Not everything is in Selçuk. The Ephesus Museum holds the site’s best-known image, the Artemis of Ephesus with her tall crown and rows of egg-shaped ornaments1, and finds from the temple excavations, together with the later Roman Artemis statues, are its own2. But finds from the older, 19th- and early-20th-century excavations went elsewhere: the British Museum, the Istanbul Archaeological Museums and the Ephesos Museum in Vienna between them hold at least as much material again, from before Turkey required exported finds to stay2. A single sculpted column drum from the Temple of Artemis, carved with Hermes leading a woman to the underworld, is in London, not Selçuk3. The museum sits within Selçuk itself, one stop among several in the guide to around Ephesus, and its finds fill gaps that a walk through the ancient city alone cannot.

Not everything is in Selçuk

The clearest single case is Ephesus’s most admired bronze. An athlete scraping himself clean with a strigil, found in 1896 at the Harbour Gymnasium and Baths in 234 separate pieces, was reassembled not in Turkey but in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where it is fine enough that it has been proposed as the original behind several known copies of the type4. Two reconstructed groups of a sphinx with a youth, found at the same site, may even reproduce the sphinx armrests of Pheidias’s lost gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the ancient world’s great vanished artworks — a suggestion Elliger makes cautiously, and one that, if right, makes these Ephesian fragments important evidence for a monument that otherwise survives only in written descriptions5. A statue group of Pan with the infant Dionysos, from the same city, is in Vienna too, attesting, Rogers argues, Pan’s part in Ephesian celebrations of Dionysos’s mysteries under Roman rule6. A Hermes herm bought by the excavator Otto Benndorf in 1895 at Marathesion, on the coast near modern Kuşadası, arrived in Vienna as a gift the following year and has stayed there since, as Hanslmayr records7.

A colossal marble head and a raised forearm from an imperial cult statue, in the Ephesus Museum
Fig. 1 Fragments of a colossal cult statue, traditionally identified as Domitian, though many scholars now argue it depicts Titus.

One sarcophagus, five addresses

The clearest single illustration of how Ephesus’s finds have scattered is not a famous bronze but a Roman tomb. The battle sarcophagus of the procurator Aemilius Aristides is important to the study of Attic sarcophagi precisely because the occupant’s name and rank are carved into the stone itself, on a bilingual inscription: Latin letters up to 4.7 cm tall set into the upper ledge within a meander border, and smaller Greek letters of 3–3.5 cm on the base zone, together naming Aemilius Aristides as procurator of the Augusti, Kintrup notes8. His portrait head survives on the couch-shaped lid, but the lid itself was found as early as 1911, could not be lifted at the time, and was then forgotten — it was only rediscovered in 1928, Kintrup notes9.

Kintrup reports that the sarcophagus today exists nowhere as a single object: fragments sit in the Efes Müzesi depots and in the museum in Selçuk itself, an inscription fragment is held separately in the inscription depot, the portrait-head lid is in the Archaeological Museum in İzmir, and three warrior heads from the same monument are in the İzmir History and Art Museum10. The name Quintus, which identifies the father, does not appear for the son on the sarcophagus at all — for him it survives only in a separate inscription from Sabratha, in modern Libya, which Kintrup connects to the same family11.

What’s in the Selçuk museum

Set against that dispersal, what actually stayed in Selçuk is still substantial. An Ephesian sundial, marked with lines for the equinoxes and for the summer and winter solstices, is on display there, Harrison and Welborn note12. From Terrace House 2, an ivory frieze and imperial portrait busts of Tiberius and Marcus Aurelius are shown in the museum rather than left in place in the Terrace Houses themselves, Ladstätter notes13. Statues of Livia and Augustus, found beneath the floor tiles of the Basilike Stoa on the State Agora alongside the plinths naming their dedicators, are also in the museum today, Rogers notes14.

A reclining figure on the carved marble sarcophagus from the Belevi Mausoleum
Fig. 2 The Belevi sarcophagus in the Ephesus Museum, photographed in 1991.

Mystery cults in the collection

A handful of small objects hint, carefully, at cult practice that the grander architecture does not otherwise show. A 5th-century BC red clay figurine of Harpocrates-Horus, finger raised to his lips, is one of the earliest — though genuinely inconclusive — signs of mystery-cult activity at Ephesus, and Rogers is careful to call it exactly that: tantalising, not proof15. A small bronze Serapis with Cerberus and a late-2nd-century statuette of Isis Panthea, both found in Terrace House 2, attest Serapis’s popularity at Ephesus from the 2nd century AD onward, after what was probably an earlier arrival in the 3rd century BC, Rogers argues16. A controversially dated offering-bowl figure, possibly depicting a Megabuzos — a eunuch high priest of the Artemision — is more contested still: Rogers dates it to around 650–600 BC only cautiously, and no ancient source actually confirms that eunuch priests presided over the mysteries, though Pliny does record that the painter Apelles once depicted a Megabuzos leading Artemis’s procession17.

Named craftsmen, and a label that was wrong

Most of what the museum shows is anonymous, in the sense that no ancient text names who made it. Two finds from a single well break that pattern. A terracotta figurine of Eros holding a rooster, from the well’s earliest, Hellenistic fill, carries an incised signature reading NIKO on its back, next to the firing hole — direct evidence of a named coroplast working at Ephesus — and a second base fragment from the same well is separately signed LOYKIOY, “of Loukios,” a second named craftsman, per Meriç18. The same well produced two imported Italian oil lamps with figural scenes, one showing two boxers, the other a panther with Dionysiac plant motifs, alongside a terracotta head-vessel of Dionysos wearing a mitra headband, he adds19.

Museum labels are not always final. A small dark grey marble torso found near the theatre’s portico in 1972 was catalogued as a Giant. In 2004 that identification changed: a matching pendant torso of the same size and material turned up, preserving the distinctive serrated-ridge thigh characteristic of a Triton rather than a Giant, and the pair was reinterpreted accordingly by Krinzinger and Ruggendorfer20. It is a small, clean example of a museum catalogue correcting itself once new evidence — in this case, the other half of a pair — actually turned up, rather than the older label simply being repeated.

Reclining marble statue of the river god Kaystros with a cornucopia, from the Vedius Gymnasium at Ephesus
Fig. 3 The river god Kaystros, from the Vedius Gymnasium.

Did Christians overturn the Great Artemis?

Room 6 of the museum displays the Beautiful, Great and Small Artemis statues together, and one of them, the Great Artemis, carries a specific hypothesis rather than a settled history. Rogers records that a case has been made for Christians having deliberately overturned the statue, rather than its having simply fallen or been moved21; the source itself frames the idea as a hypothesis, not as an established fact, and it is presented here on the same terms. The Beautiful Artemis, by contrast, is comparatively well measured: Rogers gives her height as 5.71 ft22.

A colossal winged Eros carved in herm form, found in 1926 reused as building material in a street fountain, is a genuinely rare survival on its own account: only three other free-standing examples of the type are known worldwide, plus one grave-relief version, including one at Hadrian’s Villa (now at Newby Hall in England) and one in Copenhagen, Hanslmayr notes23. A satyr-herm from a private residential quarter, the Odeionhanghaus, and a table leg carved with a bound figure of Attis from the same room, show the same kind of sculpture doing ordinary decorative work in a house rather than a temple or civic building, as Hanslmayr adds24.

Ephesus’s excavated sculpture, in short, is not a single collection in one building. Some of the strongest pieces — the strigil athlete, the sphinxes, the Pan group, the Hermes herm — are in Vienna; the column drum and the Salutaris procession inscription are in London; the Aristides sarcophagus alone is split across five separate locations. What the Selçuk museum holds is still the largest single share, and the objects gathered here are worth seeking out by name rather than assuming a room-by-room walk will surface them on its own.

Sources (29)

Each source is listed once. The numbers link back to the claims it supports; dates show when the source was checked.