Publisher's Synopsis
The volume offers, through the catalogue of more than 2000 examples, a panorama of exceptional importance concerning the clay lamps of Leptis Magna, a unique corpus both for the state of conservation of the lamps and for the variety of the typologies and for the richness of the iconographic and epigraphic apparatuses as well as for the wide chronological range involved, which goes from the Hellenistic age to the late antique age. The text portrays a broad socio-economic picture on imports, local production, distribution and circulation of this class of materials in Africa and, more generally, in the Mediterranean area. The oil lamps are presented by types arranged in chronological order and according to the area of production, in order to facilitate the understanding of their typological and chronological articulation. The volume offers an analysis of the clay bodies and epigraphic elements present on the oil lamps, which makes it possible to identify with certainty the different ateliers to which the imported oil lamps belonged and to identify the local workshops, reconstructing their production, development and distribution dynamics.
