Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Temple of Artemis at Sardis By Fikret K. Yegül. (Archaeological Exploration of Sardis Reports 7). 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2020. Pp. 336. $150. ISBN 9780674248564 (cloth).

2022; Archaeological Institute of America; Volume: 126; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/721904

1939-828X

Thomas Noble Howe,

Archaeological Research and Protection

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Temple of Artemis at Sardis By Fikret K. Yegül. (Archaeological Exploration of Sardis Reports 7). 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2020. Pp. 336. $150. ISBN 9780674248564 (cloth).Thomas Noble HoweThomas Noble HoweFondazione Restoring Ancient Stabiae Southwestern University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Artemis temple of Sardis, one of the four great Ionic temples of Greek Asia Minor (along with the Artemision of Ephesos, the Apollonion of Didyma, and the Heraion of Samos) finally has a monumental publication appropriate to its monumental status. The two volumes also go a long way toward clarifying the many enigmas of the previous accounts of its history.Yegül has worked at the Sardis Harvard–Cornell Expedition site for 57 years and on the recording of the Artemis temple for 33 years (while producing several other significant volumes of architectural history). Here, he has created a beautiful and lavishly illustrated publication in two volumes—text and illustrations (photographs and drawings) in one, and plates in the other—of a type that is rare in this age of digital abbreviation. Thanks to the Harvard–Cornell Archaeological Expedition of Sardis, and Harvard University Press, it is beautifully published with hundreds of clear and delicate line drawings, mostly by Yegül in ink on mylar. Several foldout plates in the text volume make a close reading of the extensive descriptive and analytical text easy to follow, and there is a separate boxed set of 24 gorgeous foldout plates of hand-drawn ink-on-mylar drawings. The publication in fact includes almost every drawing ever made by any scholar of the site since the 17th century, as well as numerous old photographs. The two volumes are truly a lucid compendium of all of the previous work on the site. The coordination of new drawings and photographs is exemplary.The most significant outcome of the publication is that it has largely resolved the basic chronology of the building and much of its historical context. In addition, Yegül critically examines and expands the conclusion of a few other scholars that the final (incomplete) pseudodipteros of the second century CE is not so much the continuation of the Hellenistic tradition of Hermogenes but the end of that tradition: fundamentally an eclectic Roman modification of a Hellenistic design. There never was a “Hermogenean” design. Yegül arrives at these conclusions both by critically evaluating all previous theories, and by thorough extensive original observations and critical comparanda.He accepts and reinforces the general impression that the Sardis Artemis temple was begun after the victory of Seleukos I at the battle of Koroupedion in 281 BCE, which gave him control of most of Asia Minor. Building probably was initiated by his successor, Antiochos I, immediately after Seleukos’ death in 281, and by Antiochos’ queen (and former stepmother) Stratonike, who established Sardis as an eastern capital and royal residence. In this context, the point of such an immense building project in a city that was now a Hellenistic Greek imperial capital, but that had probably very few traces of Greek culture, makes sense as a declaration of assertive post-Alexander hellenization. The author assembles a wide variety of very scattered documentation to argue that the temple was in use as a depository for documents by 240–220 BCE, or at the outside by 250–200 BCE.This temple is speculated by Yegül, and most other authors, to have been intended as an Ionic dipteros although none of the exterior peristyle columns were ever erected. The cella was roofed with marble tiles supported probably by a timber roof and marble interior Ionic columns: two rows of six in the elongated cella, two rows of three in the west-facing pronaos (foundations preserved), and one pair in the east-facing opisthodomos (the foundations were excavated and removed in the fourth or fifth century according to the excavators). The cult of Artemis had existed for some time before, as attested by the so-called Lydian Altar 1 (LA 1), dated to the late sixth or fifth century BCE. The transformation into a Hellenistic sanctuary presented major architectural problems, since the temple had to be inserted into the space between the foot of the Acropolis hill and the Pactolus river, and at the same time incorporate two preexisting cult monuments dating slightly earlier: the so-called sandstone image base and the expanded LA 2, which was directly incorporated into the west-facing main front. Yegül sorts out some earlier theories that some of the Hellenistic columns were removed from the interior (presumably from the west end of the cella) and reused on the east and west porch as pedestal columns, the pedestals being necessary to accommodate the 1.60–1.70 m difference in height between the interior paving and the pteroma. He also supports that some of the capitals on the Roman east front are Hellenistic but that several others follow the Hellenistic pattern very closely. The famous Capital C (in the Metropolitan Museum, New York) he accepts as Hellenistic but along with other scholars suspects it was never reused, or even installed, but kept on site as a “paradeigma,” which influenced the almost identical carving of the Roman capitals.The second phase of the temple is associated with a probable visit to Sardis by Hadrian and Sabina in 123/124 CE and the granting of neokorate honors (a temple of the imperial cult) to Sardis for the second time. The cella was subdivided to provide an eastern chamber for the imperial cult featuring colossal portraits attributed to at least five members the Antonine dynasty (fragments of which were recovered) and probably also including Hadrian and Sabina, and a western chamber presumably for an Artemis image. The imperial cult reused the original sandstone image base (which was no longer in the center of the cella but now at the back of its eastern half, facing east); a new east door was added facing the acropolis in the east; and the former west wall with front door was removed and rebuilt farther west, creating two symmetrical back-to-back chambers. Parallels to the temples of Amor and Roma in Rome and Zeus at Aizanoi are pointed out and illustrated.Yegül makes the design of this temple quite clear and does an admirable job of sorting out the other unresolved questions of intended design, such as the juggling of reused and new columns and problems of roof and architrave. A salient feature of the design is that the colonnades do not wrap around the building creating a uniform peripteral space surrounding the cella but create four distinct spatial compartments: two prostyle porches and two lateral pteromata. The prostyle porches and the walls seem to have carried a two-fascia architrave with cyma recta that wrap around the walls and the porch but do not run to the east front entablature. There is no evidence of fragments of a frieze or cornice.The prostyle porches within the pteroma are distinctly Roman Republican and Early Imperial-period features and not Hellenistic (cf. Mars Ultor and Jupitor Stator, Rome, and Hercules Victor, Tibur, and most closely Hadrian’s Pantheon). Yegül wisely does not call this the “Roman connection,” as do other authors, but rather considers it characteristic of the fluid exchange of cultural forms in the cosmopolitan Roman world of the second century. Yegül makes no specific gamble on the identity of the architect, or whether he was Greek, Lydian, or Roman, and he makes only a cautious mention of a certain architect Dionysios from “vine-rich Tmolos” (the mountain above Sardis), thus presumably a Sardian known from an inscription in Patara, where he clearly did not live but was buried (246–47).The arrangement of most of the interior of the east cella is fairly certain: eight of the original Hellenistic columns remained in place flanking the older image base and the Antonine cult statues in what became the east cella. In the west cella, there is more of a problem with the reconstruction. As Yegül points out, four columns of the original Hellenistic cella had to be removed, but they did not align with the six columns of the original pronaos. Yegül comes up with a very tentative attempt at a suggestion, pointing out a shabby foundation on the site of the original west wall which could have supported a single pair of columns in the middle of the long chamber, so that the long chamber had only one pair of columns and perhaps two pairs of engaged columns on the end walls—an odd arrangement to be sure, but possible with long span timber trusses. Yegül makes only a few highly speculative reconstructions, this being one, and the other that the two prostyle porches, which also have spans much too long for stone architraves, might have been timber or open to the sky. However, the span is only slightly more than the spans of the near-contemporary Hadrianic Pantheon, which employed the bronze trusses that Bernini melted down. These remain almost the only major unresolved, and maybe unresolvable, features of the Artemis temple after Yegül’s study.The bulk of the text is clearly edited and supported with hundreds of photographs and drawings of almost every block and clamp cutting. The volumes thus provide a solid cyclopedic compendium of a major, well-documented locus of Hellenistic and Roman techniques: Hellenistic use of U-clamps in upper blocks and Roman use of U-clamps in upper and wing clamps in lower; linear ashlar foundations for exterior linear foundation for Hellenistic colonnades vs. Roman use of pier foundations packed with mortared rubble (the local equivalent of Roman concrete), a construction common in Asia Minor, including the so-called Early Imperial Wadi B temple, likely the first neokorate temple.Sardis is not an easy site to study: most of the remains of the great city are ephemeral in mudbrick or rubble, and elements of durable classical architecture are few and deeply buried and are isolated by colluvium from the acropolis. This is truly a gorgeous publication, and a gorgeous piece of complex, lucid scholarship. It gives a vivid, excellently documented, coherent history of a great monument and its place in architectural history at the crossroads of cultures and epochs. In our age of promising digital publication, this is a publication in the old style as good as it gets. It also demonstrates the benefit of a project headed by one architect over its entire run.Notes[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 126, Number 4October 2022 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 360Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721904HistoryPublished online August 09, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.