Aging

Temple of Artemis

Coordinates : 37°56′59″N 27°21′50″E

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Temple of Artemis (Greek: Ἀρτεμίσιον,
or Artemision), also known less precisely as
the Temple of Diana, was a Greek temple
dedicated to a goddess Greeks identified as
Artemis and was one of the Seven Wonders of
the Ancient World. It was located in Ephesus
(near the modern town of Selçuk inpresentday Turkey), and was completely rebuilt three
times before its eventual destruction in 401.[1]
Only foundations and sculptural fragments of
the latest of the temples at the site remain.
The first sanctuary (temenos) antedated the
Model of Temple of Artemis, Miniatürk Park,
Ionic immigration by many years, and dates to
Istanbul, Turkey
the Bronze Age. Callimachus, in his Hymn to
Artemis, attributedit to the Amazons. In the
7th century the old temple was destroyed by a flood. Its reconstruction began around
550 BC, under the Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes, at the expense
of Croesus of Lydia: the project took 10 years to complete, only to be destroyed in an act
of arson by Herostratus. It was later rebuilt.
Antipater of Sidon, who compiled the list of the Seven Wonders,describes the finished
temple:
I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and
the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus
of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of
Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds,
those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, "Lo,apart from Olympus,
the Sun never looked on aught so grand".[2]

Contents
1 Location and history
1.1 Earliest phase
2 Second phase
2.1 Destruction by Herostratus
3 Third phase
4 Rediscovery of the temple
5 Cult and influence
6 Ephesian Artemis
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

Location and history
The Temple of Artemis was located near the ancient city of
Ephesus, about 50 km south from themodern port city of İzmir,
in Turkey. Today the site lies on the edge of the modern town of
Selçuk.

Synthesizing Artemis
of Ephesus: an 18thcentury engraving of a
Roman marble copy of
a Greek replica of a
lost Geometric period
xoanon.

Earliest phase
The sacred site (temenos) at Ephesus was far older than the Artemision itself.
Pausanias [3] was certain that it antedated the Ionic immigration bymany years, being
older even than the oracular shrine of Apollo at Didyma. He said that the pre-Ionic
inhabitants of the city were Leleges and Lydians. Callimachus, in his Hymn to Artemis,
attributed the earliest temenos at Ephesus to the Amazons, whose worship he imagines
already centered upon an image (bretas) of Artemis, their matron goddess.
Modern archaeology cannot confirm Callimachus'sAmazons, but Pausanias's account of
the site's antiquity seems well-founded. Before World War I, site excavations by David
George Hogarth[4] identified three successive temple buildings. Re-excavations in 198788[5] confirmed that the site was occupied as early as the Bronze Age, with a sequence
of pottery finds that extend forward to Middle Geometric times, when the clay-floored
peripteral temple wasconstructed, in the second half of the 8th century BC. [6] The
peripteral temple at Ephesus offers the earliest example of a peripteral type on the coast
of Asia Minor, and perhaps the earliest Greek temple surrounded by colonnades
anywhere.
In the 7th century, a flood[7] destroyed the temple,
depositing over half a meter of sand and flotsam
over a floor of hard-packed clay. Among the flood
debriswere the remains of a carved ivory plaque of a
griffin and the Tree of Life, apparently North Syrian,

T he Temple of Artemis, as
imagined in this hand-coloured
engraving by Martin Heemskerck
(1498 - 1574), has the "oldfashioned" look of Santa Maria
Novella in Florence and other Italian
quattrocento churches of the
previous generation.

griffin and the Tree of Life, apparently North Syrian,
and...