The change in temple orientation may also indicate that a broad orientation within the rising position of the constellation of Orion was replaced by a more specific orientation on his belt.

The altar, however, was not parallel to the temple (see fig. 1); it faced somewhat north of east (azimuth 81°), where the horizon altitude is still 4°, yielding a declination of +10°. The declination of the Pleiades between 800 B.C.E. and 550 B.C.E. was about +12°, while Orion stretched from –15° (Rigel) up to +3° (Betelgeuse), its belt being between –5° and –7° (the heliacal rising of Orion’s belt would have occurred around 17 July). The second temple, in other words, was oriented on the rising point of Orion’s belt, while the altar was oriented on the rising point of the Pleiades (which probably appeared a little above the horizon because of atmospheric extinction). The first temple (with a declination of 0°) was oriented between the two

The literary, archaeological, and astronomical evi-dence points, in short, to the following reconstruction of the festival. Groups of young girls whose protector was Artemis Orthia brought their offering (a robe) to the goddess an hour before dawn, at the time of the year when the heliacal rising of the star cluster of the seven virgins (Pleiades) was seen to rise above the part of the horizon that the temple and altar were facing. In ancient Greece, the first sighting of the Pleiades just before dawn took place above the eastern horizon in May–June, after its annual 40-day period of invisibility (fig. 4).90 It follows that during the Geometric, Archaic, and Classical periods, this viewing, and therefore also the Procession of the Girls, would have taken place on a date corresponding to around 22 May in the Gre-gorian calendar (given the latitude and longitude of the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia and accounting for the altitude of the local horizon, refraction, and atmo-spheric extinction). The Procession of the Girls ended at the altar of Artemis Orthia, as the girls placed the robe on it. In consequence, it is reasonable to suppose that the girls, as they were dedicating the robe to the goddess, were facing the rising Pleiades just above the eastern horizon.

declination

ex-tant

catasterized

One of the gen-erally accepted interpretations of the poem is that it narrates the performance of a rite during which a group of young girls bring their offering to the altar of the goddess; two of these girls, Agido and Hesiagora, are discussed separately in the poem and are called Peleades, equivalent to Pleiades. The procession hap-pens at the hour before dawn, when the Pleiades star cluster is seen to rise above the horizon, and just be-fore Agido (a maiden of the goddess of Dawn) sum-mons the sun to rise.7

century before the site fell out of use, the Roman theater was constructed (in the second half of the third century C.E.), encircling the temple and altar (see fig. 1).64 The position and layout of the theater indicate clearly that it was built to accommodate the spectators of the rites that were performed around the altar and in front of the temple.

The first temple to Artemis Orthia, constructed sometime ca. 700 B.C.E.,61 was replaced by another, built in the sixth century B.C.E., 62 which was displaced to the north and overlapped the northern part of the earlier structure

The most widely known cult site of Artemis Orthia is located in Sparta.

The other inherent limitation of the statistical evidence is that people (unlike laws of the physical universe) do not behave with absolute consistency, however powerful and restrictive the protocols gov-erning their behavior.

The essential difference between sta-tistical verification and contextual evidence is that the latter is vital to providing any interpretation; the statistical evidence merely serves to affirm that a set of structures were intentionally aligned to a given tar-get and does not by itself yield any information about their purpose.

This raises the possibility that a similar principle might apply to Greek temples, whereby as-tronomical symbolism incorporated in the temple ar-chitecture might depend on the god or cult to which the temple was dedicated.

However, simply identifying large data sets can-not guarantee patterns of consistent behavior strong enough to result in repeated and statistically verifi-able trends in the material record.

Thus, to avoid meaningless “butterfly collecting,” one needs other evidence to support the idea that a given alignment was in fact intentional. One method of do-ing this, much favored by British archaeoastronomers during the 1980s and 1990s, is to focus on groups of similar and related monuments and to identify re-peated trends that are strong enough to be statistically verifiable

Finally, there is a danger of false precision in de-termining the Gregorian dates (and hence the posi-tion of sunrise) corresponding to the ancient Greek religious festivals. The timing of these was determined within the ancient Greek state calendar, which, being luni-solar,43 means that they cannot be fixed within the Gregorian year to better than three weeks.

This said, we can return to the basic argument by both Nissen and Penrose that Greek temples were aligned to sunrise on the day of the god’s major festi-val.40 The idea that all Greek temples were aligned to face sunrise (on some day of the year) can be tested in a relatively straightforward manner by examining the spread of orientations of a suitable sample of temples and determining the percentage that fall within the solar rising arc.

dangerously ethnocentric assumption

There is also a long-term, although less marked, change in the rising and setting positions of the sun at a given time in the solar year, as, for example, at the solstices, and also in the corresponding (but more complex) rising and setting positions of the moon. The shift in the rising or setting position of the sun at the solstices is equal to about its own diameter in 4,000 years.

The circular argu-ment is completed when, as was common among the earliest archaeoastronomers, an alignment on an as-sumed stellar target (presumed to have been defined with suitable precision) is used to calculate a putative date of construction within the range allowed by the archaeological evidence.32

means that it can be mislead-ing to identify a particular star as the intended target on the basis of alignment alone.

orientations on stellar targets is complicated by the fact that the paths of the stars through the sky, although not seen to change on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis, alter significantly over a few centuries.

putative

A common characteristic of these early studies was that they presupposed the existence of an astronomical correlation and attempted to deter-mine which celestial body was targeted by the main axis of any given temple.

unsubstantiated by any ar-chaeological or historical evidence and overlook the existence of windows and roof openings, common ar-chitectural features of Greek temples that would surely have had a dramatic effect on their illumination.

interpretative paradigm

referents

In addition, the fundamental importance of astronomy and time measurement to coordinate religious festivals is supported by the dis-covery of sundials in the Temple of Apollo in klaros (Hellenistic)17 and in the Amphiareion at Oropos in Attica,18 as well as the discovery of the Hibeh papyrus (third century B.C.E.), which recorded astronomical movements associated with religious festivals to Ath-ena, Prometheus, and Hera.

The nocturnal char-acter of some Greek religious festivals (e.g., the Arre-phoria, the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Thesmophoria)16performed in open space, with little artificial light, suggests the importance of the celestial dome that encircled these performances, integrating the sky in the cult experience.

Furthermore, it is a part of the environment that is especially valuable to the archaeologist or historian because we can recon-struct ancient skies from our knowledge of modern as-tronomy;3 in other words, the sky forms a part of their perceived world that is directly visible to us.

Archaeoastronomy can be defined as the study of beliefs and practices concerning the sky in the past and the way people used their understanding of the skies.

Why would they if they could sink your ship with one ram from their ship?

Elissa (Dido)

the Second Punic War began with The Battle of the Trebbia River.

Wars with Rome

An interior port carved out of the land.

The main deities included Baal Hammon, Tanit, and Melqart.

Sources for more introductory information

Our oldest literary account of Carthaginian Human Sacrifice:

Where did the Phoenicians initially settled in?

Where did the Phoenicians expand from and what did they take with them?

This

The majority of their findings were never published until 1997.

The land of Meroë is filled with over 200 pyramids

Al-Shahi

Being that the kingdom of Kush was around for so long, there are many interesting facts about it.

The

Al, Qudrah, Hussein, and Mahdi Abdelaziz. “Kinship Terms in the Nabataean Inscriptions.” Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy, vol. 19, no. 2, Nov. 2008, pp. 193–197

cisterns

problem of water

AMAZING

From the 4th century BCE until they were conquered by Trajan in 106 CE.

WHERE is the land?

References

Second Literature

which filled with rainwater