The punctuated itineraries of purple porphyry

Porphyry is a reddish-purple, white-speckled stone that was quarried in Egypt’s Eastern Desert under Roman rule. This distinctive stone has been frequently re-carved, reused, and imitated from antiquity to the present. The Tracing Purple Porphyry Project (TPPP) traces temporal, spatial, and contextual patterns in porphyry reuse to understand the stone’s changing meaning and value. Drawing on data from the TPPP, this article employs the concept of ‘punctuated itineraries’ – rooted in scholarship on object biographies – to understand how episodes of physical transformation have reignited earlier meanings of porphyry for new audiences. We introduce two notable kinds of punctuations, embellishment and miniaturization. These are exemplified here by a Roman amphora adorned with the appendages of an eagle in the medieval period and a miniature porphyry obelisk carved in eighteenth-century Rome. Ultimately, they demonstrate how punctuations can activate the stone’s enduring associations with Rome’s imperial and Christian legacies and its exoticizing Egyptian origins.