AURIOL. – A French town in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, famous for two early Christian altars of singular form, destroyed along with their church during the Revolution in 1792, but later reconstructed from their fragments with precision.
The first (now in Marseille at the Musée Borély) is a marble slab measuring 102 x 57 x 10 cm, with a recess on the upper face of about 4 cm, and carved on the side panels with vine tendrils, and on the front with twelve doves (the Apostles) moving toward Christ, represented by his monogram (v. DE MONOGRAMMA CHRISTI). The second (now completely destroyed by ignorant masons) was a parallelepiped formed from four square limestone blocks placed one above the other; the topmost block, serving as the mensa, had a slightly recessed upper face and in its center a small well for relics; on the front panel of the same block was the Christological monogram within a circle or crown, with the usual letters A and Ω, and stylized flowers on either side.
These two altars must belong to the 5th–6th century.