Analysis and Meaning of the Use of Red Porphyry (Mons Porphyrites) in Roman and late Roman Architecture: The Temple of the Sun in Rome and the Lateran Baptistery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Red porphyry, mined from the quarries of Mons Porphyrites (Gebel Dokhan, Egypt), has been a highly valued rock since ancient times for its durability, beauty, and strong symbolic association with imperial power and divinity, especially due to its purple colour. During the late Roman and early Christian periods, its meaning expanded, adding new connotations related to the blood of Christ, the sign of the New Covenant, and to the martyrs. This study examines the use of porphyry in Roman architecture, from the imperial to the late Roman period, identifying some patterns in its use. Likewise, a possible origin is proposed for two of the largest column shafts made with this stone in Rome, and reused in the 5th century AD in the vestibule of the Lateran baptistery. Based on archaeological data and references in ancient sources, its origin is suggested from the Temple of the Sun, erected in Rome by Emperor Aurelian.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".