Headless statues of a dead woman and her servant were found in an old Greek cemetery.
The two statues, dating from the 4th century BC, were fragments of a white marble monument discovered before the construction of a city hall in Paiania, east of Athens, announced the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports in a statement Sunday (January 24).
The statues show the dead woman sitting on an ornate chair, while her servant, also a woman, is standing, the statement said. The monument would have marked the grave of the unknown woman seated.
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The marble sepulchral monument is typical of tombstones from the 4th century BC, with similar examples found in the Sacred Temple of Agia Paraskevi in Markopoulo Mesogaias and in the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens, according to the statement.
Tombs typical monuments of the time represented family reunions or masters and lovers killed with their slaves, while children’s tombstones showed them accompanied by their pets, Olga Palagia, professor of classical archeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, wrote in “A companion to Greek architecture“(John Wiley & Sons, 2016).
The ministry’s statement does not explain why these statues show women without heads, but the ancient monument was found in fragments. Grave monuments usually depicted idealized faces, according to Palagia, so they would not be accurate portraits.
Luxurious funerary monuments like this were banned in 317 BC by the then governor of Athens, Demetrios de Phaleron, which helps to date the monument prior to this period, according to the statement.
The monument was taken to the Archaeological Museum in Brauron, Greece, for maintenance and custody, the statement said.
Originally published on Live Science.