Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on March 5, 2025, at 2:00 pm EST, presented by Dr. Jessica Nitschke. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

The Alexander Sarcophagus. © Jessica Nitschke

With its dazzling sculpted decoration, the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus from Sidon is one of the most celebrated works of art from antiquity. Created not long after Alexander’s death at the end of the 4th century BCE and buried in a deep underground tomb, the monument carries a relief of the conqueror battling Persians while wearing a lion-skin headdress. This divine attribute was closely associated with Herakles, whom both Greeks and Phoenicians identified with the Tyrian hero-god Melqart.

This talk will explore the sarcophagus and its relief decoration to better understand Alexander’s depiction, taking into consideration the monument’s archaeological context, contemporary historical events, and Phoenician funerary beliefs. Especially, it will examine the sarcophagus in light of the seven-month siege of Tyre — a conflict provoked by Alexander’s claims of kinship to Herakles/Melqart — and attempt to explain why the patron might have wanted to depict Alexander on his tomb in such a way that draws attention to this devastating event.

Jessica Nitschke is a Research Fellow and contract Lecturer in the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa; she is also the editor of ASOR’s outreach publication The Ancient Near East Today. Her research concerns the history and archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE, especially interconnections between the Phoenicians, the Greek world, and Egypt. She co-edited Postcolonialism, Heritage, and the Built Environment: New Approaches to Architecture in Archaeology, published by Springer in 2020, and is currently working on a monograph on the Alexander Sarcophagus. She has carried out archaeological fieldwork at Tel Dor (Israel) and Tell Timai (Egypt), and currently excavates at el-Hibeh as part of the UC Berkeley project. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.

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