Items designed for rituals, religious practices, and special ceremonies from around the globe. This category includes ornate tools, masks, and symbols that highlight the spiritual and communal traditions of various societies.
Made in Apulia around 340–320 BCE, this bull’s head rhyton shows how inventive South Italian pottery could be in the late Classical period. The vessel combines an animal-shaped form with red-figure decoration and added paint.
Carved in marble and still preserving its inscription in full, this small inscribed colonette records a personal act of thanks in the Roman city of Tomis. The text tells us that a man from Sidon, dedicated the object to the Syrian Goddess.
Few grave monuments from classical Athens are as quietly affecting as the Grave Stele of Mnesarete. Carved in Attica around 380 BCE, the relief shows a young woman seated in composed sorrow.
Small in scale but unusually rich in meaning, this bronze votive club brings together myth, religion, and a named human presence. Cast as a miniature version of the weapon most closely associated with Herakles.
This Tanagra-type terracotta statuette from ancient Callatis offers a refined image of female presence in the Hellenistic world. The figure stands quietly yet elegantly, wrapped in abundant drapery, with a small dove perched on her right shoulder.
This Nike figurine presents the Greek goddess of victory in a form that is both graceful and slightly unusual. She appears as a winged nude figure with the body of an ephebe.
A small bronze poppy capsule becomes unexpectedly vivid through its inscription, which preserves the name of the woman who dedicated it: Nikasimacha.
This small black-figure incense vessel opens onto a world in which religion was experienced through smoke, fragrance, and image as much as through words or gesture.
This Omphalos stands at the center of the earth, the point where Zeus marked the world’s navel and where Apollo’s oracle gave voice to divine knowledge.
This marble grave stele from southern Anatolia stands as an example of Hellenistic funerary art, combining architectural form, figural narrative, inscription, and symbolic imagery into a single, highly sophisticated monument.
This votive stupa carved in steatite and densely inscribed with sacred text and imagery, it encapsulates key aspects of early Chinese Buddhism: devotion, cosmology, and the transmission of religious ideas along the Silk Road.
This exquisite horn, dating back to the 12th century, showcases intricate carvings that blend cultural influences from across the Mediterranean, inviting us to explore a world of historical fusion where Arab craftsmanship met Christian relic veneration.