To My Family and Uğraş Uzun - Bilkent University

Fittschen and W. Trillmich are together responsible for the publication of the
Corpus (Koch, 2001: 287). As a result, of the nearly 15,000 sarcophagi known to
exist, the published volumes of the Corpus contain over 4,000 examples in over
2,000 plates (Koch, 2001: 287). The latest symposium about the Sarkophag-
Corpus was held in 2001 in Marburg, and anticipated the publication of
“Anatolian Columnar Sarcophagi” by H. İşkan Işık (Koch, 2001: 290).
A recent publication by G. Koch and H. Sichtermann, “Römische
Sarkophage”, follows the “Sarkophag-Corpus” in its general terms, but also
introduces suggestions about the classification of other examples from regions
not yet studied in detail (Koch and Sichtermann, 1982; Koch, 2001: 287). Finally,
G. Koch’s “Sarkophage Der Römischen Kaiserzeit”, published in 1993 in
German, and in 2001 in Turkish, reviews the types of Roman sarcophagi,
regional styles and relevant literature (Koch, 2001). In spite of these recent
publications as major sources in the area of sarcophagi studies, as G. Koch
mentions himself, there is still a lack of photographic documentation for the
newly found sarcophagi, and the necessity of including the Docimeum sarcophagi
as a specific class within the Sarkophag-Corpus (Koch, 2001: 163).
Although the “Sarkophag-Corpus” continues to be produced, sarcophagi
studies today focus more on the identification of marbles and quarries using
petrographic, isotopic and chemical analyses (Walker, 1984; Moens, 1990;
Dodge, 1991). The scientific studies are especially helpful in confirming or
rejecting ideas about whether the broken parts of a marble sculpture or a
sarcophagus belong to the same original, and especially in the identification of
the workshops where the sarcophagi come from (Walker, 1984: 207).
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