Marble Anthropoid Sarcophagus
Unknown · c. 470 BC (Hellenistic reuse possible)
Lid and box together form a body more than two metres long, its outline swelling at the shoulders and narrowing to the feet in a wavy silhouette. A beardless face with a lock of hair on the forehead looks up from the lid, carved in clear white marble, while the rest of the surface is left smooth. Along the sides are carved handles, four on the lid and six on the trough, copied from Egyptian stone coffins. The sarcophagus was found broken and has been pieced back together; look for the joins across the lid.
It is one of the earliest of the marble anthropoid sarcophagi made for the Phoenician elite, dated around four hundred and seventy years before Christ, when Greek sculptors were moving from the archaic smile to the severe style visible in this face. The museum record notes that it may have been reused in the Hellenistic period. Nineteenth-century sources place its discovery near Beirut or Tripoli in Lebanon, and it was purchased for the Louvre, where it joined the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar as evidence of the Phoenician way of death.
Did You Know? Ten carved handles, four on the lid and six on the box, imitate the lugs used to lower an Egyptian stone coffin, though they were never meant to bear weight.
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