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Virtue & Power

Archaeology

Museums and object provenance

Where the objects on this platform came from and who holds them now — findspot, excavation, inventory, condition and the arguments over identification, with the gaps in our own catalogue stated rather than filled.

19 institutions · 22 objects · 11 records checked, 11 incomplete

Until now this platform showed you a photograph of an object and told you who took it. That is a licence credit, not a provenance. It did not tell you that the Caesar portrait came out of the ground at Tusculum in 1825, sat unidentified in a Savoy royal collection for a hundred and fifteen years, and owes its identification to a comparison with dated coins.

This layer answers those questions where they can be answered. Each object record carries what the thing is, what it is made of, when it was made, where it was found, who excavated it, who holds it, what condition it is in, what has been restored, and how secure the identification of the subject actually is.

Why some records say “not recorded”

This catalogue could have been filled out to look complete. Inventory numbers, findspots and excavation dates are exactly the fields it would be easiest to invent and hardest for a reader to check, and a plausible-looking entry is worse than an absent one because it closes off the question.

So every record is marked checked or incomplete, and incomplete records name what is missing. 11 of 22 are checked. The remaining 11 are a visible backlog, tracked by the content validator, not a hidden one.

Identification is the interesting part

Very few ancient portraits are securely identified. The Azara Alexander is, because the herm is inscribed. The Pericles is, for the same reason. The Tusculum Caesar rests on coins. The colossal Constantine was called Commodus for four centuries. And the bust captioned Plutarch on this site is a modern commemorative sculpture — no ancient portrait of him survives, and the object record says so.

Institutions

  • New Haven, Connecticut, United States

    Yale University Art Gallery

    Holder of the Dura-Europos material, including the only substantially complete Roman shield known.

  • Haifa, Israel

    National Maritime Museum

    Holder of the Athlit ram, the principal surviving example of the weapon on which ancient naval battle turned.

  • Rome, Italy

    Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia

    The national Etruscan collection, and holder of the Chigi vase — the earliest clear depiction of hoplites in formation.

  • Vatican City, Vatican City

    Vatican Museums

    The oldest continuously assembled collection of classical sculpture, and the source of the portrait types through which Europe has pictured the ancient philosophers.

  • Rome, Italy

    Capitoline Museums

    Generally described as the oldest public museum collection in the world, begun with a papal donation of bronzes to the people of Rome.

  • Paris, France

    Louvre

    Holder of the Code of Hammurabi, the glazed brick friezes of Darius's palace at Susa, and the Azara herm of Alexander — much of it a product of nineteenth-century excavation concessions.

  • London, United Kingdom

    British Museum

    Holder of roughly half the surviving Parthenon sculptures, the Cyrus Cylinder and the Babylonian astronomical diaries — and of the most prominent restitution dispute in the museum world.

  • Rome, Italy

    Museo Nazionale Romano

    Four sites holding the sculpture, painting and coinage recovered as modern Rome was built over the ancient one.

  • Turin, Italy

    Museo di Antichità

    Holder of the Tusculum portrait — the only surviving likeness of Julius Caesar that may have been carved in his lifetime, and which nobody recognised as Caesar for over a century.

  • Athens, Greece

    National Archaeological Museum

    The principal collection of Greek antiquities, from the Mycenaean shaft-grave gold to the great bronzes recovered from the sea.

  • Athens, Greece

    Acropolis Museum

    Built at the foot of the rock to hold what came off it, and designed with a gallery whose empty spaces are an argument.

  • Naples, Italy

    Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli

    Holder of nearly everything portable that came out of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which is why the sites and the museum have to be read together.

  • Berlin, Germany

    Pergamon Museum

    Holder of the reconstructed Ishtar Gate, built from bricks excavated at Babylon and shipped to Berlin between 1899 and 1917.

  • Munich, Germany

    Glyptothek

    A museum built for a single collection of ancient sculpture, and an early case of restoration being undone rather than added.

  • Heraklion, Crete, Greece

    Archaeological Museum of Heraklion

    The principal Minoan collection, and the institution at the centre of the argument about how much of Knossos is Arthur Evans's.

  • Delphi, Greece

    Delphi Archaeological Museum

    Holder of the Charioteer, the Siphnian Treasury frieze, and the Delphic hymns — the only substantial ancient Greek music that survives with its notation.

  • Archaia Olympia, Greece

    Archaeological Museum of Olympia

    Holder of the Temple of Zeus pediments and the largest collection of Greek arms and armour anywhere, most of it dedicated as spoils.

  • Tehran, Iran

    National Museum of Iran

    The principal collection of Iranian antiquity, and the destination of the Persepolis tablets as they return from Chicago.

  • Istanbul, Türkiye

    Istanbul Archaeological Museums

    Founded to stop antiquities leaving the Ottoman empire, and holder of the Alexander Sarcophagus and the Treaty of Kadesh tablet.

Objects

How to read the evidence labels

Evidence level: Documented
Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
Evidence level: Probable
Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
Evidence level: Disputed
Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
Evidence level: Literary
Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
Evidence level: Mythological
Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
Evidence level: Unknown
The available evidence is insufficient to decide.

These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.