Acropolis of Athens

One image dominates our contemporary world above all others: the human body. How Art Made the World travels from the modern world of advertising to the temples of classical Greece and the tombs of ancient Egypt to solve the mystery of why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic.

The main theme of this episode is how people rarely created images of the body that are realistic. By understanding this we  also understand something about our bodies, and human nature in general.

The Venus of Willendorf, in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, is a small Venus figure with exaggerated breasts, hips and sexual organs. These exaggerations are symbolic of fertility,  what is significant is that the artist ignored other parts of the body, such as her face and arms. Similar Venus figures with similar exaggerations and omissions have been found all over Europe and Russia. Professor Ramachandran explains why features were exaggerated. By making comparisons to research with Herring Gulls showing how their chicks, which are stimulated by the red stripe on their parents beaks, can be over stimulated by simulating a beak with additional stripes. He suggests that the same neurological process stimulated early man, explaining why they exaggerated these features of fertility over others.

Moving forward several thousand years. The Egyptians, who valued consistency and order in their society, abandoned the exaggerations of their ancestors and chose to use a mathematical approach to creating images of the body. They chose to show each part of the body from it’s clearest angle, developing their recognisable style and then preserving this style for thousands of years. When the Ancient Greek’s culture came into contact with the Egyptians, this ignited an artistic revolution across the Greek city states. The Greek culture wanted a more realistic representation of the figure for their temples, and as with the Kritios Boy, they measured and reproduced the body to exact dimensions in their sculptures. A generation later, however, the Greeks abandoned this ultra realism preferring exaggerated representations of the body based on the aestetic theories created by Polykleitos, such as the Riace Bronzes. Prof Ramachandran explains that art needs this exaggeration to be interesting.

The programme concludes with what we choose to exaggerate, saying this  “is where the magic comes in”. The choice of what to exaggerate has changed over the centuries to match changing human values.

This paper argues that the display of the iconic Caryatids in the New Acropolis Museum has been seriously compromised by the overriding desire amongst Greek politicians and heritage professionals to use the museum to reinforce their long-standing request for the return of the Parthenon Marbles. In designing a museum geared primarily to achieving the repatriation of the sculptures taken from the largest of the temples on the Athenian Acropolis, the museum’s architect has ensured that these marbles were presented within sight of their former monumental home, exhibited in a manner that imitates the architectural layout of the Parthenon, while the large windows of the museum allow vast amounts of natural light to illuminate the marbles. By contrast, the five Caryatids that remain in Athens have been treated with considerably less respect for such restitutionist sensibilities. Displayed within the concrete heart of the museum, lacking views of the outside world, let alone to the Acropolis, and with limited access to direct natural light, the marble women are positioned with no consideration for their original alignment. The important functional role of the Caryatids as integral structural elements within the architecture of the Erechtheum is also poorly represented in the manner of their current museological display in Athens.

http://www.jcms-journal.com/articles/10.5334/jcms.130/

A survey of evidence from a formative stage of the Athenian state sanctuary.  In studies of Archaic Athens, emphasis is often placed on the “archaeology of tyranny” versus the “archaeology of democracy.” As recent research has shown, focusing on those distinctions often creates biases in the interpretation of the monuments, sequences of building, and iconography. This article reviews the evidence for the appearance of the Acropolis prior to 566 BC, a date associated with the re-organization of the Panathenaic festival and the monumentalization of the Acropolis. Since much of this evidence is fragmentary and has been disturbed by later building projects, the full significance of the range of votive and architecture pieces is not always appreciated. The state sanctuary of Athens is often thought to lag behind other cities and sanctuaries in the 8th, 7th, can early 6th centuries until ca. 566 (and the possible patronage of the tyrant Peisistratos). The article analyzes the available evidence in light of new research (on bronzes, sculpture, early architecture) and argues that many aspects of the Acropolis suggest a more dynamic and progressive development of the sanctuary before 566.

The Elgin Marbles, nowadays known as the Parthenon Sculptures, are arguably the most controversial art collection in the world. It was exactly 200 years ago, in 1816, that the British Museum acquired the Elgin Marbles from lord Elgin, former ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople. The story behind Elgin's acquisition of the "Elgin Marbles" and the collection's path to England were paved with a series of (un)fortunate events. It vividly depicts the response from the contemporary public and the question of the legality of Elgin's actions. The Greek repatriation request for the Elgin Marbles is discussed within a larger context, as the author puts a spotlight on the so-called universal museums and the patronizing attempts of the large museums to avoid any sincere discussion about the repatriation requests.

The present study examines the  topographical development of early Athens from around 1075 BC until 480/479 BC, as this is ascertained from the archaeological remains, particularly of the cemeteries but also of the few houses or other indications of habitation.
Taking the graves as stable starting points and correlating their location with the Acropolis, the administrative, residential, and religious center of Athens, an attempt is made to approach the areas in which the early
nuclei of habitation, which are related to the nearby burial grounds and cemeteries, developed.
Through the overall assessment of the continuous interaction between
the areas of burial and of settlement, we try to detect the limits of habitation in each period, as this becomes clear from the development of the Submycenaean cemeteries in Geometric times, the Archaic settlement remains, and the successive changes in the uses of space down until the Persian destruction.

Of all the misfortunes that have befallen the various sculptural decorations of the Parthenon during its long history, the removal of the so-called Parthenon Marbles by Elgin’s workers is among the most grievous, but, under certain conditions, can be considered as potentially reversible. Today, the standing request for the return of these sculptures to Greece does not call for their reinstallation on the monument itself, as it is well known that the threat of weathering damage precludes any display of the original sculptures in their original positions. Thus, Greece’s claim refers only to a reunification of the sculptures within the Acropolis Museum.
Presently, the Parthenon stands destitute of much of its sculptural wealth – a loss made all the more distressing because it further contributes to the ruined state of the building’s architecture. Conspicuous nowadays are not only areas where both the sculptural decorations and their architectural frameworks are missing, but also those areas where the architectural settings are fully preserved while the sculptures they once accommodated have been removed or lost, thus leaving these once-adorned spaces empty.
The reinstallation of Elgin’s marbles on the Parthenon has been an issue for Greek archaeologists and architects from the first decade of the founding of the new Greek State, as well as throughout its modern history. Just forty years after the antiquities’ removal, the Greek Archaeological Society was already requesting that the British Museum provide replicas of the sculptures for the completion of reconstructions of the monuments (archival letters of 1835 and 1844). At that time, the supplementation of sculptural gaps with copies was a reasonable, if not self-evident, solution for the recent loss: "... Copies in marble material should be placed in the antiquities’ original positions, in order to mask the disfigurement left by the operations of the denuder of the Acropolis", said Kyriakos Pittakis in his speech to the Archaeological Society in 1844.
Since then, copies from the Elgin Collection have been incorporated into the Parthenon’s restoration program in only two individual cases: in 1932, on the eastern pediment, and in 2003, on the western frieze. At the International Meetings for the restoration of the Acropolis monuments, in Athens, in 1983, 1989 and 2004, the responses elicited from leading Greek and foreign researchers – concerning questions raised by the scientific committees on the subject of using copies of architectural sculptures – together constitute the richest recorded discussion of the topic. There, the importance is emphasized of finding a better material for the creation of copies than cement. It was also pointed out that marble is the only material whose long-term qualities we are familiar with, and that construction carried out completely with marble offers the advantage of achieving the same structural behavior throughout the building.
Today, as the digital technology of copying and sculpting marble has evolved, it is technically feasible for those sculptures still complete enough and able to stand on their own (i.e. not suffering from a loss of critical mass) to be reinstalled on the body of the building through the use of high quality, accurate copies. Among the main museum collections of Parthenon sculptures (British Museum, Acropolis Museum, Louvre) it is estimated that restorable sculptures on the Parthenon include thirteen pedimental figures, sixteen metopes and thirty-three blocks of the frieze.

This paper presents up-to-date texts, informed by relevant work published since 2000, of the two extant sets of fragments of the building accounts of the Erechtheion in Ionic script as a basis for translations of these accounts published simultaneously on AIO. It reviews the date of these accounts, and presents a fresh argument by John Morgan to the effect that, if certain assumptions are made, no. 2 (IG I3 477) is datable to 405/4 BC. That would make it probably the latest extant account. Morgan also finds in this fragment a supporting argument for the position initially aired in AIO Papers 5, p. 3, that the Council's year and the archon's year were not made systematically coterminous in 407 BC, as had previously been thought, but continued to be out of step, probably until ca. 403 BC.

A group of 56 Mycenaean vases and minor finds, with the indication “Athens, Acropolis” has been kept for years at the storerooms of the National Archaeological Museum. They were first registered in the Museum’s inventory in 1998 and 2001 and were identified with the pottery illustrated in a volume published by Graef and Langlotz in 1925. According to the authors, the antiquities were discovered during Kavvadias’s 1885-1890 excavations of the Debris from the Persian sack of the Acropolis; however, Kavvadias’s own records, published in 1907, do not verify such a provenance. The vases’ shapes and condition indicate a funerary rather than domestic character; moreover, their date implies that they come from a cemetery, although it does not coincide with that of any of the known cemeteries around the Acropolis. It is hereby suggested that the particular group of vases and minor finds kept in the National Archaeological Museum, together with an equal number of finds stored in the Acropolis Museum, may have derived from earlier excavations, prior to 1877, when those objects were first named Mycenaean. Furthermore, since the warrior’s chamber tomb revealed in 1965 on the south slope of the Acropolis, overlaps chronologically with a big part of the material under study, the existence of a late Mycenaean cemetery in the area is quite possible.

A brief version of the same study is published in Papadimitriou N. et al. (eds), Athens and Attica in Prehistory, Athens 2020, 529-540.
This is the complete presentation of the topic with the entire catalogue of finds.

In this article the circular bronze sheet with Gorgon EAM X 13050, on display at the Acropolis Museum of Athens, is reconsidered. This artefact, datable to the second quarter of the seventh century BC, has been interpreted since the 60s of the􏰝􏱒􏰘 􏰝􏰠􏰘􏰖􏰝􏰡􏰘􏰝twentieth century as a pediment or acroterial element of a small building, to be identified perhaps in the first temple of Athena Polias􏰛􏰘. On the basis of a new study of the find and of three other analogous products of geometric metallurgy from the Athenian Acropolis, a different hyphothesis is proposed, which recognizes in the sheet with Gorgon the handle of a large tripod. The reconstruction is also based on the comparison with the bronze tripod handles dedicated in the Panhellenic sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. Therefore, an exclusive votive dedication for dimensions and for decoration is reconstructed, which together with other similar objects formed a class of prestigious "anathemata", characterizing the sacred landscape of the Acropolis in its earlier life.

Joseph Hoffer, a Hungarian-born architect trained at the Polytechnikum of Vienna, worked in the newly independent Kingdom of Creece between 1833 and 1838. In Athens he surveyed with extraordinary accuracy the buildings of the Acropolis, which led to the discovery of one of the "refinements" of ancient architecture, the curvature of the horizontal parts of Greek temples. He published his findings in the Vienna AIlgemeine Bauzeitung in 1838, but for some time his achievement was ignored. John Pennethorne, an English architect, claimed to have observed this same fact first, but he published it only later. After his return from Greece, Hoffer, already a master-builder in his native Arad, was admitted to the builders' guild of Pest, but with only límited rights; in Hungary, his scholarly achievement was not appreciated.

Acro : derived from Greek 'Akros' which means : topmost, highest / Polis : Pole, citadel, top of a stake, pale, pal-ace, platform, top of tree 
The Acropolis in Athens is an ancient temple site located high up on a rocky cliff in the middle of Athens. Its turbulent history is long -in human life-span terms -and dates back to 6000 BC. It has been the focus of a myriad of texts written by all types of authors, but oddly enough, the rock that bears the site has scarcely been mentioned. This paper intends to fill that gap, to pro-vide readers and visitors alike with a view of another much longer history, dating back to the Upper Cretaceous age, some 70 million years ago, when the rocks that underlie the rocky crest of the sacred hill were deposited in the delta of a mighty river. How much the geological composition and geological structure of the hill affects its human-related history, and why this par-ticular hill has been – and for some, still is – considered sacred, might be a matter of intense debate. So first let us briefly address that glimpse of time. After all, a rock is only a rock, at least for us geologists. The famous Acropolis is an ancient temple site located high up on a rocky cliff in the middle of Athens. The hill is formed of a lowermost Upper Cretaceous (100 My) lime-stone resting on younger rocks of the Athens Schist Formation (72 My). Overthrusting, marked by the brecciated character of the lower part of the limestone, must have occurred during continental collision in the Upper Eocene orogenic phase; erosion and faulting produced the klippe that we can observe today. The contact between the lower Athens schist and the upper limestone has traditionally been a place of numerous springs and karstic caves.

History

The Acropolis was home to one of the earliest known settlements in Greece, as early as 5000 BC. In Mycenaean times – around 1500 BC – it was fortified with Cyclopean (one eyed giants) walls (parts of which can still be seen), enclosing a royal palace and temples to the cult of Athena. By the ninth century BC, the Acropolis had become the heart of Athens, sheltering its principal public buildings, which remained there until in 510 BC the Oracle at Delphi ordered that the Acropolis should remain the province of the gods, unoccupied by humans.

Following the Persian sacking of Athens in 480 BC, a grand rebuilding project under the direction of the architect and sculptor Fidias created almost everything you see today in an incredibly short time: the Parthenon itself took only ten years to finish. The monuments survived unaltered for close to a thousand years, until in the reign of Emperor Justinian the temples were converted to Christian worship. Over the following centuries the uses became secular as well as religious, and embellishments increased, gradually obscuring the Classical designs. Fifteenth-century Italian princes held court in the Propylaia, and the same quarters were later used by the Turks as their commander’s headquarters and as a powder magazine.

The Parthenon underwent similar changes from Greek to Roman temple, from Byzantine church to Frankish cathedral, before several centuries of use as a Turkish mosque. The Erechtheion, with its graceful female figures, saw service as a harem. A Venetian diplomat described the Acropolis in 1563 as “looming beneath a swarm of glittering golden crescents”, with a minaret rising from the Parthenon. For all their changes in use, however, the buildings would still have resembled – very much more than today’s bare ruins – the bustling and ornate ancient Acropolis, covered in sculpture and painted in bright colours.

A group of 56 Mycenaean vases and minor finds, with the indication “Athens, Acropolis” has been kept for years at the storerooms of the National Archaeological Museum. They were first registered in the Museum’s inventory in 1998 and 2001 and were identified with the pottery illustrated in a volume published by Graef and Langlotz in 1925. According to the authors, the antiquities were discovered during Kavvadias’s 1885-1890 excavations of the Debris from the Persian sack of the Acropolis; however, Kavvadias’s own records, published in 1907, do not verify such a provenance. The vases’ shapes and condition indicate a funerary rather than domestic character; moreover, their date implies that they come from a cemetery, although it does not coincide with that of any of the known cemeteries around the Acropolis.

It is hereby suggested that the particular group of vases and minor finds kept in the National Archaeological Museum, together with an equal number of finds stored in the Acropolis Museum, may have derived from earlier excavations, prior to 1877, when those objects were first named Mycenaean. Furthermore, since the warrior’s chamber tomb revealed in 1965 on the south slope of the Acropolis, overlaps chronologically with a big part of the material under study, the existence of a late Mycenaean cemetery in the area is quite possible.

This article presents a fragment of the Erechtheion frieze found during excavations on the north slope of the Acropolis in 1939. The marble fragment represents a Corinthian helmet set upon a thick, finished mass of stone intended to represent a rocky ground line. Through technical and iconographic comparisons, it was argued that the helmet once belonged to a seated figure of the goddess Athena, the main divinity of the temple. Although numerous fragments of the frieze are have been identified, the precise subject of the frieze has not. Moreover, the sculptors of the frieze apparently used few attributes (symbols) to identify the figures, so that it is unclear which gods and heroes were represented. The association allows scholars to recognize, for the first time, at least one appearance of the goddess among the several seated female figures attributed to the architectural sculpture of the most venerable temple on the Acropolis of Athens. An appendix plan reviews the archaeological contexts of all marble fragments found on the north slope and attributed to Erechtheion frieze from the 1930s to the 1995.

In studies on the siting of the temples and other important public buildings of the ancient Greek city it has been argued that their main view was not axial, but in an oblique axis relative to the building. The idea of the oblique view appears at the margin of different theories concerning the picturesqueness of the composition, optical corrections, sacred landmarks, as well as the interpretation of the concept of σκηνογραφία as described by Vitruvius

Agrigento possiede la più esauriente documentazione di altari rispetto agli altri santuari greci di Sicilia: altari monumentali con gradinata nei santuari delle divinità olimpiche, altari quadrati e rotondi nei santuari ctoni. Fra i primi rimane isolato, quasi testo a sé stante, l'altare monumentale del grande Tempio di Zeus; esso ha offerto da sempre difficoltà di lettura e di interpretazione struttiva, tali da rendere problematico ogni tentativo al riguardo. Bisogna rendere merito all'architetto Alberto Distefano, giovane studioso formatosi presso l'Università di Palermo, per avere affrontato il problema interpretativo delle rovine di questo grande altare afferente al maestoso Tempio di Zeus in Agrigento: rovine, come abbiamo detto, di fronte alla cui problematicità è sempre risultato prudente fermarsi sino ad accontentarsi di affermare l'assenza di una autenticità topografica struttiva.
L'analisi tipologica, costruttiva, dimensionale, condotta con perseveranza di tipo filologico, ha portato l'Autore a dare alla propria ricerca una soluzione interpretativa apprezzabile, riconoscendo nel sistema costruttivo dei piedritti, di cui si compone caratteristicamente la fondazione dell'altare, il reimpiego da un edificio della stessa epoca (verosimilmente non portato a termine) o addirittura elementi originariamente destinati all'elevato dello stesso Olympieion. (...)
La ricerca di Distefano toglie dall'isolamento di un semplice rilevamento questa importante costruzione di altare, ipotizzando le possibili restituzioni plano-volumetriche, e proietta la sua lettura in possibilità interpretative e soluzioni convincenti: il che vuol dire far progredire la conoscenza delle strutture e degli spazi santuariali in genere.
Ernesto De Miro

Sommario: Ernesto De Miro, Presentazione. Introduzione. 1. Le ricerche dal XVIII agli inizi del XXI secolo; 2. Il rilievo topografico e architettonico; 3. Analisi tipologica; 4. Analisi costruttiva; 5. Analisi morfologica degli elementi lapidei; 6. Analisi paleografica delle iscrizioni lapidee; 7. Analisi dimensionale dei blocchi squadrati; 8. Considerazioni metrologiche; 9. Ipotesi di restituzione. Conclusioni. Tavole. Abbreviazioni. Bibliografia.

En este artículo se recopilan todas las informaciones conocidas hasta el momento sobre la estancia en Atenas de Jerónimo de la Gándara en 1850. Se presentan también cuatro obras inéditas, de las que dos están relacionadas con su etapa griega, y un legajo de documentos que se encuentran en la colección privada de sus descendientes, los marqueses de Casa-Laiglesia. Se incluye además un proyecto desconocido que el arquitecto Pedro Tomé y Vercruysse realizó en Atenas en 1847.

Apart from a brief publication (Levi 1933), the findings from D. Levi’s 1922 excavation of a Neolithic hut on the South Slope of the Acropolis (north of the Stoa of Eumenes) and the archeological material he collected in 1923 from two small natural rock recesses north of the temple of Asklepios, have not been extensively studied and published. This paper consists of a preliminary report that briefly presents the archaeological material with emphasis on the ceramics and in a first attempt to reinterpret the material and integrate these data for the first time into the wider context of the Final Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.
The material include stone tools, obsidian (blades and cores), pottery and remnants of a hearth. Ceramics, in particular include cheese pots, pattern-burnished ware, sauceboats (dark-on-light, urfirnis, yellow-mottled), rolled-rim bowls, i.e. types that place the site of the Acropolis in the broader cultural context of the Final Neolithic, EH I and EH II periods. The presence of ceramics from the Attica- Kephala culture and the EH II era testifies to the common characteristics of the material culture with other sites in Attica and contacts with the Cyclades either directly or indirectly through trade centers such as Agios Kosmas.