The volumes under review are the second instalment in the series Sculptures from Roman Syria, the first of which was published by T.M. Weber (Sculptures from Roman Syria in the Syrian National Museum at Damascus, I [2006]). That first volume covered stone and metal sculpture of the National Museum of Syria in Damascus, from selected sites of ‘cities and villages of Central and Northern Syria’. The volumes under review were published in 2023 as the second part, but their scope is not limited to the National Museum in Damascus and is instead guided by material and form, bringing together the marble Greek, Roman and Byzantine sculptures from ancient Syria (including not only modern Syria but also sites in adjacent states). Those marble sculptures are now, like so much of Syria’s archaeological wealth, internationally dispersed, and the number of global museums who allowed access to material for the production of the volume was too great to list in the preface (p. ix).

It is a monumental work, and it is no small miracle that such volumes of carefully compiled corpora are still produced: the work is a testament to the dedication of the editors and contributors, to whom those working on the Greek and Roman East owe a debt of gratitude. Following a short introduction, the work is organised by site, ordered within six regions, with a seventh section for marble sculptures of unknown provenance. Each site is briefly introduced, and individual entries for each sculpture are provided with a catalogue nomenclature for each site (e.g. the first item from Daphne/Harbiye is Daph-1), generally using ancient classical names rather than contemporary Arabic, Turkish (etc.) names for the sites. The catalogue entries are thorough, following the general format of the previous volume, which is modelled on Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani (CSIR), but not part of that series (only the Syrian sculpture in Czech collections appeared as a CSIR volume, in 1999). Like those volumes, the volume under review has no digital equivalent, except an ebook. Doubtless, pragmatic publishing choices led to separate volumes of text and plates, but there are accompanying issues of ease-of-use in both the format and the lack of an online database. We might indeed question how such corpora are intended to be used and by whom. There are relatively few appendices (current locations of items, mythological and historical individuals, and a general index), so that it is difficult to search the work for (e.g.) imperial portraits without looking up individuals or to explore chronological or geographical trends, let alone contextual information such as modes of display. The volumes thus serve the purpose of a reference work exceptionally well, but it is a shame that the opportunity was not taken for a fuller introduction or analysis of the material; nor does the format facilitate such work. The iconographic and typological discussions tend to be limited by the catalogue structure to particular sites, and the introduction summarises mostly the distribution, but without a map, and scant references to historiography, despite a useful (if not always up-to-date) bibliography built from the catalogue entry citations.

The first volume in the series noted that it included only c. 100 of 700 monuments from the region it covered which were held in the National Museum in Damascus, selected for their good provenance information in the museum’s inventory. At the time, the museum held a total of c. 3000 Roman sculptures. The publication noted that an Arabic database was made at the time of this larger group, which one hopes survives (T.M. Weber [2006], p. 12). The present volume adds a further c. 650 items (I counted 647 in the location appendix), including those from many other collections, attempting to bring together the marble statuary from the Roman province of Syria ‘as exhaustively as possible’ (p. xi). The work to catalogue and understand the rich sculptural environment of the Graeco-Roman Near East is well served by these volumes, but they also highlight how much work remains to be done, a task not made easier by years of conflict in modern Syria. The corpora emerging from R. Raja’s Palmyra Portrait Project, of Palmyrene sarcophagi (O. Bobou and R. Raja, Palmyrene Sarcophagi [2023]), and the forthcoming corpus of Palmyrene funerary reliefs, are comprehensive landmark studies (contributing 729 and more than 3,000 respectively) and will represent even further, monumental gains to our knowledge and enable further work.

Objects whose location is currently unknown (i.e. which are known to have been excavated or found at particular sites but have since been lost) are included in the volumes under review, but often, for obvious reasons, these are less well documented than other catalogue entries. Indeed, a worrying amount of the material that was known to archaeologists of the early twentieth century is now of ‘current location unknown’. Taking for example Antioch: of the 94 items catalogued, the largest proportion (38) are recorded as being in the Hatay Archaeological Museum, but only slightly fewer (30) are now of unknown location, with a further 22 being in American collections (Baltimore, Princeton, Worchester and Harvard) and 3 in Syria (2 in Damascus and 1 in Aleppo). It is then not only the dispersal but also the disappearance of so many items that highlights the challenges faced by the contributors and the importance of bringing the items together. However, such numbers also indicate the failure of stewardship of so much material, which emerged largely from (as in the case of Antioch) American–French excavations.

The volumes were published with thanks to the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) of the Assad regime (which has since fallen), and despite a long list of esteemed contributors – and the fact that the first, 2006, volume was part of a European Union-funded training programme in Syria – includes no Syrian authors. Catalogues such as this are of incredible value to scholars, providing rich data on which to base further study. And yet, they are also exclusive. These well-produced volumes sit on my desk with a heavy and satisfying thud, but it is high time that more inclusive models are used: many of these sculptures are now long-distant from where they were found, and we owe it not only to future students and scholars to bring corpora into the twenty-first century through digital projects (ideally, alongside, not instead of, analogue ones). But also, it seems that the very least we could do is to write about those sculpted diaspora in a form that could be accessed by broader audiences, including those in the places from which the objects have come.