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Monumental graveyard forge of empires11/5/2023 ![]() Among the hundreds of thousands of tourists who go to Blenheim each year there must also have been quite a few who knew what it was. Over the years countless academics and students must have visited the palace and known immediately what they were looking at. I soon realised, however, how extremely unlikely it is that I really could have been the first one to have realised that this plant box was really a 1700 year old Roman grave monument.īlenheim is within a short bus ride of Oxford, home to the largest Classics Faculty in the world. My first reaction was to think that I should have been the one to ‘discover’ the sarcophagus and have had my fifteen minutes of fame (the antiques expert who did discover it remains anonymous). Above is the photo I took of it – you can see the date if you want proof I really spotted it before it made the news. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit, though, because the thing is I remembered seeing the sarcophagus myself on my first visit to Blenheim last April. I’ve only now gotten around to writing about this because I was bit ill when the news appeared (one of the hazards of having small children) and a bit busy with other things since then. The managers of the estate were apparently unaware of what the object really was and have since had it restored and moved to inside the palace. The newspapers reported that an antiques expert has identified the piece, finely carved with Dionysiac reliefs being used as a flowerpot in the palace grounds. The story was reported by the Daily Mail, the BBC, the Oxford Mail, ITV News,the Times and the New York Times among others. Earlier this month a story that made a splash in the national and international press and that was all over my twitter feed was the ‘discovery’ of an ancient Roman sarcophagus at Blenheim palace.
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