Category Archives: Greek

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Paestum

Paestum was a major ancient Greek city on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea in Magna Graecia. After its foundation by Greek colonists under the name of Poseidonia (Ancient Greek: Ποσειδωνία) it was eventually conquered by the Lucanians and later the Romans. The Lucanians renamed it to Paistos and the Romans gave the city its current name as Pesto or Paestum.
The ruins of Paestum are notable for their three ancient Greek temples which are in a very good state of preservation. Today the remains of the city are found in the modern frazione of the same name, which is part of the comune of Capaccio in the Province of Salerno, Campania, Italy.
According to Strabo the city was founded as Poseidonia (named after the Greek god of the sea) by Greek Achaeans from Sybaris. The colonists had built fortifications close to the sea, but then decided to found the city further inland at a higher elevation. The fortifications might have been built to the south of Poseidonia on the promontory where Agropoli is now. According to the historical tradition the sanctuary to Poseidon was located there, after which the city would have been named. The date of Poseidonia’s founding is not given by ancient sources, but the archaeological evidence gives a date of approximately 600 BC.

Alternatively, the Sybarites may in fact have been Troezenians. Aristotle wrote that a group of Troezenians was expelled from Sybaris by the Achaeans after their joint founding of that city. Gaius Julius Solinus calls Paestum a Dorian colony and Strabo mentions that Troezen was once called Poseidonia. As a consequence it has been argued that Paestum was founded by the Troezenians referred to by Aristotle. Another hypothesis is that the Sybarites were aided by Dorians in their founding of Poseidonia.
Archaeological evidence from Paestum’s first centuries indicates the building of roads, temples and other features of a growing city. Coinage, architecture and molded votive figurines all attest to close relations maintained with Metaponto in the sixth and fifth centuries.It is assumed that Poseidonia harbored refugees from its mother city Sybaris when that city was conquered by Croton in 510 BC. In the early fifth century, Poseidonia’s coins adopted the Achaean weight standard and the bull seen on Sybarite coins. A. J. Graham thinks it was plausible that the number of refugees was large enough for some kind of synoecism to have occurred between the Poseidonians and the Sybarites, possibly in the form of a sympolity.
Poseidonia might have had a major share in a new foundation of Sybaris which lasted from 452/1 BC until 446/5 BC. This is suggested by the great resemblance of the coins of Sybaris to those of Poseidonia in this period. Possibly a treaty of friendship between Sybaris, its allies and the Serdaioi (an unknown people) dates to this new foundation, because Poseidonia was the guarantor of this treaty.It is not until the end of the fifth century BC that the city is mentioned, when according to Strabo the city was conquered by the Lucanians. From the archaeological evidence it appears that the two cultures, Greek and Oscan, were able to thrive alongside one another.
What is known is it later became the Roman city of Paestum in 273 BC after the Graeco-Italian Poseidonians sided with the loser, king Pyrrhus of Epirus, in his war against republican Rome during the first quarter of the third century BC.
During the Carthaginian invasion of Italy by Hannibal, the city remained faithful to Rome and afterwards was granted special favours such as the minting of its coinage. The city continued to prosper during the Roman imperial period, and became a bishopric as Roman Catholic Diocese of Pesto around 400 AD.
It started to go into decline between the 4th and 7th centuries, was abandoned during the Middle Ages and was suppressed as a diocese in 1100. The decline and desertion were probably due to changes in local land drainage patterns, leading to swampy malarial conditions.

The main features of the site today are the standing remains of three major temples in Doric style, dating from the first half of the 6th century BC. These were dedicated to Hera and Poseidon, although they have traditionally been identified as a basilica and temples of Neptune and Ceres, owing t 18th-century mis-attribution.
The city of Paestum covers an area of approximately 120 hectares. It is only the 25 hectares that contain the three main temples that have been excavated. The other 95 hectares remain on private land and have not been excavated. The city is surrounded by defensive walls that still stand. The walls are approximately 4750 m long, 5 – 7 m thick and 15 m high. Positioned along the wall are 24 square and round towers. There may have been up to 28 but some of them were destroyed during the construction of highway in the 18th century that effectively cuts the site in two.

The first Temple of Hera, built around 600 BC by Greek colonists, is the oldest surviving temple in Paestum. Eighteenth-century archaeologists named it “The Basilica” because they mistakenly believed it to be a Roman building. A basilica in Roman times was a civil building, not a religious one. Inscriptions revealed that the goddess worshiped here was Hera. Later, an altar was unearthed in front of the temple, in the open-air site usual for a Greek altar; the faithful could attend rites and sacrifices without entering the cella.
Just south of the city walls, at a site still called Santa Venera, a series of small terracotta offertory molded statuettes of a standing female nude wearing the polos headdress of Anatolian and Syrian goddesses, which were dated to the first half of the sixth century BC, were found in the sanctuary; other similar ones have been excavated at other Paestum sanctuaries during excavations in the 1980s, but the figure is highly unusual in the Western Mediterranean. The open-air temenos was established at the start of Greek occupation: a temple on the site was not built until the early fifth century. A nude goddess is a figure alien to Greek culture before Praxiteles’ famous Cnidian Aphrodite in the fourth century: iconographic analogies must be sought in Phoenician Astarte and the Cypriote Aphrodite. “In places where the Greeks and Phoenicians came in contact with one another, there is often an overlapping in the persona of the two deities,” Rebecca Miller Ammerman has explained (Ammerman 1991), in identifying the cult at the site as that of Phoenician Astarte or Cypriot Aphrodite. In Roman times, inscriptions make clear, the cult was reserved to Venus.

The second Temple of Hera was built around 460–450 BC. It has been variously thought of as a temple dedicated to Poseidon. The Temple of Hera II has nothing in common with the first temple, reason being for its symmetrical style for its columns. Also every column does not have a normal 20 flutes on each column but it has 24 flutes. The Temple of Hera II also has a wider column and a smaller spacing for the placing of the columns. The temple was also found to be used to worship more than just Hera but also Zeus and another unknown god. There’s a legend where beings would go to the temple in hope to make love with the goddess and the belief on insuring pregnancy; Hera is also the goddess of childbirth. There are visible on the east side the remains of two altars, one large and one smaller. The smaller one is a Roman addition, built when they cut through the larger one to build a road to the forum. It is also possible that the temple was originally dedicated to both Hera and Poseidon; some offertory statues found around the larger altar are thought to demonstrate this identification.

In the central part of the complex is the Roman Forum, thought to have been built on the site of the preceding Greek agora. On the north side of the forum is a small Roman temple, dated to 200 BC. It was dedicated to the Capitoline Triad, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.

To the north-east of the forum is the amphitheater. This is of normal Roman pattern, though much smaller than later examples. Only the western half is visible; in 1930 AD, a road was built across the site, burying the eastern half. It is said by local inhabitants that the civil engineer responsible was tried, convicted and received a prison sentence for what was described as wanton destruction of an historic site.

On the highest point of the town, some way from the other temples, is the Temple of Athena. It was built around 500 BC, and was for some time incorrectly thought to have been dedicated to Ceres. The architecture is transitional, being partly in the Ionic style and partly early Doric. Three medieval Christian tombs in the floor show that the temple was at one time used as a Christian church.

All three temples have undergone some renovation and repair in recent years.

Paestum is also renowned for its painted tombs, mainly belonging to the period of the Lucanian rule, while only one of them dates to the Greek period. It was found, on 3 June 1968, in a small necropolis some 1.5 km south of the ancient walls. The burial monument was named Tomb of the Diver (Italian: Tomba del tuffatore) after the enigmatic scene, depicted on the covering slab, of a lonely young man diving into a stream of water. It was dated to the first half of the fifth century BC (about 470 BC), the Golden Age of the Greek town. The tomb is painted with the true fresco technique and its importance lies in being “the only example of Greek painting with figured scenes dating from the Orientalizing, Archaic, or Classical periods to survive in its entirety. Among the thousands of Greek tombs known from this time (roughly 700–400 BC), this is the only one to have been decorated with frescoes of human subjects.”
The remaining four walls of the tombs are occupied by symposium related scenes, an iconography far more familiar from the Greek pottery than the diving scene.
All the five frescoes are visible in the local National Museum, together with the cycle of Lucanian painted tombs.

  • 1976 Praktika XL Agfa slides
  • 2012 A710IS
  • 2014 Canon 1200D and S95
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Agrigento

Agrigento was founded on a plateau overlooking the sea, with two nearby rivers, the Hypsas and the Akragas, and a ridge to the north offering a degree of natural fortification. Its establishment took place around 582-580 BC and is attributed to Greek colonists from Gela, who named it Akragas. Akragas grew rapidly, becoming one of the richest and most famous of the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia. It came to prominence under the 6th-century tyrants Phalaris and Theron, and became a democracy after the overthrow of Theron’s son Thrasydaeus. At this point the city could have been as large as 100,000 – 200,000 people. Although the city remained neutral in the conflict between Athens and Syracuse, its democracy was overthrown when the city was sacked by the Carthaginians in 406 BC. Akragas never fully recovered its former status, though it revived to some extent under Timoleon in the latter part of the 4th century.

The city was disputed between the Romans and the Carthaginians during the First Punic War. The Romans laid siege to the city in 262 BC and captured it after defeating a Carthaginian relief force in 261 BC and sold the population into slavery. Although the Carthaginians recaptured the city in 255 BC the final peace settlement gave Punic Sicily and with it Akragas to Rome. It suffered badly during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) when both Rome and Carthage fought to control it. The Romans eventually captured Akragas in 210 BC and renamed it Agrigentum, although it remained a largely Greek-speaking community for centuries thereafter. It became prosperous again under Roman rule and its inhabitants received full Roman citizenship following the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC.

Ancient Akragas covers a huge area — much of which is still unexcavated today — but is exemplified by the famous Valle dei Templi (“Valley of the Temples”, a misnomer, as it is a ridge, rather than a valley). This comprises a large sacred area on the south side of the ancient city where seven monumental Greek temples in the Doric style were constructed during the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Now excavated and partially restored, they constitute some of the largest and best-preserved ancient Greek buildings outside of Greece itself. They are listed as a World Heritage Site.

The best-preserved of the temples are two very similar buildings traditionally attributed to the goddesses Juno Lacinia and Concordia (though archaeologists believe this attribution to be incorrect). The latter temple is remarkably intact, due to its having been converted into a Christian church in 597 AD. Both were constructed to a peripteral hexastyle design. The area around the Temple of Concordia was later re-used by early Christians as a catacomb, with tombs hewn out of the rocky cliffs and outcrops.
The other temples are much more fragmentary, having been toppled by earthquakes long ago and quarried for their stones. The largest by far is the Temple of Olympian Zeus, built to commemorate the Battle of Himera in 480 BC: it is believed to have been the largest Doric temple ever built. Although it was apparently used, it appears never to have been completed; construction was abandoned after the Carthaginian invasion of 406 BC.

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Matera museum

The area of what is now Matera has been settled since the Palaeolithic. The city was allegedly founded by the Romans in the 3rd century BC, with the name of Matheola after the consul Lucius Caecilius Metellus. In AD 664 Matera was conquered by the Lombards and became part of the Duchy of Benevento. In the 7th and 8th centuries the nearby grottos were colonized by both Benedictine and Basilian monastic institutions. The 9th and 10th centuries were characterized by the struggle between the Byzantines and the German emperors, including Louis II, who partially destroyed the city. After the settlement of the Normans in Apulia, Matera was ruled by William Iron-Arm from 1043.

The National Archaeological Museum of Matera is the oldest museum of Basilicata. Established in 1911, with a national law, by the will of Senator Domenico Ridola, who donated it to the State its important archaeological collections, presents the important archaeological sites found in the area of ​​Matera.
As for the pre-history, the most significant findings regarding some entrenched villages Neolithic, which was also recognized in this area, starting from the sixth millennium BC, the introduction of agriculture and consequently the structuring of permanent settlements, according to defined templates in the Eastern Mediterranean.
For the most recent phases of prehistory and the phase VI-IV century BC documentation of interest is related to Timmari, located a short drive from Matera. From this center come, among other things, some funeraral objects of the fourth century BC characterized by bronze armor and monumental red-figure vases and numerous votive statues, fine workmanship, found in a sacred area.

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Allard Pierson Museum

The museum is displaying original antiquities and other objects as one of the sources of Western tradition to put the present in a culture-historical perspective by means of insight in and understanding of the past.
The Allard Pierson Museum is the Archaeology Museum of the University of Amsterdam, and shows the significance of ancient civilizations to contemporary European culture n a challenging way. We do this for the widest possible interested public, on the basis of an archaeological top collection in collaboration with talented students, excellent researchers and fellow institutions.
The ancient civilisations of ancient Egypt, the Near East, the Greek World, Etruria and the Roman Empire are revived in this museum. Art-objects and utensils, dating from 4000 B.C. till 1000 A.D. give a good impression of everyday-life.

Het Allard Pierson Museum is het archeologisch museum van de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Het museum werd in 1934 geopend. De collectie bestond toen uit ca. 5000 oudheden, afkomstig uit de verzameling van dr. C.W. Lunsingh Scheurleer. Deze collectie was aangekocht door de Allard Pierson Stichting met steun van de Vereniging Rembrandt en vele particulieren en geschonken aan de Universiteit. Inmiddels telt het museum meer dan 16.000 voorwerpen, waarvan een belangrijk deel is geschonken door particulieren.
In het Allard Pierson Museum komen de antieke beschavingen uit het Oude Egypte, het Nabije Oosten, de Griekse wereld, Etrurië en het Romeinse Rijk opnieuw tot leven.
Kunst- en gebruiksvoorwerpen uit de periode van 5000 voor Chr. tot 500 na Chr. geven een beeld van het dagelijks leven, mythologie en godsdienst in de antieke Oudheid.

>Allard Pierson (Amsterdam, 8 april 1831 – Almen, 27 mei 1896) was een Nederlandse predikant, theoloog, geschied- en taalkundige. Allard Pierson was lid van de familie Pierson en een zoon van de koopman Jan Lodewijk Gregory Pierson en de schrijfster Ida Oyens (lid van de familie Oijens). Hij kwam uit een aanzienlijke Amsterdamse koopmansfamilie, die tot de kringen rond het Réveil behoorde. Hij was een broer van Nicolaas Pierson en Hendrik Pierson; hij was een zwager van de kunstschilder Herman ten Kate die met zijn zus getrouwd was. Pierson trouwde met Pauline Hermine Elizabeth Gildemeester (Amsterdam, 7 maart 1831 – Scheveningen, 6 september 1900). Uit dit huwelijk werden zes kinderen geboren, onder wie Jan Lodewijk Pierson sr.. Zij bewoonden Huize Velhorst in Almen (vlak bij Zutphen), waar Pierson op 65-jarige leeftijd is overleden.
Pierson werd predikant te Leuven, maar legde dit ambt neer vanwege zijn modernistische inzichten. In 1870 werd hij hoogleraar theologie te Heidelberg. Pierson was van 1877-1895 de eerste hoogleraar in kunstgeschiedenis, esthetica en moderne talen en letteren aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Het archeologie museum van de Universiteit van Amsterdam is naar hem vernoemd omdat hij in 1877 de eerste hoogleraar archeologie aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam werd. Hij behoorde tot de fijnzinnigste geesten uit het Nederlandse culturele leven van de 19e eeuw. Tijdens zijn hoogleraarschap in Amsterdam legde hij een verzameling gipsafgietsels aan. Het Allard Pierson Museum van de Universiteit van Amsterdam draagt zijn naam.

Amsterdam, 2012-2015. Canon S90, S95, G1 X

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Neues museum

The Neues Museum (“New Museum”) is a museum in Berlin, Germany, located to the north of the Altes Museum (Old Museum) on Museum Island.It was built between 1843 and 1855 according to plans by Friedrich August Stüler, a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The museum was closed at the beginning of World War II in 1939, and was heavily damaged during the bombing of Berlin. The rebuilding was overseen by the English architect David Chipperfield. The museum officially reopened in October 2009. Exhibits include the Egyptian and Prehistory and Early History collections, as it did before the war. The artifacts it houses include the iconic bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti.
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Berlin Museuminsel Altes Museum

The Altes Museum (German for Old Museum) is a museum building on Museum Island in Berlin, Germany. Since restoration work in 2010/11, it houses the Antikensammlung (antiquities collection) of the Berlin State Museums. The museum building was built between 1823 and 1830 by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the neoclassical style to house the Prussian royal family’s art collection. The historic, protected building counts among the most distinguished in neoclassicism and is a high point of Schinkel’s career. Until 1845, it was called the Königliches Museum (Royal Museum).

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Zeus Altar in Pergamon museum

The Pergamon Altar is a monumental construction built during the reign of Greek King Eumenes II in the first half of the 2nd century BC on one of the terraces of the acropolis of the ancient Greek city of Pergamon in Asia Minor. The structure is 35.64 metres wide and 33.4 metres dee
p; the front stairway alone is almost 20 metres wide. The base is decorated with a frieze in high relief showing the battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods known as the Gigantomachy. There is a second, smaller and less well-preserved high relief frieze on the inner court walls which surround the actual fire altar on the upper level of the structure at the top of the stairs. In a set of consecutive scenes, it depicts events from the life of Telephus, legendary founder of the city of Pergamon and son of the hero Heracles and Auge, one of Tegean king Aleus’s daughters.

In 1878, the German engineer Carl Humann began official excavations on the acropolis of Pergamon, an effort that lasted until 1886. The excavation was undertaken in order to rescue the altar friezes and expose the foundation of the edifice. Later, other ancient structures on the acropolis were brought to light. Upon negotiating with the Turkish government (a participant in the excavation), it was agreed that all frieze fragments found at the time would become the property of the Berlin museums.

Karl Humann’s 1881 plan of the Pergamon acropolis.
In Berlin, Italian restorers reassembled the panels comprising the frieze from the thousands of fragments that had been recovered. In order to display the result and create a context for it, a new museum was erected in 1901 on Berlin’s Museum Island. Because this first Pergamon Museum proved to be both inadequate and structurally unsound, it was demolished in 1909 and replaced with a much larger museum, which opened in 1930. This new museum is still open to the public on the island. Despite the fact that the new museum was home to a variety of collections beyond the friezes (for example, a famous reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon), the city’s inhabitants decided to name it the Pergamon Museum for the friezes and reconstruction of the west front of the altar. The Pergamon Altar is today the most famous item in the Berlin Collection of Classical Antiquities, which is on display in the Pergamon Museum and in the Altes Museum, both of which are on Berlin’s Museum Island.

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Museuminsel Berlin

The Altes Museum (German for Old Museum) is a museum building on Museum Island in Berlin, Germany. Since restoration work in 2010/11, it houses the Antikensammlung (antiquities collection) of the Berlin State Museums. The museum building was built between 1823 and 1830 by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the neoclassical style to house the Prussian royal family’s art collection. The historic, protected building counts among the most distinguished in neoclassicism and is a high point of Schinkel’s career. Until 1845, it was called the Königliches Museum (Royal Museum).

The Neues Museum (“New Museum”) is a museum in Berlin, Germany, located to the north of the Altes Museum (Old Museum) on Museum Island.It was built between 1843 and 1855 according to plans by Friedrich August Stüler, a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The museum was closed at the beginning of World War II in 1939, and was heavily damaged during the bombing of Berlin. The rebuilding was overseen by the English architect David Chipperfield. The museum officially reopened in October 2009. Exhibits include the Egyptian and Prehistory and Early History collections, as it did before the war. The artifacts it houses include the iconic bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

The Pergamon Museum (German: Pergamonmuseum) is situated on the Museum Island in Berlin. The site was designed by Alfred Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann and was constructed in twenty years, from 1910 to 1930. The Pergamon Museum houses original-sized, reconstructed monumental buildings such as the Pergamon Altar and the Market Gate of Miletus, all consisting of parts transported from Turkey. The museum is subdivided into the antiquity collection, the Middle East museum, and the museum of Islamic art. By the time the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum on Museum Island (today the Bodemuseum) had opened, it was clear that the museum was not large enough to host all of the art and archaeological treasures excavated under German supervision. Excavations were underway in Babylon, Uruk, Assur, Miletus, Priene and Egypt, and objects from these sites could not be properly displayed within the existing German museum system. As early as 1907, Wilhelm von Bode, the director of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Wilhelm-Museum had plans to build a new museum nearby to accommodate ancient architecture, German post-antiquity art, and Middle Eastern and Islamic art.


Visited in March 2009 (Pergamon, Altes Museum) and November 2009 (the re opened Neues Museum).
Photos made with A710IS and Canon 1000D.