The Hellenistic and Roman sculptures at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums chronicle the history of their time in stone.

As in all the civilisations of antiquity, in Greece too beliefs were influential in every aspect of life. Accordingly Greek sculpture arose and developed in conjunction with religious needs. Due to this influence, in the early periods especially (Greek Archaic period, 7th-6th century B.C.), the sculptures of the Greek artists are static. But the Greeks, who created the gods and their adventures based on their own world as a model, regarded the human body as partaking of the divine and, after this early period, created sculptures of ideal proportions in which the problem of the static was overcome.
The principal types of sculpture of the early period are statues of young men, known as ‘kouros’, and of young women, known as ‘kore’, made under essentially Egyptian influence.