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This article is about the early Christian sarcophagus called “the praying lady” in the Musée départemental Arles antique. It is carved from an architectural block of Carrara marble, which has preserved traces of its original decoration : Nymphs or Charites walking to a thymiaterion. The representation and the treatment of the remaining drapery, with the type of incense burner, date this block with neo-Attic production of the Augustan period. In the second half of the 4th cent. AD the frieze was levelled for carving the sarcophagus. Comparing chests in Rome, the author believes that this block originally adorned a pagan building, perhaps in Rome, which had been dismantled, the stone then being re-cut by workshops carving Christian sarcophagi in Rome and taken later to Arles.