Eine 'Trübung des attischen Geistes'?

The collection and interpretation of ancient funerary reliefs from Attica can look back on more than a century of research history. For the Archaic period, G.M.A. Richter's compilation remains the standard work, although our knowledge of the period has expanded considerably. So far, the figurative funerary stelae from the remainder of the Greek area have been explained from an "Attic point of view", as simple recipients of examples set in Athens. The present compilation and analysis of the pieces from outside Attica challenges the usefulness of such a centre-periphery model for interpreting Archaic-Greek funerary reliefs as a whole. For example, it is shown that the custom of depicting the deceased on their tombs has its longest pedigree in Crete and the Cyclades, rather than Athens, and was probably inspired by other, non-Greek influences. In contrast to sculpture, possible sources here are found not so much in Egypt, but rather in the Syrian-Hittite area. Notably, the respectively earliest funerary stelae in the different Greek regions appear chronologically close to each other, in the later 7th and early 6th centuries B.C., but independently of each other. In a second phase, spanning roughly the first and second thirds of the 6th century, the earliest figurative funerary monuments in each region are developed further and "local traditions" emerge, whose existence has so far been denied. It is only in a third phase, in the final decades of the 6th and the early 5th centuries, that these local traditions dissolve under the influence of Attica; the centre-periphery model is therefore only applicable to the transitional phase between the Archaic and Classical periods. In contrast, beyond the limits of the Greek areas, neither Attic nor non-Attic Archaic funerary reliefs appear to have had any influence, as illustrated by asides on the so-called Carian-Egyptian stelae and on funerary monuments from the Italic region. In this way, an unrestricted view on sepulchral art in Greece and beyond its borders reveals both the existence of strong regional patterning and the mobility of ideas in Archaic times, thus enriching our view of this period.