A database of marble objects from the Levant region has been completed as part of the project “Marmora Bizantina: Identification of the origin of marbles and their use in secular and sacred spaces in the southern Levant during the Early Byzantine period (4th–7th centuries AD).” The project’s principal investigator is Dr. Mariusz Gwiazda from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw.
This database includes descriptions of marble artifacts from the 1st century BCE to the 10th century CE, cataloging architectural elements, liturgical furnishings, interior decorations, everyday items, and sarcophagi. These artifacts come from an area stretching from present-day Türkiye to Jordan. Dr. Mariusz Gwiazda has prepared the database based on informatio available in scientific publications. It contains 7,415 records, each with 26 descriptors, such as the provenance, material, function, object type, dimensions, presence of inscriptions, chronology, and bibliography. The descriptions are enriched with photos and drawings of the objects. The data comes from 360 archaeological sites.
Additionally, a text database has been prepared, listing fragments of ancient texts and inscriptions related to the use of marbles during the Early Byzantine period, geographically linked to the eastern Mediterranean. This database was created by Dr. Paweł Nowakowski from the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw and contains 177 texts.
This is the first publicly available database on ancient marbles, enabling both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The database is fully accessible online, allowing researchers to utilize this resource and integrate it with other databases. The extensive dataset enables analyses of marble distribution, considering both diachronic and functional approaches. The website hosting the database includes applications that allow for the creation of various queries, with results presented as distribution maps and statistical charts. These applications were developed by Maciej Krawczyk.
The database is a tool designed for a wide range of specialists dealing with Antiquity, such as historians, art historians, archaeologists, archaeological scientists, and spatial analysis experts. It will be helpful in searching for analogies for new marble finds and conducting synthetic studies on the form of different categories of marble objects. Currently, papars based on these data are under preparation, addressing the distribution of marbles in Palestine, the impact of transport costs on this distribution, and the social function of marbles during the Early Byzantine period.
The method of creating the marble finds database is described in the publication: Gwiazda, M. (2023). Marmora Bizantina: A digital corpus of marble finds from the southern Levant. In M. Gwiazda, A. Poggio, and D. Wielgosz-Rondolino (eds.), Marble in the Early Byzantine Eastern Mediterranean: Use, Aesthetics, and Social Significance (=Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean, 32/1) (pp. 181–195). Warsaw: WUW. https://doi.org/10.37343/uw.2083-537X.pam32.1.07
The project “Marmora Bizantina: Identification of the origin of marbles and their use in secular and sacred spaces in the southern Levant during the Early Byzantine period (4th–7th centuries AD)” by Dr. Mariusz Gwiazda is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (OPUS 19, 2020/37/B/HS3/00306).
- Marmora Bizantina database: marmorabizantina.pcma.uw.edu.pl