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Psyche on a Dromedary
Unknown · 3rd century BC
A young woman sits sideways on a saddle, holding the reins, as a camel with a single hump paces forward. She wears a light chiton; the animal wears a collar hung with a little bell. The relief is shallow, cut into a slab less than a metre wide, and the background still shows the fine parallel lines of the claw chisel. The lower edge and the left corner are lost, so the camel's feet are gone, and the back of the slab was trimmed long ago for reuse. The rider is traditionally called Psyche, the soul, whom Greek art often shows as a girl with butterfly wings; here no wings are visible, and she may simply be a traveller.
The slab comes from Alexandria Troas, a city founded near the site of Troy by one of Alexander's successors, and it was carved in the third century BC, when the eastern conquests had brought camels, elephants and other marvels into Greek imagery. Whether it decorated a tomb or a shrine is unknown. It reached the Louvre at a Paris sale in October 1818 with other antiquities from the Greek East, a rare and charming image of the desert entering Greek art.
Did You Know? Camels were exotic even to Greeks in Asia Minor, and the artist gives this one a collar with a bell as if it were a pet.
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