem künstlerischen und bildhauerischen Zentrum. So entstanden viele kunstvoll verzierte Bauwerke und Marmorskulpturen. Die Fähigkeiten der aphrodisischen Bildhauer waren im gesamten Reich und besonders auch in Rom gefragt, wo sie einige der schönsten erhaltenen Werke schufen, z.B. in Hadrians Villa in Tivoli. Am Beginn des Rundgangs stehen eine Reihe kunstvoller Sarkophage, Skulpturen und Reliefs.

Lagepläne geben Auskunft über die benachbarten Marmorsteinbrüche und die Objekte in der Ausgrabungsstätte. Quelle : http://www.aphrodisias.org.uk/ Von den ehemals rechtwinklig angelegten Straßen ist nur noch wenig zu erahnen, doch das reich verzierte Tormonument, das Tetrapylon, steht weithin sichtbar am eingang der Stadt.

Die Stadt besaß ein sehr großes Stadion und ein beeindruckendes Theater.

Die Bedeutung der Aphrodite von Aphrodisias reichte noch weit bis ins Christentum, ihr Tempel wurde erst um 500 n. Chr. zur Kirche umgebaut. Von beiden sind noch Ruinen zu sehen.

Auch hier gab es eine hervorragende Badekultur, wovon die Bäder des Hadrian zeugen. Der Boden des großen Bassins war reich mit Mosaiken verziert.

Die Frühlingssonne scheint warm, doch in der Ferne sind noch die schneebedeckten Berge zu sehen.

Die Besichtigungstour endet am Sebasteion, einem wunderschönen Gebäude, das dem Kaiserkult gewidmet war. Wer mer sehen möchteh, kann auch noch das Museum besuchen.

Resümee

Aphrodisias ist eine äußerst interessante Ausgrabungsstätte mit einer langen Geschichte. Hier gibt es eine Vielzahl wunderschöner Marmorreliefs und Skulpturen zu bewundern. Besonders bemerkenswert fand ich, dass sich hier der Ursprung vieler Meisterwerke befindet, die der eine oder andere so wie ich in den antiken Stätten in und um Rom bereits sehen konnte. Read the full article

[theancientwayoflife]

~ Nero and Agrippina Minor, relief from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias.

Date: A.D. 54-58

Medium: Marble

Provenience: Aphrodisias, Archaeological Museum

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

Aphrodisias: Sebasteion; Augustus Sebastos (or Claudius?)

   “The deified Roman emperor Augustus Sebastos as he was depicted in the Sebasteion (shrine to the imperial cult) at Aphrodisias, Turkey. Note that the museum at Aphrodisias identifies this figure as the emperor Claudius. Shown in a dynamic pose, with Greek-inspired heroic nudity, the highly idealized representation of the emperor is flanked by allegorical beings that represent land (left) and sea (right), the former lifting a cornucopia and the latter a ship’s rudder. Now in the museum at Aphrodisias. Dated to the first century C.E.”

[kumimonster]

2020 October 29 - Aphrodisias

[owlask]

Sometimes I wonder what people are on in order to come up with the craziest theories

[uncleclaudius]

Agrippina crowning her son Nero, Sebasteion, Aphrodisias, modern Turkey.

[ukdamo]

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: Hercules prepares to wrestle Antaios; he hangs his cloak up on a herm, depicting Pan, before the bout.

[eucanthos]

Aphrodisias

Tinatin Mangasarian photo

Stalked Heads of Aphrodisias (Roman city founded on the site of a rural sanctuary of Aphrodite). Today Turkey.

Known as the most magnificent of the cities dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty in mythology, Aphrodisias took its place among the best sculptor centers of the Roman period. The city pool, Tetrapylon Gate, Sebasteion Temple, ancient theater, bath, and especially the stadium which have had a maximum capacity for around 30,000 spectators, are the areas that attract the most attention in the ancient city.

https://web.facebook.com/athenologio/posts/pfbid06mQfEHcAGWMVuo1JXbTCoMvivgHffPQ11brjeTjPRRAEyXtbVAhZfi28dfsBCAhbl

[blueiscoool]

Who Looted an Ancient Roman Shrine? A Village Finally Tells

Investigators say they have figured out how bronze statues from a shrine built 2,000 years ago in Asia Minor to venerate the emperors of Rome ended up in museums around the world.

One towering ancient bronze was found last year in the Sutton Place apartment of a notable New York philanthropist. Another this year in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A third bronze, the head of a young Roman boy, was seized from Fordham University in March.

Each of these ancient artifacts, and a half dozen more like them, are believed to have once graced an elaborate shrine in a region that is now part of Turkey. Erected by locals to honor the Roman Empire at a time when it ruled that part of the world, the shrine in the ancient city of Bubon featured a pantheon of emperors, experts say.

So Lucius Verus, it’s thought, stood next to Marcus Aurelius, his adoptive brother with whom he ruled. The statue of Septimius Severus was beside those of his wife and children. The emperors Valerian and Commodus once stood on their own plinths nearby.

In 1994, a Turkish archaeologist, Jale Inan, published a book, “Latest Research on the Sebasteion of Bubon and Its Statues,” in which she plotted the location of the bronzes as they appeared in ancient times.

But just decades ago, according to investigators from the Turkish government and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, this set of rare, larger-than-life bronzes came to be scattered around the world. Individual statues ended up in a variety of affluent homes and prestigious museums.

Now, relying on newly discovered records and interviews with regretful, at times tearful, farmers now in their 70s, the investigators say they have been able to reconstruct what happened. They say men from a nearby village found the bronzes buried on a hillside, beginning in the late 1950s and, acting in tandem over a period of years, dug up the statues, often working in large groups to facilitate their excavation. Many were then sold to an antiquities dealer they knew as “American Bob.”

His real name, investigators say, was Robert Hecht and he would become famous — and later infamous — as one of the world’s great dealers of antiquities, both looted and unlooted. Although it had been illegal under Turkish law since 1906 to sell antiquities without official permission, Hecht and others brought the bronzes to market, the investigators say.

VALERIAN Roman emperor, A.D. 253 to 260 Headless torso is in the Burdur Archaeological Museum in Turkey. Head location is unknown.

Authorities now have begun to seize the bronzes, one by one. Two have already been returned to Turkey. Three more have been seized, and are yet to be sent back. Another four are being sought, according to the district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

Some experts, and at least one museum that holds a statue being sought, have questioned whether the evidence placing these particular artifacts in Bubon is as strong as the authorities have suggested. But Matthew Bogdanos, who leads the unit, said he is undeterred.

“Everybody fights Bubon,” he said of the naysayers. “But if there were ever a case we wanted to get into a courtroom, Bubon is it.”

The story of the Bubon bronzes, though, is more than just a tale of looters’ remorse, investigative zeal, art market intrigue and antiquities repatriation. It’s also a lesson in history, one that presents a more nuanced view of ancient Rome than that popularized by Hollywood epics. Those films often depicted an empire that relied almost exclusively on the spear, the whip and the executioner’s sword to keep the conquered in line. The truth was more complicated.

Some of the men who rose to lead Rome were, in fact, born in conquered lands. Severus was from modern-day Libya; the emperor Trajan from modern-day Spain. Rome allowed a measure of self-government and promoted the promise of citizenship as potent tools to keep the peace. And there was often local buy-in, evident in the shrines built by invaded peoples to show respect for their conquerors.

Known as shrines to the “imperial cult,” only a handful of them survive today in any form. One is the excavation at Bubon, according to archaeologists. From the time of Augustus, Roman emperors were venerated as gods, sometimes alongside the deities themselves. The shrine at Bubon, in what was then known as Asia Minor, is believed to have been built by local gentry as a sign of fealty to Rome. Started around A.D. 50, it is thought to have been in use for perhaps two centuries before it was buried in earthquakes.

The calamity, fortuitously, protected the bronze statuary at a time when discarded metal was routinely recycled into armaments. The Bubon bronzes, instead, remained underground, intact, for almost 2,000 years.

Until the farmers found them.

The stone plinths that made up the shrine bore the names of the Roman emperors, inscribed in Greek, with some of their imperial titles. This one once held a statue of the emperor Gordian.

Asia Minor Under the Empire

Though life under Roman rule would ultimately prove prosperous and pleasant for many of the people of Bubon, it took time and bloodshed.

Before the Roman conquest, parts of Asia Minor, also known as Anatolia, had embraced the Greek language and way of life and the region was largely under the dominion of Greek rulers for two centuries, starting with Alexander the Great in 330 B.C. But when Rome, after much warfare, ultimately took power in the first century B.C., the empire used its well-honed tactics to convert the region into a stable and passive province.

The Romans built paved roads and large public amenities like baths and markets. They integrated Roman tradesmen, soldiers and administrators into local life, and dangled the possibility of Roman citizenship, which conferred political rights on people from conquered lands.

“For much of Anatolia, the Roman Imperial period was the high point of classical antiquity,” said Peter Talloen, an archaeology professor from the University of Leuven in Belgium who is excavating in the region. “The vast road network built and maintained by Rome,” he added, “would result in Anatolian goods such as textile, pottery, wine and olive oil being profitably exported to all different areas of the Roman Empire.”

The Roman Empire, A.D. 200

In the period when the shrine at Bubon was active, the Roman Empire had spread through large parts of the world, as far west as modern day Britain and as far south as what is now Algeria, Libya and Egypt.

The Roman Empire, A.D. 200

In the period when the shrine at Bubon was active, the Roman Empire had spread through large parts of the world, as far west as modern day Britain and as far south as what is now Algeria, Libya and Egypt.

Bubon itself was a small and relatively wealthy agrarian hilltop community that, under Rome, featured central markets, a theater, low battlements and a small stadium for athletic contests. Its residents, perhaps a few thousand people, archaeologists estimate, would likely have enjoyed self-governance so long as they showed loyalty and paid tribute to the Roman prefect in charge of their province.

Amid the ruins of the theater, there is an inscription relating how the emperor Commodus (A.D. 177-192) commended the city for crushing a band of brigands. Bubon, as a result, the inscription reports, was rewarded with an extra vote at the provincial assembly.

Many monuments would have been erected, Talloen said, some to the local elites who financed the public buildings and activities like religious festivals, others to the Roman officials who authorized the local leaders to tax things like the ownership of land or the sale of produce.

The shrine, or sebasteion (suh-BASS-tay-ohn), at Bubon was one such monument, built to proclaim the populace’s devotion to Rome. Sakir Demirok, an archaeologist with the Burdur Museum in Turkey, said the shrine, a U-shaped courtyard that was probably covered, would have likely been a site for animal sacrifices, incense burning, and communal prayers and vows, led by a local priest.

Romans were keenly religious and worshiped multiple mythological deities, like Jupiter or Juno, whose favor or disfavor were thought to influence daily life.

“Rome was the safeguard of the peace and welfare,” Demirok said. “It was a system that provisioned grain for the citizens’ good and secured the trade routes. Cities were expected to demonstrate their gratitude for the stability provided by that system.”

“MARCUS AURELIUS” Roman emperor, A.D. 161 to 180 Headless torso at the Cleveland Museum of Art, under seizure order. Head location is unknown.

The Bubon shrine was begun, experts think, during the reign of Nero, between A.D. 54 and 68, and initially featured statues of the emperor and his wife Poppaea Sabina. Nero was popular in the Greek-speaking provinces because he embraced Greek culture and song. During its life span, at least 14 individuals were represented by statues — 11 emperors and three empresses — Demirok said, the last being Gallienus, who ruled from A.D. 260 to 268. As rulers were unseated, their statues were sometimes replaced, so Nero’s, for example, was removed and his name erased from the statue’s plinth, which later was used for Marcus Aurelius, experts said.

Experts credit the survival of the bronzes to a series of earthquakes that occurred in the decades after Gallienus was enshrined, burying the sebasteion in protective layers of soil and stone as the Roman Empire began its long decline.

The restitution of the statues now, as a group, serves to highlight, experts said, the central role they played in binding the people of a remote province like Bubon, spiritually and politically, to their counterparts in far-off Rome.

“They want to show their allegiance to Rome,” said Christina Kokkinia, an expert at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Greece who has visited and written about Bubon. “They were proud to be Roman.”

Archaeologists and excavation site workers recreate the position of ancient bronzes of Roman emperors that once filled a shrine at Bubon in what is now modern Turkey.

Some Finds in the Fields

The looting of Bubon indeed took a village, investigators say.

The farmers from Ibecik, a small community a mile and a half from the shrine site, told interviewers that they had known about the ancient ruins for years before they began digging up the bronzes sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. As young men, they said, their teachers had led them up to a deep hole in the stony hillside that some came to call the “Museum.” One villager recalled some of the bronzes were piled up there, like logs in a fireplace, investigators said.

At first, just a few villagers were involved in selling off artifacts to local smugglers. But soon the local farmers joined in groups of 20 to 30 — sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing — to excavate and carry away the heavy, large bronzes, now filled with several centuries of settled dirt. Some statues were broken into pieces to make them easier to transport, the farmers recalled. Investigators say pickax marks are still visible on the bronze of Lucius Verus.

When the money came in, many of the families shared in the proceeds.

“It was seen as the property of the village,” said Zeynep Boz, a Turkish official responsible for the return of her country’s antiquities.

The illegal excavations ebbed after 1967 when the Turkish police found a headless bronze torso hidden in the local woods. That statue of Valerian, who ruled from A.D. 253 until his capture in battle with the Persians in A.D. 260, now stands in a museum in the nearby town of Burdur.

CARACALLA Roman emperor, A.D. 198 to 217 Head seized from the Met and in storage in New York. Torso is thought to be with a Greek collector.

But other bronzes, investigators say, had already entered the art market. Villagers recently recalled for investigators how a pair of local smugglers ferried the artifacts in a pickup truck to the port town of Izmir, about four hours away. There, in the souk, or bazaar, some were sold to a dealer they called American Bob. Investigators say that, based on the evidence they have collected, the dealer was Hecht.

The evidence includes shipping and sales invoices that show Hecht in possession of remarkable 2,000-year-old Roman bronzes that had never been seen before. In the late 1960s, he sold five — four torsos and a head — to a Boston collector called Charles Lipson, who exhibited them at several museums before consigning them to a New York gallery, from which they were resold. Investigators say Hecht sold other bronzes to a second gallery in New York.

At the time, the paper trail did not identify where the bronzes had come from and some of the statues had yet to carry the names of emperors. The bronze that was later identified as a depiction of Marcus Aurelius was just referred to as a large-scale Roman bronze in a 1974 museum exhibition, and there was a debate about where it and others had originated.

But a Turkish archaeologist, Jale Inan, came to be convinced they had all come from Bubon, which she visited in 1973, drawn by reports of the looting. In 1979, she traveled to Denmark, where a museum owned a bronze head that had been purchased from Hecht. She and a curator at the Danish museum agreed that it was likely a match for a headless torso in the United States that Lipson had owned and identified as that of Septimius Severus.

A line drawing featuring multiple boxes that depict the bases of statues that once stood in an ancient shrine. In her book, Jale Inan, the archaeologist, included schematic drawings of the site that depicted the scale of the shrine and were helpful in plotting the location of the bronzes.

In 1990, Inan returned to the hillside in Bubon to dig at the site. She spoke to local farmers who acknowledged they had taken part in illicit digging. She found a journal in which one of the looters had reconstructed what had occurred 30 years earlier. Through interviews and excavation, she plotted the positions of the statues using the stone bases that remained, the names of the emperors still inscribed on them in Greek.

In a paper and in a 1994 book, she cataloged her research, including sketches that showed how she thought some of the statues, now held by various parties around the world, would have fit onto the plinths at Bubon. She died in 2001, before she could realize the fruition of her efforts, but investigators today have built their work atop the research she started decades ago. “It was her life’s work,” said Elizabeth Marlowe, a professor at Colgate University in New York who has closely tracked the Bubon statues. “She began drawing attention to this problem shortly after the looting occurred and never gave up. She’s the one who connected the dots. This is all her work.”

A man walks on a road toward a rural town. In Ibecik, investigators are working with people from the village to reconstruct what happened decades ago when the bronzes were dug up.

The Farmers Came Forward

One summer afternoon in 2021, Zeynep Boz, the Turkish official, sat outside the village cafe in Ibecik’s main square and addressed some 90 farmers gathered at tables under the trees.

She described how, once Turkey adopted its antiquity law in 1906, there was no such thing as private ownership of buried antiquities. She assured the villagers they would not be prosecuted for events 60 years earlier and asked them for any old letters, photos or other evidence that could help get the statues back.

“Your village has been robbed to its bones,” she said. “It harms the country’s reputation. Please help me here.” “In the beginning they were like, ‘We don’t want to. The people have all died,’” Boz said in an interview. “But then slowly, slowly they understood our only purpose was making things good and they started talking to us.”

Boz and officials from the museum at Burdur eventually found 10 men who recalled the looting. Their testimony is crucial to Turkey’s repatriation claim, one now supported by New York investigators and other experts.

But not all experts agree that each of the statues was looted from Bubon. Some argue that Bubon was too much of a backwater to have housed such monumental bronzes or that the evidence is inconclusive.

Kokkinia of the National Hellenic Research Foundation said that, while she appreciates Inan’s research, she questions whether her archaeological techniques were sufficiently rigorous to have decided the question. She suggests further investigation at the site before every statue is shipped to Turkey.

“I love Bubon,” she said. “Let it have all the statues in the world. But it’s not necessarily scientifically correct in all cases.”

The Danish museum that for years said its bronze head belonged to the headless torso of Septimius Severus from Bubon has more recently said this is not certain. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen said more research was required.

“SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS” Roman emperor, A.D. 193 to 211 Headless body seized from the Met museum. Returned to Turkey. Some experts say the head is at a Copenhagen museum, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the headless “Severus” statue had been on loan, turned it over to the New York investigators for repatriation. But the museum said it was not established that it definitely depicted the emperor or had come from Bubon. While it had the bronze on display, the Met referred to it as simply “Statue of a Nude Male Figure.”

The Cleveland Museum of Art, which holds a headless statue that investigators say is the Marcus Aurelius that once stood in Bubon, has gone to court to block its seizure. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which served seizure papers on the museum in August, said it has interviews and detailed forensic evidence that support Turkey’s claim. The museum has described the evidence as “conjecture,” though until recently it had said the bronze “likely represents Marcus Aurelius.” In recent months, curators have retitled the statue “Draped Male Figure.”

Some worry additionally that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government may be aggressively exploiting the return of cultural property for political purposes, boosting a nostalgic Turkish nationalism and a reassertion of its historical greatness at a time when there are questions about its commitment to human rights and democracy. “Why is the U.S. rewarding Erdogan, a demagogue acting daily against U.S. interests in the region, for this bad action?” wrote Kate Fitz Gibbon of the Committee for Cultural Policy, in 2020.

But the New York investigators say they have recovered additional evidence that illustrates the scope of the looting at the shrine, including the Hecht invoices, the testimony of the villagers from Ibecik and arms and legs from bronze statues that may also be tied to the shrine. (Hecht, who died in 2012, was accused several times of antiquities trafficking but was never convicted.)

Several of the villagers have correctly identified the statues now being targeted as looted from a lineup of other ancient bronzes. Some have mimicked the poses of the bronzes for investigators to show they remembered what they looked like, investigators said.

“There is this unbelievable heartening thing happening where people are coming forward in their 70s and saying, I have been living with this for 55 years,” Bogdanos of the district attorney’s office said.

Earlier this year, when the statues of Septimius Severus and Lucius Verus were returned, two of the looters, now in their 70s, were invited to see them.

“They were very emotional,” Boz said. “They really regret it. You can see it in their eyes.”

By Graham Bowley and Tom Mashberg.

[m1male2]

Sebasteion, Aphrodisias (1st century) Turkey, dedicated to the Imperial Sebastos, a Greek name for the Roman Emperor Augustus. It was covered with mythological reliefs and Roman emperors. With this monument we wanted to highlight the divine origin of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.