Lover's Memorial	Volume 56 Number 1, January/February 2003
by Jarrett A. Lobell

Until now, archaeologists familiar with the tomb of Antinoos--built in Egypt by the Roman emperor Hadrian after his young lover drowned in the Nile in A.D. 130--were puzzled by the absence of a proper memorial to Antinoos at Hadrian's villa in Tivoli, Italy.

Recently excavated, a large colonnaded building on villa property has now been identified as a temple commemorating Antinoos. In addition to the building itself, a large statue of the pharaoh Ramses II, shipped by Hadrian from Memphis to adorn his beloved's temple, was found. A statue of Antinoos dressed as the Egyptian god Osiris had been discovered earlier, during the original excavation of the villa in the eighteenth century.

© 2003 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/0301/newsbriefs/antinoos.html