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The
Temple Artemis
at
Ephesus
In what must be one my favourite sites in the Ancient World, Ephesus
stood another of the Seven Wonders: The Temple of Artemis.
The story goes that around 1100AD a crusader visited Ephesus and
looking at the swampy village asked the locals where the bay was?
The habour? Where the temple had gone? The locals looked at him
and asked:
"What temple?"
And indeed, when I visited the ruins almost nine centuries later,
the bay had silted up and the city of Ephesus was located some 3
kilometers inland, the old harbour buildings bordering a flat plain
of rich loam.
Almost 3,000 years ago, Ephesus was a small village in Asia Minor.
It's inhabitants worshiped Artemis. This goddess wasn't the Greek
virgin goddess of hunt, but an older earth mother type fertility
goddess, who's statues carried a large necklace of what could be
either eggs or.... 1) A stone, possible a meteorite was
on display in her temple.
Four hundred years later it was a rich port city that traded all
across the Mediterranean and deep into the heartland of Asia Minor.
The town chose the architect Chersiphron to build them a new temple
to Artemis, a temple worthy of the goddess and the city.
However, the temple didn't last long as in 550BC King Croesus conquered
the city and temple was destroyed in the fighting. Croesus hired
an architect named Theodorus and had him build a new and bigger
temple on the spot. Almost a hundred meters long, by 50 meters wide
it was easily four times the size of the previous temple.
The gods can't have been too pleased with it as in 356BC disaster
struck. A young man by the name of Herostratus set fire to the temple
and destroyed it. When asked why he did it? He replied:
"I want to be in the history books."
Well, he certainly succeeded,but was quickly killed by the enraged
Ephesians, who also decreed anyone that spoke of this horrible person
should be put to death as well.
Ephesus, at this time one of the richest cities in the world commissioned
Scopas of Paros to build them a new temple. Scopas created a foundation
of charcoal and fleece in the swampy ground and started building.
The resulting temple was easily twice as large as the Parthenon
in Athens and had sculpted bases on each of it's 127, 20 meter high
columns Philon of Byzantium writes of the result:
"I have seen the walls and Hanging Gardens of ancient
Babylon, the statue of Olympian Zeus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the
mighty work of the high Pyramids and the tomb of Mausolus. But when
I saw the temple at Ephesus rising to the clouds, all these other
wonders were put in the shade."
Pliny records that it took 120 years to build this massive structure
and we know that it was still under construction when Alexander
the Great came by in 333BC. He wanted his name on the temple and
offered to spend money on it's construction. The city wasn't too
happy with this idea and convinced Alexander that "one god should
not build a temple for another."
The temple and it's souvenir sellers were still around when St.
Paul visited in 57AD. St. Paul tried to convince the Ephesians Christianity
was the better option, but the people were not impressed by his
arguments and forced him to leave the city.
In 262AD the city was raided by the Goths who sacked the city and
destroyed the temple. Constantine tried to breath life back into
Ephesus but had chosen for Christianity and ignored the remains
of the temple. However, the harbour silted up and the place was
eventually abandoned.
By the end of the 19th century English archeologists
excavated the temple's foundations, took the best bits home and
promptly forgot all about it. Currently the temple's remains have
fallen victim to the marsh again and but a single column marks the
site of it's majesty.
1) They probably
were something else, but that's not repeated in polite company.
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