Cool Finds

Why Did the Ancient Romans Bury This Monumental Marble Statue Facedown? They Wanted to Repurpose It as a Paving Stone

Archaeologists discovered the roughly 2,500-year-old sculpture of a young man while conducting excavations at Sardis in western Turkey. The artwork reflects the different cultures that wielded control over the city in the first millennium B.C.E.

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

August 10, 2026 2:01 p.m.

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Some 2,500 years ago, an artist in what is now western Turkey sculpted a larger-than-life statue of a young man holding a piece of fruit in his right hand, likely a quince slated to be offered to the gods. Hundreds of years later, after the region came under Roman rule in 133 B.C.E., the sculpture found a new lease on life as a paving stone. Workers broke the marble figure in two and placed its halves facedown, inadvertently preserving them for centuries.

Archaeologists discovered the repurposed statue while excavating Sardis, the onetime capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. According to the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the seven-foot-tall sculpture dates to between 470 and 450 B.C.E., about a century after the Achaemenid Persians wrested control of Sardis from the Lydians. At the time, Sardis served as the capital of an Achaemenid province, or satrapy.

The young man’s appearance is unusual for the period, reflecting a blend of stylistic influences. “It’s a wonderful piece, and we’re still kind of astounded and a bit perplexed by it,” Nicholas Cahill, field director of the Sardis Expedition, tells the Art Newspaper’s Hadani Ditmars.

The sitter’s long hair and posture are reflective of older sculptural traditions from the sixth century B.C.E., but his facial features and hands are more in line with contemporary works from the first half of the fifth century B.C.E. His clothing, meanwhile, is distinctly Lydian, featuring a thick himation, or outer wrap, over a thin chiton shift, with a striped garment underneath.

“The combination of the very old-fashioned hairstyle, clothing and such with the more modern rendition of the hands with veins, the facial features, the turn of the neck and such, is quite striking,” Cahill says to the Art Newspaper. “This is a sculptor who knew about what’s going on in Greece and Italy but chooses to portray the person as his ancestors had been portrayed.”

In a social media post, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Turkey’s minister of culture, describes the sculpture as “a unique discovery at Sardis that will shed light on Anatolian archaeology,” per a translation by Türkiye Today. Scientists plan to clean, examine and restore the figure, keeping an eye out for traces of paint that might have once adorned the marble. Once this work is complete, the statue will go on display at the Manisa Museum, in the Turkish city of the same name.

Researchers hope that the statue will shed light on the daily lives and beliefs of Sardis’ elites, who probably commissioned the work during a time of transition for the ancient capital. As the Sardis Expedition notes, the city became Lydia’s capital in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., “when a dynasty of kings from Gyges to Croesus conquered western Anatolia; invented the world’s first coins; and concluded treaties with the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece.”

The Lydian kingdom thrived until 546 B.C.E., when Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Sardis. Over the next 400 years, the city traded hands among the Greeks, the Seleucids and the Romans, eventually emerging as a Christian center with a smaller but no less vibrant Jewish community. Sardis started its decline in the sixth century C.E. but was only fully abandoned in the early 15th century.

Today, Sardis is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. First excavated between 1910 and 1914, the city has been the focus of an ongoing expedition since 1958. Despite this lengthy excavation history, the newly discovered statue is the first of its kind found in Sardis.

“It is one of the most unusual pieces of sculpture to emerge from excavations in western Turkey in the last decades,” Hector Williams, an archaeologist who has previously worked at the site, tells the Art Newspaper. “Specialists in Greek sculpture are going to have [a] field day with it.”

Meilan Solly is a senior associate digital editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she oversees the online history section. Solly's specialties are Tudor England, medieval Europe and World War II.