Santoro reached out to her classical archaeologist colleague Susann Lusnia, who realised that the slab was a 1900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor
REPRESENTATIONAL PIC/ISTOCK
A family in New Orleans made an extremely unusual find while cleaning up their overgrown backyard — a mysterious marble tablet with Latin characters that included the phrase “spirits of the dead.”
Daniella Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University, said, “The fact that it was in Latin really gave us a pause. We realised it is not an ordinary thing.” Santoro reached out to her classical archaeologist colleague Susann Lusnia, who realised that the slab was a 1900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus. She revealed that the tablet had been missing from an Italian museum for decades.
Lusnia shared that Sextus Congenius Verus had died at the age of 42 due to unknown causes, after serving more than two decades in the imperial navy on a ship named Asclepius, the Roman god of medicine.
“Grave markers are considered important in Roman culture to uphold legacies, even of everyday citizens,” Lusnia said. “If there is an afterlife and he is in it and he knows, he is very happy because this is what a Roman wants — to be remembered forever.”
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