The Metrological Relief is an Ancient Greek relief of a man with arms outstretched, cut with hammer and chisel on a triangular, marble slab between 460 and 430 BC. It was found in Turkey or the

Greek Islands Greece has many islands, with estimates ranging from somewhere around 1,200 to 6,000, depending on the minimum size to take into account. The number of inhabited islands is variously cited as between 166 and 227. The largest Greek island by a ...

in 1625–26 AD by a

chaplain A chaplain is, traditionally, a cleric (such as a Minister (Christianity), minister, priest, pastor, rabbi, purohit, or imam), or a laity, lay representative of a religious tradition, attached to a secularity, secular institution (such as a hosp ...

called William Petty collecting sculptures for Thomas Howard, Earl of

Arundel Arundel ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the Arun District of the South Downs, West Sussex, England. The much-conserved town has a medieval castle and Roman Catholic cathedral. Arundel has a museum and comes second behind much large ...

. It was sold to Sir William Fermor in 1691 and then presented to Oxford University in 1755. It is now on display at the

Ashmolean Museum The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University of ...

in Oxford, United Kingdom. It was the only known metrological relief until 1988 when another was found on

Salamis Island Salamis ( ; el, Σαλαμίνα, Salamína; grc, label=Ancient and Katharevousa, Σαλαμίς, Salamís) is the largest Greek island in the Saronic Gulf, about off-coast from Piraeus and about west of central Athens. The chief city, Sala ...

, Greece.

Measurements

The relief measures 2.09 m long, 62 cm high by ca. 10 cm thick and is broken over the figure's left forearm but when complete it measured one Greek fathom or

orguia A fathom is a unit of length in the imperial and the U.S. customary systems equal to , used especially for measuring the depth of water. The fathom is neither an International Standard (SI) unit, nor an internationally-accepted non-SI unit. H ...

. There is also an image of a foot above the right forearm which measures 29.7 cm, an imprint of a clenched fist over the right forearm of 11 cm and fingers, which measure between 1.85 and 2 cm. Eric Fernie studied the relief and noted its ancient measurement of the Greek fathom.

References

External links

Ashmolean exhibit including images and English translation.
5th-century BC artifacts Collection of the Ashmolean Museum 5th-century BC sculptures 1st-millennium BC steles Historiography of Greece Hellenistic Greece Reliefs in the United Kingdom {{AncientGreece-stub