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Marble Medusa Head Survived Ancient Religious Purge - C C - Oct 20, 2015 www.livescience.com/52531-medusa-head-ancient-roman-outpost.html EXCERPT: In the ruins of a Roman city in southern Turkey, archaeologists have discovered a marble head of Medusa, somehow spared during an early Christian campaign against pagan art. The head was unearthed at Antiochia ad Cragum, a city founded during the first century, around the rule of Emperor Nero, that has all the marks of a Roman outpost —bathhouses, shops, colonnaded streets, mosaics and a local council house. With serpents for hair, wide eyes and an open mouth, Medusa was a mythical monster who could turn a person to stone with her gaze. At Antiochia, a Medusa architectural sculpture would have served an apotropaic function, intended to avert evil —but later, her likeness would have been considered idolatrous by the Christians who came to live at the site. "The people living at Antiochia later were zealous Christians who were destroying art in much the same way that ISIS is destroying remnants of the ancient past," Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska–Lincoln art historian and director of the excavations, told Live Science. "These things were meant to be destroyed and put into a lime kiln to be burned and turned into mortar...." RE: Marble Medusa Head Survived Ancient Religious Purge - Magical Realist - Oct 20, 2015 Could be the real head of Medusa after she got "stoned" gazing at herself in Perseus' mirror shield. I was once shopping for a Medusa wall plaque to compliment my collection of mythical face sculptures. Here's one that "stood out":