Rome's marble yards

Abstract

By the death of Augustus, imperial building projects in Rome were being supplied by marble from Africa (Chemtou), Asia (Docimium), Egypt (various alabaster sources), Aegean Greece (Chios, Euboea, and Paros), Attica (Pentelikon), and from Luna (Carrara) in N Italy. A vast network of quarries in Egypt's Eastern Desert was already under development, and their granites and porphyry began to be seen at Rome in the middle of the Julio-Claudian era. By the Antonines, marble from Scyros, Thasos, Proconnesos, and Iasos was also arriving in Rome.Quantities in this period reached several thousand blocks per year. Relative to demand, was this a lot or a little? The Roman marble trade has always attracted attention because of the facilities and the organizational feats that brought so much exotic stone to the capital and thence outward, but the real importance of the answer lies in the use of marble. Whether marble was easy or hard to come by and what distinguished the grades and colors — even whether all grades and colors were available to customers up and down the social ladder — are prerequisite questions for understanding the choices open to imperial and private architects, to sculptors with great or humble commissions, and even to wall-painters with faux architecture to apply to a wall.

Marble trade in the Roman Mediterranean: a quantitative and diachronic study

“…supply, in particular of the principles of production-to-stock as opposed to production-to-order, see Russell 2013b. 64 Fant 1992;Fant 2001 andRussell 2013b, 232-39 convincingly argue that the marble yards of Portus and Rome can be considered unintentional stockpiles and do not provide evidence for the widespread use of the production-to-stock trade model for marble. Their main arguments are (1) the limited amount of material in these piles compared to the estimated annual amount of marble needed in Rome, Italy, and the rest of the Roman world; (2) the absence of standardization in size and form of the architectural elements, without which an effective production-to-stock system could not have functioned; and (3) the quality of the material, in particular the frequent presence of flaws and repairs in many blocks and columns.…”

Metamorphic Domes in Northern Tunisia: Exhuming the Roots of Nappe Belts by Widespread Post‐Subduction Delamination in the Western Mediterranean

“…These normal faults bound the Messinian sediments of the Mejerda basin, both to the North and South of the massif, and also cut mineralized outcrops of Eocene allochthonous Tellian rocks (cross‐section A‐A’, Figure 2). The massif is formed by the Chemtou marbles (e.g., Fant, 2001), and underlying Triassic metapsammites. This antiformal structure produces a prominent WSW‐ENE oriented ridge with a positive gravimetric anomaly all along the northern border of the Mejerda basin, coinciding with the Hairech and Rebiaa massifs (Amiri et al., 2011; Frifita et al., 2020) (See cross‐section A‐A’ in Figure 2).…”

THE EMPEROR AND HIS ANIMALS: THE ACQUISITION OF EXOTIC BEASTS FOR IMPERIALVENATIONES

“…The stones mined in distant Egypt ended up carefully inventoried in Roman stockyards, awaiting the next great imperial building project. 39 The same principle applied to gladiators. A series of gladiatorial schools (ludi) in Rome was fed by a constant stream of gladiators from ludi in the provinces to ensure that the emperor always had on hand the means to give games.…”