Dr. Catherine Lomas

These painted tombs, they had a set of recurring iconographies that you have over and over again in these tombs.

And the iconography of the Return of the Rider, that's how we refer to it.

Yeah, the Return of the Rider.

Very mysterious, right?

But that's a very popular one.

And it's popular for men.

Then you have a completely different set of iconographies for women.

So they're very much different in terms of gender.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, our Lucanian painted tombs had a wide range of iconographies, very lively scenes, and I would like to show you a few of them.

And I've got one in particular that I want to show you, and it's here.

There we have it.

Let me see if I can pull it out.

There we go, yeah.

Now you're going to have to tell me what you think about it.

Not bad.

I kind of expected a more, you know, enthusiastic reaction.

Yeah, what we have here is a chariot race and that was another very common iconography and it was probably linked to funerary games.

That's a very important topic in the context of these ancient tomb paintings.

I mean, the funerary ceremony was crucial to understand the role that these paintings had.