How many actual statues survive from antiquity?

Factual Questions
1

I was vaguely looking at the topic of how women were portrayed by ancient sculptors but other than the Venus de Milo couldn’t think of any by name. But that got me to wondering just how many examples we have to go by; how many such statues actually survive (or were faithfully copied by later artisans). Are there thousands if you could count every unremarkable example to be found scattered around the Mediterranean? Hundreds? A few score preserved antiques? And am I right that male statues are far more common than female?

ETA: since relief sculpture is more common and more likely to be stylized rather than attempts at realism, I’ll limit the question to actual 3-D statues.

2

I’ll let someone more knowledgeable weigh in about how many marbles we have, but I’ll note that the fact that antique sculptures in the popular imagination are made of marble is in aks of itself an artifact of survivorship bias. The Greeks did much of their sculpting in bronze, but since a bronze statue can be melted and repurposed while a marble one cannot, we only have 30 Greek bronzes (and most of those only survived by spending the intervening eras at the bottom of the sea!).

3

Precise definitions will be challenging. For example, do the many small statues surviving from Egypt count? How about the very ancient Venus figurines? Olmec or Easter Island heads?

4

There’s also a variable concept of “survival.” Fully intact? More than half? Fragmented but reassembled?

I have seen lots of sculptures from antiquity in the many European museums I’ve toured, but I can probably count on two hands the number of very old busts that still had their noses.

5

It’s also difficult to know, IMO, because there are probably many existing statues that haven’t been discovered yet. If I’m not mistaken, there’s a lot of that in and around Alexandria, Egypt.

6

One item I read said that most of the “surviving” Greek statues are in fact Roman copies. There are a few like Milo or Nike who are missing pieces, but full complete is rare.

As for Egypt, another Item I read said that in terms of cubic yardage, Ramses II beats everyone else in history hands down for statues of themselves. It helped that he was a living god, hence needed worship material for his subjects, lived into his 90’s and ruled 73 years.

It’s more apparent on the reliefs in Egyptian ttemples, but the early Christians and then the Moslems took the “no idols” thing seriously. Many of the Egyptian reliefs and statues had the faces and sometimes hands chiselled off. Many survive from neglect, having been buried in sand until the modern era.

(Also brings to mind that the nose isn’t the only obvious protruberance often missing from ancient Roman statues. Back when many computer programs required a serial or USB dongle to run, to prevent piracy, there was an ad for a program that would emulate dongles; it showed an nearly-intact Roman statue of a unhappy male nude with the caption “Lost your dongle?”)

Also important to mention the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xian - lost for two millenia, a replica of an entire army

Estimates from 2007 were that the three pits containing the Terracotta Army hold more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which remain in situ in the pits near Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum.[2] Other, non-military terracotta figures were found in adjoining pits, including officials, acrobats, strongmen, and musician

Since they were put in troughs covered with wood beams, in many places the beams had sagged or caved in. One area of the museum is busy re-assembling some of the soldiers from fragments. It appears that they had an assembly line making the basic shapes, and then each individual head and some clothing and armour details were customized to reflect the individuals in the emperor’s army - so actual, individual portraits.

7

There are many, many thousands of surviving Greek and Roman statues. They are still being dug up on a fairly regular basis.

True, up to a point. The very best Greek statues were usually made in bronze and so those rarely survive. The surviving versions are marble copies, often commissioned by the Romans. But there are plenty of examples of Greek statues for which there were probably never bronze versions.

8

An article in NYTimes today - Why are so many statues headless? -includes this little tidbit:

In other cases, the ancient statues just lost their noses. Early museum conservators replaced the noses with new ones, but the process was reversed in modern days as curators decided authenticity trumped appearances. (The Glyptotek in Copenhagen displays the removed, replacement noses in a collection it calls a “Nasothek.”)

Also suggests stylized bodies were made with replaceable heads to change the statue from Emperor A to B depending on politics.

9

Marble statues can be burned to make lime.

10

According to this site, the British Museum alone has “20,000 to 30,000 individual objects”, referring to Graeco-Roman statues, How they are defined, I don’t know – do fragments of statues count? How about bas reliefs?

In any event, there are a heluva lotta statues in collections all over the world. A lot more than “scores” or “hundreds”. Look at the number on display in just one museum – The Metropolitan in New York or the MFA in Boston – that easily exceeds “scores”, and that’s not counting all the ones in storage.

Forgot the cite – https://www.quora.com/How-many-Roman-statues-are-in-the-British-Museum

11

Depends what you mean by “objects”. There were a few bronze flying penises in the Roman artifacts collection there, I recall. May also include innoculous objects like oil lamps. There are a lot of trivial smaller objects. Plates, cups, coins, jewelry, weapons, helmets… Was the OP only meaning human forms?

But yes, there are plenty of what we would call statues.

12

Thousands upon thousands upon thousands.

There are at about 1,500 complete Cycladic figurines alone, and that’s just one type. Also hundreds if not thousands of kouros and kore statues. That’s not counting other statue subjects and that’s just the Greek civilization. You’re looking at similar amounts for Egypt, the Levant, Etruscans, Minoans, etc.

And am I right that male statues are far more common than female?

No - Cycladic sculptures are mostly female figurines, for instance.

13

For Egypt, can we could sarcophagi with carvings of the resident as statues? I mean, they are, basically, just horizontal statues with a surprise inside. If so, many of those still exist.

14

Sure, but even those are outnumbered by the surviving Ka statues. Thousands of those. And of course dozens of monumental temple sculptures, like those at Luxor etc.

15

Now I’ve spent the last ten minutes looking at them.

I find myself sometimes transfixed by these sorts of things, wondering what these people were like, who lived so long ago.

16

I love those. The curious smile is intriguing.

And all the little ushabti.

17

As an example - The Egyptian government has been in the process of unearthing the ancient holy road from Luxor to Karnak temples; there are hundreds of status of sphinxes and ram-heads lining the road.

I guess the other question would be - what’s a “statue”? For example, there are plenty of jars with animal or human heads for lids, used to contain the assorted organs of mimmified Egyptians (Canopic jars). When does a 3-dimensional depiction of a person or thing stop being a statue? When it can serve another purpose too?