Expressing Regional Cultic Concepts Through Local Art: A New Marble Relief from Blaundos

Blaundos Ancient City is located approximately 2 km northeast of the village of Sülümenli in the Ulubey district of Uşak Province. The findings obtained through archaeological excavations conducted in the site since 2018 provide significant information about the religious and socio-cultural characteristics of Blaundos in antiquity. This study addresses a marble relief, discovered in two separate fragments during the excavations conducted in 2018 and 2019 along the Main Street extending adjacent to the Temple of Demeter (Ceres) in Blaundos. The relief is significant not only for its sculptural features such as typology, iconography, and style, but also for bearing traces of the cults in the city. The three figures depicted on the relief represent the Priestess of Demeter, Dionysos, and the Pudicitia Philista type. This scene, which provides new contributions to our knowledge of Eastern Lydia, introduces a previously unobserved figurative and cultic combination in the city and its surrounding region. The findings related to the cults of Demeter and Dionysos, previously discovered separately in epigraphic, numismatic, and architectural forms in Blaundos, are for the first time observed together on the same relief in this study. Stylistically, it is argued that the standard types known from Western Anatolian sculpture are reinterpreted on the Blaundos relief through a local craftsmanship approach. The work is likely to date to the second half of the 1st century AD, around the same time as the temple, when social life in the city was particularly active.