For the modern visitor the first view of the Temple of Artemis is a pair of columns rising to their full height of some eighteen meters, stepping down from them other columns preserved at lesser heights, and white marble walls set against the dramatic rise of the acropolis of Sardis with its sharp peaks and ridges (Figs. 1.1–1.5). The ancient traveler, also approaching from the Hermus plain and the Pactolus River valley to the northwest, would have seen an even more dramatic scene of the ruin, with more columns rising above a sloping pasture, possibly with a colorful camel caravan camping under them (see Figs. 2.4–2.5). The temple is oriented east–west, resting on the lower slopes of the acropolis, in the broad valley of the Pactolus River, directly across from another massif, the steep cliffs of which are surrounded by rounded lower hills now pockmarked by the graves of the ancient city, loosely known as the necropolis (Figs. 1.6–1.7). The acropolis, rising to a height of ca. 169 m above the Hermus plain, is an extension of the vast and magnificent Tmolos mountain range (Bozdag), the “blessed” snowy peaks of which, for six months of the year (let us hope they long stay so), offered a formidable background to the Artemis temple and its sprawling, grandly remote sacred land. For the odd traveler then and now approaching this land – and the temple – from the acropolis and the hilly terrain on the southeast, the temple presents its very long southern flank on a straight axis between the two sacred eminences (Fig. 1.8). Looking beyond the temple, the Pactolus valley opens widely and kindly into the fertile “chariot plain” of Lydia, and beyond that, to the northwest, hundreds of tumuli are spread over the hazy horizon – the monumental burial realm of Lydian kings and notables, its modern Turkish moniker, Bin Tepeler (“thousand mounds”), aptly and impressively exaggerated.
Figure 1.1 Sanctuary of Artemis, Sardis. General view of the Pactolus valley, acropolis, and Tmolos Mountains; looking east-southeast.
Figure 1.2 Temple of Artemis, Sardis, with archaic/Hellenistic altar in front, acropolis behind; looking southeast.
Figure 1.3 Temple of Artemis with columns 6 and 7, looking east towards the acropolis peak.
Figure 1.4 Temple of Artemis, east end general view, looking southwest.
Figure 1.5 Temple of Artemis, general view looking east towards the acropolis.
Figure 1.6 Temple of Artemis, east front columns, looking west towards the necropolis.
Figure 1.7 Temple of Artemis, aerial, looking west towards Pactolus valley and the necropolis.
Figure 1.8 Temple of Artemis, general view towards northwest, Pactolus valley and Hermus plain, with “Bin Tepeler” burial mounds in the distance.
The temple in its original phase was a Seleucid building. The Seleucids, or the Seleucidae, were a Macedonian royal dynasty founded by Seleucus I Nicator (r. ca. 312/305–281 BCE), a leading general of Alexander the Great. After the breakup of Alexander’s Macedonian empire following the hero’s death in 323 BCE, Seleucus conquered in a remarkably short time a vast territory, creating a Near Eastern empire centered in Babylonia but extending northwest to Cappadocia in central Anatolia. By the beginning of the third century BCE, Seleucus the Conqueror (=Nicator, naturally) had taken western Anatolia in the decisive Battle of Koroupedion in 281 BCE, and established Sardis as the western capital of his extensive domain. The decision must have been made then to embellish the venerable Sanctuary of Artemis of Sardis with a colossal temple worthy of the power of Seleucid sovereignty in the west – a remarkable building but an unremarkable public relations act. The sanctuary had a colossal altar dating back to the late sixth/early fifth century BCE, but no temple (Fig 1.2; see Plan 2). Since Seleucus was killed within a year of his Sardian victory, the patrons responsible for the new temple were likely to have been the new Seleucid king and queen, Antiochus I and Stratonike. More will be said about the sociopolitical world inherited by the Seleucids in western Asia Minor and the extraordinary presence of Queen Stratonike, daughter of Demetrius I and granddaughter of Antigonus I Monophthalmus (“One-Eyed”), in her new capital, Sardis, where she lived for twenty-seven years and died in peace.
It must have taken fifty to sixty years to complete the first phase of the temple at Sardis. We have no way of knowing the stages and sequences of the construction, but the temple as a functional, viable, and visually recognizable entity must have been open for business, with a marble tile roof and possibly with the cult image of the goddess inside, around 220 BCE. This “temple” consisted of only a very elongated all-marble cella (67.51 × 23 m) facing west towards the existing altar, as do some other Artemis temples in Asia Minor such as those at Ephesus and Magnesia-on-the-Meander (Fig. 1.2). It had a frontal pronaos porch of six columns in antis in two rows (ca. 18 × 17.70 m) and an opisthodomos of two columns in antis (ca. 18 × 6 m); the interior of the cella (which was ca. 1.60 m higher than the ground outside) had twelve columns in two rows with the image platform (basis) in the center (ca. 39.60 × 18.60 m) (Figs. 1.7, 1.9; see Plan 5). These tall Ionic columns carrying capitals of extraordinary refinement (now preserved only in their foundations) were the only columnar elements of the original Hellenistic phase. The columns of the east front, including the two intact columns, are Roman (Figs. 1.6–1.7, 1.10). None of the peripteral columns of the temple were in place.
Figure 1.9 Temple of Artemis, general view of cella from the top of column 7; looking west.
Figure 1.10 Temple of Artemis, columns 7 (left) and 6 (right), preserved intact; looking west.
We should consider the Hellenistic-era temple, technically (or materially), at least, unfinished. The building had to wait a very long time, well over three centuries, before workers moved in to recommence the next major reconstruction (rather, recreation) in the Roman era – as we strongly believe, during the time of Hadrian and clearly associated with the visit of Hadrian and Sabina to Sardis in 123/24 CE. This was the occasion for the granting of the city its second neokorate honors, or the privilege of establishing an official temple of imperial cult. Designed as a Roman-era pseudodipteros, this phase of the temple, too, remained unfinished (Figs. 1.4, 1.11). We can only imagine the grand vision of this colossal temple in its beautiful landscape, with a posse of sacerdotes and priestesses in front of its grand altar, below the acropolis, in a hypothetical reconstruction John Goodinson provided for us (Fig. 1.12). Of the total of sixty-four columns (with a height of 17.87 m with capitals) needed for this daunting plan, only those of the east and some of the west front and almost none of the sides (except in their rough foundations) were finished (Plan 5). The cella was redesigned to incorporate the newly granted imperial cult by dividing it into two equal chambers, the west retained by Artemis, the east dedicated to and filled with the colossal cult images of the royal family (mainly Antonine heads were found; see below). The decision to take away half the building from Artemis to accommodate the imperial cult, however exalted this new function may have been, must have engendered serious, and possibly bitter, political discussions among the city authorities and the lay populace (more of this later).
Figure 1.12 Reconstruction of Roman-era pseudodipteros with the grand altar on the west.
Based on Vitruvius’ strong testimony, the pseudodipteros system in temple design was “invented” (though a better term would have been “codified”) by the architect Hermogenes who, we know from the latest archaeological evidence, was active in Asia Minor during the last quarter of the third century BCE (Vitruvius 3.2, 6). The ideal, or regular, Hermogenean system (as best exemplified in his Temple of Artemis at Magnesia-on-the Meander; see below) posits a dipteral configuration (that is, two rows of columns around the cella instead of the usual one) but with the inner row removed, resulting in two intercolumniation ambulatories (pteroma) between the exterior colonnades and the cella walls. The imperial period recreation of the Sardis pseudodipteros is interesting and important because it is not a rule-bound example harking back to the prestigious Hermogenean pseudodipteros model but a creative, unorthodox, even unique recreation of it. The pseudodipteral arrangement was especially favored in Asia Minor, as befitting of its Anatolian creator. There are very few examples of it from Greece and almost none from Italy and the west. Hence the relationship of the imperial-era Sardis pseudodipteros to other earlier and later examples constitutes a prominent aspect of this study. One important anomaly displayed by the Sardis temple is the unequal width of the ambulatory that circles the cella: it is two intercolumniations wide on the long sides, but three on the ends. The design of its east and west porches also follows a unique arrangement, unknown within the traditional categories of Hellenistic and Roman pseudodipteral temples, a subject that, along with an extended consideration of recreative and unorthodox temple design, we will return to for a fuller discussion. In sum, the Temple of Artemis at Sardis is important for being both a Greek and a Roman temple, a hybrid, which straddles the historical temple traditions of Asia Minor chronologically and architecturally.
Post-classical History: The Afterlife of the Temple
Construction activity at the Sardis temple, mainly the business of adding marble block foundations and column bases along its long side peristyles, must have slowed down through the late second and the third century. Over the fourth century, with the concomitant rise of Christianity, the appeal of the Artemis cult and the pagan use of the temple must have diminished and eventually ceased. Yet the growing anti-pagan policies of the late Roman emperors were often followed by periods of tolerance of the ancient cults and memory places associated with them. Periods of ambiguity between popular cults and the new monotheistic religion were not uncommon. In Asia Minor, while some temples were closed, and cult images plundered and broken late in Constantine’s reign (r. 306–337 CE), others enjoyed some measure of acceptance. Some of these images, and traditional sacred places lingered on in sentimental public memory and survived into late antiquity (Rojas Reference Rojas2010). Given this fluid relationship between Christianity and waning pagan beliefs, some form of worship of Artemis must have continued at Sardis through the course of the fourth century.
Sometime around 400 CE, a small church (Church M) was built in the southeast corner of the temple and a rudimentary entryway created as the ground level in front of the church had risen as much as a meter (Fig. 1.4). Judging by the many Christian crosses carved on the interior walls of the southeast anta and the marble jambs of the east temple door, it is likely that the whole east porch of the temple served as a kind of collecting space, or “atrium,” for the church (Figs. 1.9, 1.13; see Plan 2).
Figure 1.13 Temple of Artemis, north jamb of east door with Christian graffiti; looking northwest.
In the following centuries successive landslides of gravel, sand, and mud from the high ground at or around the acropolis buried the temple except for some of the columns of the east end, which remained visible above ground at various heights into our time, including the two famously fully preserved columns carrying their capitals (Figs. 1.10, 1.14). These columns set against the picturesque mountain background were recorded in word or drawing by various travelers, artists, and architects who visited the site from the fifteenth century onward (see below). Through the eighth and ninth centuries, extensive destruction of the temple was in progress. Geological studies indicate that much of the east end was buried by the ninth century, including the church. During this period the temple was clearly being used as a stone quarry; looters were digging even the deep foundations of the columns. The huge fine marble blocks repurposed for contemporary construction were undoubtedly good building material and their reuse undoubtedly made good economic sense, but they also presented insurmountable problems of transportation by land to distant locations where larger buildings (such as Byzantine churches or Islamic mosques) could have found a new purpose for them. In late Roman and Byzantine Sardis, dismantled blocks from the temple, or the bath-gymnasium complex, or the theater and stadium found substantial use in civic and religious buildings. There is also a good case for the rich role played by railroad construction: transportation of heavy blocks became possible after the railroad reached Sardis in 1875 (Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh2013). Still, the widely accepted and sensible solution for the use of large marble blocks was breaking them up to manageable size or feeding them into lime kilns to produce this much-coveted building material. Copious evidence for lime kiln activity around the temple from the fourth through the nineteenth century exists.
Figure 1.14 Columns 6 and 7, east end of the temple, before excavation, 1909; looking west.
Repurposing the Past as a Resource
The idea of a beautiful marble block, especially one carrying fine ornament, half buried and disintegrated in a lime kiln is sad and disheartening. Inherited wisdom describes such activities as vandalism (unfairly associating such activities with the Vandals), though less so if these marble blocks were instead used in the construction of later buildings. The Hadrianic rebuilding of the Sardis temple released sufficient numbers of column drums from the interior of the Hellenistic cella to be recarved and proudly reused in the monumental tetrapylon/gate downtown at the western entrance to a main marble street (the absolute date of the early phase of this gate is not clear yet). Modern village houses in Turkey often incorporate ancient (sometimes carved and ornamented) stones in prominent and prized locations, honoring the material remains of the past in a simple, sane, and respectful “repurposing.” These examples represent a meaningful continuity between the past and the present. So, a new and unprejudiced voice in positive recognition of the use of spolia needs to be heard.
Not all dismantling activity should be seen as vandalism because in antiquity demolition was often an orderly process of salvage for future construction (Kinney Reference Kinney1997, Reference Kinney2001; Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh2011; Liverani Reference Liverani, Brilliant and Kinney2011). Quite apart from the wide variety of meanings subsumed by the concept of “continuity” in building, salvage supports the economic viability of reuse, indicating that “the cost of second-hand ashlar blocks could be roughly 80% lower than the cost of newly produced blocks” (Barker Reference Barker, Camporeale, Dessales and Pizzo2010). Still, when judged individually, some ambiguity persists on the merits and demerits of dismantling ancient monuments (hence obliterating their history in the process) for their reuse in a modern one. For Cyriacus of Ancona, a humanist who gained audience with Hamza Bey, the governor of Bursa, in 1444, and complained of the dismantling of the Temple of Zeus-Hadrian in Cyzicus in Bithynia for the construction of the port of Mudanya on the Marmara Sea, the process was certainly regrettable. This is an instance where we are left to judge whether the request to stop reusing the blocks of the ancient temple for a project of unquestionable merit for its community was ultimately beneficial, even admirable. At any rate, polite and enlightened, Hamza Bey entertained the learned humanist, but continued with the port project (Belozerskaya Reference Belozerskaya2009; Yegül Reference Yegül2020b, I, 14).
While reconsidering the subject of spolia as a positive and rational choice from a purely practical, economic, but also cultural point of view, we should nevertheless be aware that each case, each geography, had its own consequences to be evaluated. Most of the new, positive view on “repurposing” (as in the studies quoted above) is focused on examples from the city of Rome, where the demand for second-hand building materials would have been quite different than at Sardis. Also, geography was paramount in creating demand. Any large and heavy salvage materials from Sardis, if not used on the site, had to be carried some 100–120 km over hilly country to the coast, to potential venues at Smyrna or Ephesus. Hence, they tended to be left in place or broken up for the needs of smaller local buildings or for lime. Burning marble for lime, which we commonly disdain, is also a meaningful repurposing and continuity of the past. Lime, as mentioned above, is an important and coveted construction material. It is also a solution for “reuse” when the reused material, typically very fine but large blocks of marble, even when sliced, is too heavy to carry, given the technology of the later periods; so, fire does the job of reducing these elements to manageable form or size. It is telling that most of the reused blocks of such buildings are of moderate size (rough and irregular blocks ca. 0.90–1.20 m long and 0.40–0.50 m high, but not the 2–3 m long polished marble blocks of the temple). Still, considering the sheer volume of marble that must have been available from the abandoned temple (the part remaining now is no more than about one-tenth of what it once was), and accounting for some of this material being broken up and reused locally or burned for lime, where it all went is an enigma.
History of Excavations and Investigations
The earliest attempt to excavate in the temple in a very limited way was that of Robert “Palmyra” Wood and his team, who visited the site in 1750 and uncovered the column in front of the northeast anta pier (column 16) which was standing intact. The objective of determining the full height of the column was achieved by a lightning-quick excavation that revealed no stratigraphic or archaeological information. In 1812, C. R. Cockerell, a British architect who visited the site, employed a Cretan to dig down to see the base of one of the columns of the east front, but “[We] had to give up after we got down ten feet without reaching it” (Cockerell Reference Cockerell1903, 143–45). In 1850, George Dennis, the British consul in Smyrna, made several trenches in the cella and discovered a colossal marble head identified as Faustina the Elder, wife of the emperor Antoninus Pius (r. 138–61 CE), now in the British Museum in London (see below). In 1904, Gustave Mendel, representing the Ottoman Imperial Museum in Istanbul, under the aegis of the director Osman Hamdi Bey, dug two trenches, one down to the bases between the east front columns 5 and 6, and another on the south side of column 1 (the northeast corner), but did not continue owing to lack of funds.
The first systematic and scientific archaeological excavations in Sardis were undertaken from 1910 to 1914 under the directorship of Howard Crosby Butler, a professor of architecture from Princeton University, under the sponsorship of a private group of supporters (mostly from New York City) called the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis. The team, often working six-month seasons, excavated and investigated successfully a very large area during these four years. Excavations at the temple (clearly the pièce de résistance of the whole expedition) started in March 1910 and all the temple and much of the area around it had been uncovered by the beginning of World War I in 1914. Further work was planned but not realized because of the start of the Greco-Turkish War in 1918. The results were published in 1922 and 1925 as the first two volumes of a planned publication series (Butler Reference Butler1922, Reference Butler1925a; a supplemental atlas of plates was also published: Butler Reference Butler1925b).
Apart from a partial (salvage) season in 1922, during the last year of the Greco-Turkish War (and by permission of the Greek occupation government in Smyrna), the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis never returned to the site and was quietly dissolved by the end of the 1920s. The primary disagreement between this group (who wished to export all Sardis finds to America against the legal provisions of the Sardis permit) and the Turkish Department of Antiquities of the newly created republic was over the unauthorized removal of fifty-eight crates of antiquities to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. After long and sometimes bitter negotiations and with the expert help of Admiral Mark W. Bristol, then the high commissioner and diplomatic representative of the United States in Turkey, most of this material was amicably returned to Turkey (Yegül Reference Yegül and Redford2010b, Reference Yegül and Kökdemir2013). Some objects, such as the superb Ionic capital from the temple (and parts of a column and base), which became a much-loved, iconic holding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were offered by the Turkish authorities as a gift to the museum in memory of Howard Crosby Butler, who had died on August 13, 1922, in Paris, returning from the last Sardis season (see Figs. 3.88, 7.43).
How scientific were Butler’s excavations at the temple (and the rest of Sardis)? Although he used many of the current practices and methods of a modern archaeological excavation (field books, measured drawings, coordinates, levels, and copious photographic recording), his approach was limited but still followed the standards of his day. It is understandable that today’s slow, careful, and layered digging and recording practices could not have been used to excavate a truly colossal building buried up to 6–8 m in clay and silt in a mere four years. Even the lifting and moving of colossal blocks of stone, some weighing up to 10–12 tonnes, was an astonishing and heroic achievement (for which his engineers used a narrow-gauge railway, a true miniature locomotive [lost in World War I], and a rail-mounted 3-tonne crane) (Fig. 1.15). Butler’s team did use coordinate grid and elevation systems to determine the locations and elevations in the field, but little of this information, curiously, was transferred to the temple’s final publication (Butler Reference Butler1925a). Judging by one specimen found in the Butler Archives of the Princeton University Department of Art History and Archaeology, Butler’s excavators must have kept field books and “logs.” It contains some clear and accurate measured sketches but little in the line of recording the excavation process, finds, and stratigraphy. It is likely that there were others which were more informative that were kept at the excavation house but lost along with other items when the house was broken into and largely destroyed during the militia wars that ravaged this region through 1918–22.
Figure 1.15 Iron crane used by H. C. Butler, Reference Butler1911.
Excavations resumed at Sardis in 1958 with the directorship of George M. A. Hanfmann, under the aegis of the Harvard–Cornell Archaeological Exploration of Sardis – and they continue today. Between 1960 and 1970, Hanfmann undertook a partial study of the temple and its environs, and ten trenches were opened. Further small-scale excavations and sondages in the temple intermittently between 1996 and 2012 helped to clarify aspects of the building’s structure, design, and history; these were supervised by Crawford H. Greenewalt Jr. (director 1976–2007), Nicholas D. Cahill (director from 2008), and the author (Yegül). Between 2010 and 2012 the large altar, originally constructed in two phases, Lydian and Hellenistic, was consolidated and restored. Perhaps the most remarkable new field project at the temple was the removal of the damaging, black biological film from the entire structure in 2014–18. This cleaning process returned the temple to its original superb creamy color of the marble and revealed the many fine details which had been obscured by lichen and cyanobacteria.
Outside the work of the Harvard–Cornell Expedition, the Temple of Artemis has been the subject of several scholarly studies, notably by Gottfried Gruben
in 1961, Wolfram Hoepfner
in 1990, and Thomas Howe in 1999 (see below for discussion).
