Cemeteries
Funerary monuments were a major business for the local marble workshops. Tomb buildings could carry portraits statues and busts. More modest burials were marked by stelai. Aphrodisias also has a large collection of gladiator reliefs from the tombs of entrepreneurs who owned gladiator and beast-hunter 'schools'. (These trained fighters were for hire to the providers of the Roman-style games put on in the city in honour of the emperors.) By far the largest category of funerary monument, however, was marble sarcophagi -- large, expensive, often richly decorated marble coffins.
