A soldier wearing a long blue cloak stands alone, with a spear in his right hand and a tall ovoid shield at his left. Celtic groups from Europe migrated eastward in 279 B.C. and established independent kingdoms in Thrace and central Asia Minor. Known as Galatians, they were used extensively as mercenary soldiers. Inscriptions identifying at least three Galatian soldiers who must have served under the Ptolemies occur on loculus slabs in the rather simple tomb found in 1884.
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Title:Painted limestone funerary slab with a soldier standing at ease
Period:Hellenistic
Date:2nd half of 3rd century BCE
Culture:Greek
Medium:Limestone, paint
Dimensions:Height: 15 1/2 in. (39.4 cm) Other: 3 3/4 in. (9.5 cm) Width: 11 5/8 in. (29.5 cm)
Classification:Miscellaneous-Paintings
Credit Line:Gift of Darius Ogden Mills, 1904
Accession Number:04.17.5
Inscription: Found in 1884 in a tomb near Alexandria
Found in 1884 in a tomb in Alexandria, Egypt (near Ramleh)
1884, found in a tomb in Alexandria, Egypt; 1884, purchased by Elbert E. Farman, New York; after 1887, purchased by Darius Ogden Mills from Elbert E. Farman; until 1904, collection of Darius Ogden Mills; acquired in 1904, gift of D.O. Mills.
Merriam, Augustus C. 1885. "Inscribed Sepulchral Vases from Alexandria." American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts, 1(1): p. 18 (general mention).
Merriam, Augustus C. 1887. "Painted Sepulchral Stelai from Alexandria." American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts, 3(3/4): no. III, p. 265.
Gillett, Charles R. 1898. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Egyptian Antiquities in Halls 3 and 4. no. 866, p. 58, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Reinach, A. J. 1910. "“Les Galates dans l’Art Alexandrin.”." Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot, 18(1): no. 9, p. 55.
Pagenstecher, Rudolf. 1919. Nekropolis: Untersuchungen über Gestalt und Entwicklung der alexandrinischen Grabanlagen und ihrer Malereien. no. 32, p. 48, Leipzig: Giesecke & Devrient.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1927. Handbook of the Classical Collection. p. 192, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1953. Handbook of the Greek Collection. p. 132, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Blanche R. 1957. Ptolemaic Paintings and Mosaics and the Alexandrian Style. pp. 16, 20, 47, pl. III, 1, Cambridge, Mass.
Cook, Brian. 1966. Inscribed Hadra Vases in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Papers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol. 12. pp. 12, 16–8, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Marszal, John R. 2000. "Ubiquitous Barbarians. Representations of the Gauls at Pergamon and Elsewhere." From Pergamon to Sperlonga. Sculpture and Context, N.T. de Grummond and B.S. Ridgway, eds. p. 198, n. 34, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Leona, Marco and Dr. Seán Hemingway. 2009. "The Materiality of Art: Scientific Research in Art History and Art Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 67(1): p. 8, fig. 8.
Plantzos, Dimitris. 2018. The Art of Painting in Ancient Greece. pp. 259–60, fig. 251, Atlanta: Lockwood Press.
Abramitis, De and Mark Benford Abbe. 2019. "A group of painted funerary monuments from Hellenistic Alexandria in the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Techne : Journal of Technology for Architecture and Environment, 48: pp. 60–71, figs. 1–10.
Zanker, Paul. 2022. Afterlives : Ancient Greek Funerary Monuments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. no. 53, pp. 164–65, New York: Scala Publishers.
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The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than 30,000 works ranging in date from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312.
