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Demeter Sanctuary
The Demeter Sanctuary is dramatically situated on the edge of
the town under a towering cliff and set on a terrace retained by
massive stone walls. It was from here that Newton recovered a
number of very fine sculptures including the celebrated Demeter, a
rare survival of an original fourth-century BC cult statue. The
site was excavated by Newton and then again by Iris Love in the
early 1970s. The British Museum has restricted its latest research
to a survey, and the architectural remains have been redrawn by
Ayse Dalyanci, architect to the British Museum's excavations. These
drawings are now being prepared for publication.
Sanctuary of the Muses - a Fountain House and Nymphaeum
A fifth and final season of work in 2003 was completed in the
Nymphaeum at Cnidus. This brings to a close the campaign to
re-excavate the building first explored between 1857 and 1859 by
Charles Newton. The aims of the excavation were threefold: to
establish an accurate plan of the site; to understand the function
of the building as a context for Newton's finds, now in the British
Museum; and to achieve a date for its foundation and later history.
The results have exceeded expectations and are summarised here in
advance of a fuller publication.
Discovery and Rediscovery
The building identified by Charles Newton as a Sanctuary of the
Muses was published with a plan by his assistant Robert Murdoch
Smith in Newton's A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus,
Cnidus and Branchidae (2 volumes 1862, 427- 442). The
identification of the cult depended upon an inscription that
mentions a dedication to the Muses of a statue of Glykinna by
members of her family. Other finds from the sanctuary include parts
of a series of female statuettes in marble that Newton also
identified as Muses. The Greek remains were extracted from the
collapsed ruins of a later Byzantine reuse of the building. Sadly,
after Newton 's time, the exposed Greek masonry of the interior
walls was reduced to rubble for building a goat pen and herdsman's
hut. This destruction probably happened in the early twentieth
century, and with it the sanctuary became forgotten. It was never
again mentioned in archaeological literature, and not until its
rediscovery in 1997 was it possible accurately to locate it on the
archaeological map of Cnidus. As almost nothing survived in its
original position above ground, the decision was taken to
re-excavate the sanctuary.
Plan and Elevation of the Sanctuary
The site occupies a terrace in the natural slope that descends
to the sea from the lofty acropolis of Cnidus. The usual method of
creating a building terrace for the ancient city was to construct a
massive retaining wall, and then to level the slope behind this
wall with imported dump material. In this case, however, the
situation is strikingly different. Here the rock was cut away to
form a level area, backed by a twenty foot artificial cliff. On
this step were laid the foundations of the sanctuary walls to form
a building measuring some sixty-five by forty-nine feet. The
sloping side walls of the excavated platform are riddled with
grottoes created by the action of spring water.
The foundations of walls have been exposed, along with what
survives of ancient floor levels. The nineteenth-century published
plan has broadly been confirmed with some important corrections and
additions. From the archaeological evidence and from Newton 's
description of columns, walls and terracotta roof tiles, it has
been possible to attempt a reconstruction on paper of the principal
elevation.
A rectangular courtyard was contained on two sides by a wall of
dressed limestone. On the north the courtyard was overlooked by a
colonnaded façade, while the west side of the courtyard was open to
give access via a flight of steps. These steps were reached by a
way that led off a street running along the foot of the southern
boundary wall. A second set of steps joined the courtyard stairs at
right angles and led up to an entrance vestibule. This short
passage was paved in a white mosaic of limestone cubes, each
measuring a centimetre square. Newton recorded that this mosaic
incorporated lead strips in the design, which is confirmed in the
sample that he deposited in the Museum.
A door led off from the entrance passage into the principal
room. This was open to the courtyard through a colonnade of four
Doric columns standing on a footing (stylobate) of pale grey
limestone blocks laid end to end. The east and west ends of this
elevation were closed by walls. Cuttings in the top bed of this
stylobate show that screens were fitted between each wall and the
nearest column. A third screen closed the gap between the second
and third columns, but the two other intercolumniations were left
open. A door pierced the east wall of this room, but not on the
same axis as the west door. This eastern door gave access to one of
the three caves exposed by the cutting of the natural rock. The
large room gave access through doorways on its north side into two
back rooms, divided by a partition wall. The northernmost
foundation block of this partition wall was cut with settings for
pipes to carry water away from each of the two back rooms and into
the channel running along the rear wall of the sanctuary.
Function
The new excavation has shown that the sanctuary is better
identified as a Nymphaeum, sacred to the spirits credited with the
supply of fresh water that was so obviously a prominent feature of
the place. Marble female statuettes from the site, naked to the
waist, were identified by Newton as Muses, but this nudity fits
better with the Nymphs than with the Muses. A fragment of a marble
relief found by Newton shows Nymphs dancing with goat-footed Pan
around an acanthus column and provides a direct link to the cult of
Nymphs. The worship of Muses in a sanctuary of the Nymphs should
not surprise us. The two groups of deities are connected by their
association with the Olympian god Apollo and in ancient literature
they tend to occupy the same physical and mythological
landscape.
The sacred function of the sanctuary went hand in hand with its
secular role as a fountain house supplying fresh water to the
residential district of the city that lay to the south and east. In
design the building stood mid-way between two types: on the one
hand there is the simple country shrine found all over the Greek
world at natural grottoes in rocky places, such as the Corycean
cave near Delphi; on the other there is the large, formal Nymphaeum
of the Roman period, such as that funded by Herodes Atticus for the
great athletic sanctuary at Olympia in western mainland Greece.
Date
To judge from the style of masonry and the finds, the
construction of the sanctuary probably occurred around 300 BC, not
long after the foundation of the new city in the middle of the
fourth century. The courtyard wall, with its rusticated facing,
relieved by comb-picked margins, can be paralleled by identical
walls in datable contexts all over the city. The blue limestone
blocks standing back to back on plinths to form the lower part of
the main walls of the building also represent a type of masonry
that is known from other sites in the city. These include the Ionic
gateway (propylon) at the western end of the main street of Cnidus,
which is dated in a recent study to c. 300 BC.
The earliest sherds of pottery from the site are black-glazed
Athenian wares, or local imitations, that may be dated to the late
fourth and the early third century BC. These fragments of pottery
vessels must represent the first dedications in the sanctuary. A
chronological sequence of pottery from the new excavation is being
assembled by Dr Alexandra Villing of the British Museum. It
descends through typical Hellenisitic Cnidian and other local
coarse and fine wares to the Roman period, when in the late first
and second centuries AD the attractive red-slip Cnidian relief
wares feature largely. The latest pottery, bar that of the modern
era, relates to the Christian transformation of the sanctuary into
a church.
Later history
The pottery provides some insight into the life-span of the
sanctuary and accords with other archaeological evidence. In the
Roman period the place continued to function. Water may not always
have been in the same abundant supply as previously, and there were
attempts to conserve it during dry spells. In the bedrock terrace
of the courtyard two sets of terracotta pipes feed into a complex
of cuttings that centre on a cistern with an estimated depth of up
to thirty feet. The water that fell into this tank first passed
through a shallower set of subsidiary cuttings that allowed
sediment to fall and collect at the bottom of a sump, before the
newly-filtered water was channelled into the main cistern. One set
of pipes (identical with the other) lies over the filling of an
earlier cutting. In this filling was found a sherd of Cnidian
relief ware, firmly datable to the second century AD. The complex
around the cistern, and probably the cistern itself, appear
therefore to be Roman of the second century, or later.
The sanctuary may have been allowed to fall into ruin in the
late pagan and early Christian period. In the last quarter of the
fifth century AD, it was converted into a church. The street was no
longer in use; the old entrance was shut down and the stairwell
filled in with stones. Approaching at a higher level than before,
an entrance was made in the colonnade wall of the sanctuary, the
gaps between the columns having been filled in with rubble. Inside
the church, the arrangement of rooms is largely lost. It seems
clear, however, that a narthex of sorts was created at the west end
out of the old entrance vestibule. The cross wall that closed the
passage to the north was removed, and beyond it a new rubble wall
was erected. A white plaster floor was laid over the bed of an old
water pool and a series of reused blocks were put down on to it,
one of them with a deep rectangular cutting for holding something
in place. It is proposed that these blocks were the support of a
baptismal font.
The latest pottery finds suggest that the sanctuary remained in
use as a church for a couple of centuries before it was abandoned,
perhaps as a result of Arab piratical raids. When the Cnidians
reoccupied their city following this intrusion, the old Nymphaeum
probably lay outside the perimeter of the new, smaller settlement.
If not already wrecked, it seems then to have fallen into ruin, a
thousand years after its foundation.
The Gymnasium
In summer 2004 excavation began at another of the places
previously explored by Newton. His so-called gymnasium was
subsequently lost and forgotten but has now been re-located on the
ancient high street of Cnidus . The research objectives of the
present excavation are to determine the layout of the building and
to ascertain its date, function and history. Thus it is hoped to
provide a better understanding of the archaeological context of
objects in the collections of the British Museum.
The site comprises an enclosure measuring some 21 x 16 metres.
Much survives of the lower courses of the perimeter walls, the
northern of which is actually the massive wall of the street. As
for the internal walls, the local farmers had destroyed these - as
they did at the Nymphaeum - in order to make a goat pen. From
Newton's plan and from our preliminary excavation, it is obvious
that the building descended in three terraces towards the west and
was entered from the street by a staircase that led down into the
lowest terrace. The 2004 summer season of excavation concentrated
on these steps and on clearing the highest terrace of the earth and
stones that had accumulated since Newton's day. Part of a white
pebble and tessara mosaic was uncovered, along with the setting for
a pair of columns forming an entrance to the central one of three
rooms.
Newton called the place a gymnasium, because of an inscription
dated to the late first century BC or early first century AD that
honoured G. Ioulios Artemidoros with the exceptional right to be
buried in the gymnasium within the city. He was the son of
Theopompos, friend of Julius Caesar. Artemidoros followed his
father to Rome and dramatically entered written history when, as
Plutarch famously records (Life of Caesar 65), he warned Caesar not
to go into the Senate on the Ides of March, 44 BC.
Our site does not have the large open space that we might
normally associate with a gymnasium, although it might have been
attached to a gymnasium, which could lie in the large unexcavated
area to the south. The inscription (BM 787) that mentions
Artemidoros' tomb also mentions the fact that he was priest of
Artemis Hiakynthotrophos (she who nourishes the nymph Hiakynthos).
Can the building have been the cult place of this deity? Another
inscription from the site records a dedication to the same goddess.
It is hoped that the answers to this and other questions will
emerge as the excavation proceeds.