The Temple of Artemis at Sardis

The Temple of Artemis at Sardis, the fourth largest Ionic temple in the world, is situated dramatically on the western slopes of the Acropolis, below the mass of the Tmolus Mountains in a broad valley opening into the ancient Pactolus River bed (Figs. 1, 2, 3).¹ As with the other two Artemisions of Asia Minor, the great Archaic/Hellenistic temple at Ephesus and Hermogenes’ Temple of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia-on-the-Meander, the principal facade of the temple was toward the west. The area might have been sacred to Artemis from the earliest days onward as attested by a large Archaic altar of limestone blocks, located at the west end of the temple.² Although the exact date of this altar (which was enlarged at a later period) is not certain, it is clear that the earlier structure predated the temple.

Located on land sloping down naturally from the Acropolis, east to west, the temple was buried deeper, and hence preserved better, on its eastern end; two of its columns survived intact to our day. The clarity of its structure and its well-preserved details makes the Temple of Artemis of Sardis a remarkable example for the study of the construction process of a major Greek building. Yet, certain portions, such as the entire west end, the north and south peristyle colonnades, and the roof structure, are entirely gone, have been altered, or were never finished. We have one whole and a few fragmentary architrave blocks, but none of the frieze, cornice, or the hypothetical pediment. This makes the understanding of the original design, and its successive renovations, difficult. Furthermore, it appears that the architecture of the Temple of Artemis at Sardis was highly unorthodox, making it hard to place in a traditional category of Greek temple design (Fig. 4).

The construction of the cella, probably including the columns between the anta walls of the front and back porches, must have been conceived and developed in the century or so following the death of Alexander the Great, ca. 300–175 BC. Although the temple was in use during this period, none of the peripheral columns had yet been built. The construction of the exterior colonnade, especially the east and west projecting porches (pronaos), belongs to the Roman Imperial era. Sometime during the first half of the second century AD, the cella was divided into two equal chambers and the temple incorporated the Imperial Cult, as attested by the discovery of numerous colossal portraits of the Roman emperors of the Antonine family and their consorts inside or immediately around the building. The gigantic structure was still unfinished by the end of the fourth century AD when it was abandoned with the coming of Christianity, and a small church was erected at the southeast corner. Dozens of crosses crudely carved on its marble walls are a testimony to the attempt to regain the magnificent pagan structure for a new use. In time, however, its marble blocks, paving, columns, and entablature were either systematically broken up for rebuilding the Byzantine city or burned for lime. By the ninth and tenth centuries AD, the temple was buried deeply by landslides from the Acropolis, but the tops of several columns, with capitals and architraves, were tantalizingly visible and recorded by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers.³

Perhaps the first western traveler to see and record his impressions of the temple was Cyriacus of Ancona, who visited Sardis in 1444 and saw “twelve round, huge columns.”⁴Three centuries later, in 1750, Robert “Palmyra” Wood and his party stopped in Sardis on their way to Palmyra and Baalbek and recorded the visible ruins of the ancient city. Giovanni Battista Borra, Wood’s friend and a professional draughtsman, made a beautiful ink-wash drawing of the temple showing six columns of the east porch as well as numerous pencil drawings of temple details (now in the Joint Library of the Hellenic and Roman Societies, the Institute of Classical Studies, London).⁵ Wood also uncovered one of the columns (#16, east of the northeast anta) down to its base, probably the first attempt to excavate the building. C.C. Cockerell, a well-known British Neoclassical architect, then only twenty-four, visited the site in 1812 and made some sketches of the standing three columns. There is little question that the massive columns and beautiful capitals of the Temple of Artemis influenced the young architect in his later work (Fig. 5).⁶ In 1850, George Dennis, British Consul in Izmir, made several trenches in the cella and discovered a colossal head that has been identified with Faustina the Elder, the wife of Emperor Antoninus Pius (AD 138–161), now in the British Museum.⁷ In 1904, Gustave Mendel, representing the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Istanbul, dug two trenches down to the bases between columns #5 and #6 and on the south side of column #1.⁸ Proper and systematic archaeological excavations in the temple were undertaken from 1910 to 1914 by Howard Crosby Butler, a professor of architecture at Princeton University and the director of the expedition. Although the war imposed a premature end to excavations in Sardis and at the temple, the results were published in the first two volumes of the Publications of the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis (see n. 1). Between 1960 and 1970, the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, based at Harvard and Cornell Universities and under the direction of George M.A. Hanfmann, undertook a partial study of the temple and its precinct; some ten test trenches were opened.⁹ Outside the official Sardis Expedition, the Temple of Artemis has become the subject of several scholarly studies since 1961.¹⁰

Since 1988, a comprehensive investigation of the temple was started by Fikret Yegül for the Sardis Expedition, under the directorship of Crawford H. Greenewalt, Jr. Among the primary goals of this project are a complete architectural documentation of the building and its construction details and several computer-aided reconstruction studies. The close observation and recording of the building has resulted in new information illuminating the complex construction history of the temple and revealing a picture in some ways significantly different from previous hypotheses.¹¹

The Temple of Artemis is a pseudodipteros (a “dipteral” temple with the inner row of columns omitted), with eight columns in front and back and twenty along the sides (Fig. 4). The original pronaos, or front porch, faced west; the back porch (also called an opisthodomos), before the present-day door existed, faced east. Both porches display four projecting columns in the front and two in the returns behind them. Consequently, the side ambulatories (pteroma) of the temple do not wrap uniformly around the ends as they do in normal pseudodipteral plans. The sides are the usual two interaxial distances wide, but the ends are three. The columnar spacing of the flanks, uniform at 4.99 m, is considerably narrower than the east and west ends, where interaxial spacing increases progressively from 5.31 m at the corners to 5.45 m, 6.65 m, and 7.06 m at the center. Such complex contraction of interaxial distances is uncommon in Hellenistic temple design; it is an archaic Ionic practice and can be seen at the Artemision of Ephesus. The overall dimensions of the peristyle are 44.58 m x 97.60 m (or roughly 151 x 330 Roman feet). The cella is exceptionally elongated, 23.0 m x 67.52 m (a ratio of about 1:3), another archaic, or rather “archaizing,” characteristic. The cella floor was ca.1.60 m higher than the porches and ambulatories. In the original Hellenistic plan, the base or podium for the cult image, preserved in sandstone foundation blocks, was placed centrally inside the cella. A double row of twelve slender columns, also preserved in marble foundation blocks only, helped to reduce the span and support the roof (the center-to-center distance between columns across the cella width is 9.40 m, clear span ca. 7.80 m). The original pronaos (west) between the antae measures 18.20 m x 17.70 m; the opisthodomos (east) is 18.20 x 6.01 m (a ratio close to 1:3). The side ambulatories are 8.23 m wide (10.78 m including the colonnade); the ends, measured from the antae, are ca. 12.45 m (15.05 m including the colonnade). Careful measurements at foundation and plinth levels reveal a distinct convex curvature of the north and south walls of the cella, although the full extent and consistency of the curvature have been compromised by the settlement of temple foundations.¹²

It appears that the columns of the east and west porches were erected, although only those of the east end have been substantially preserved; several of the base foundations of the flanks might have received columns now gone. Of the six columns of the projecting west porch, five are preserved in foundations, and one, #52 (northwest corner column), is entirely missing and probably was never constructed. With the exception of the southwest corner column, #64, none of the columns of the west front, even in foundations, seem to have been started. In contrast, the spectacular row of eight columns of the east end is preserved at different heights; two of them, #6, and #7, have stood intact since antiquity, along with their capitals.

The inspiration for the Temple of Artemis belongs to the post-Alexandrian world of ideological and materialistic expansion, although no specific record connects the temple with Alexander's short visit to Sardis in 334 BC. The original structure might have been conceived as a dipteros, following, in general, the plan and proportions of the great Ionian dipteroi, such as the Temple of Apollo at Didyma or the late Classical Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.¹³ The colossal building was probably begun under the Seleucids, soon after the battle of Korupedion in 281 BC when Seleukos I, the founder of the dynasty, defeated Lysimachos near Sardis. This date is also suggested by a dedicatory inscription found near the temple, which mentions one Stratonike, “daughter of Demetrios, the son of Antigonos,” who must indeed be Queen Stratonike, the wife of Seleucos I (301–281 BC).¹⁴ Another epigraphic indication that the cella and possibly the front and back porches, with their columns inside the anta walls, were complete and the temple in use by the end of the third century BC is provided by the so-called Mnesimachos Inscription. Partially preserved in situ on the interior of the northwest anta wall, the inscription, which records in detail the mortgage obligations of a certain Mnesimachos, could be dated to ca. 250–220 BC¹⁵ Some 127 coins found in the foundations of the image base inside the cella, all predating 200 BC, support this assumption. At this time no work had started on the exterior colonnade.¹⁶

Several scholars have suggested that the pseudodipteral peristyle belonged to a second Hellenistic phase of construction during the last quarter of the second century BC, perhaps under the growing influence of Hermogenes and his renowned Temple of Artemis at Magnesia-on-the-Meander (Fig. 6).¹⁷ The hypothesis is attractive, and there are some similarities between the two Artemisions (proportions of cella divisions, column alignments, and the central position of their image bases). However, the differences between the plans of the two temples are significant and fundamental, especially the design of the highly unusual front and back porches and the deliberately archaizing, complex, interaxial contractions of Sardis compared to the orthodox plan of the pseudodipteros of Hermogenes at Magnesia. Judged by its plan, the Artemision of Sardis is not a true pseudodipteros.

Current investigations at the temple produced ample evidence to indicate that the entire peristyle colonnade and the dividing wall of the cella belonged to a single project undertaken during the Roman Imperial period. Two structural and archaeological conditions support this conclusion. First, individual marble block foundations of the peristyle columns (ca. 1.70–1.90 m deep) are connected to each other by a construction of heavy rubble set in lime mortar, a typical local version of Roman concrete (opus caementicium). In contrast, all of the major cella walls have continuous block foundations, ca. 2.50–3.0 m deep, a common Hellenistic practice. The nature and details of mortared rubble construction make it clear that it was laid concurrently with the block foundations of the columns, not added as reinforcement at a later period, as suggested by Butler. Second, only few of the foundations of the long north and south sides could carry bases or columns, because their top courses were never finished. In these instances, the top courses (some preserved below the level of the ambulatory) are composed of very rough blocks, crudely fitted together, with uneven surfaces. These blocks do not have the usual construction features such as clamps, dowel holes, or setting marks, except for large and crude lewis holes, essential for lifting them.

The walls, bases, and foundations of the temple display two clearly distinguishable construction techniques that can be associated with the two major phases of building: Hellenistic and Roman Imperial. In the original, Hellenistic work, marble blocks are joined to each other by I-shaped ("bar") clamps; there are small, square dowel holes paired with "prying holes," or slits, used for crowbar leverage in setting the blocks. Dowel holes do not have channels for lead runoff. Lewis holes are entirely absent. Blocks are well fitted and well trimmed. These construction methods are uniformly applied to all four major walls of the cella and all the foundation blocks of the interior columns. This type of construction conforms to the widespread Hellenistic masonry practices of Asia Minor and is readily comparable to ashlar wall construction techniques of late Classical and Hellenistic temples such as the Temple of Athena in Priene, the Temple of Artemis at Magnesia, and the Temple of Artemis at Letoon. The second type of construction, recognized as Roman work, shows blocks with relatively uneven surfaces and rougher fit. Many of them reused, these blocks are generally much smaller than those of the first type (especially the pieces used in the middle of the wall as “fill”). Lewis holes ("double splayed") are larger and appear consistently on all blocks. Large "butterfly" (or “wing”) clamps are used for courses below the floor or stylobate level; regular bar-clamps are the norm at or above the stylobate level. They are used frequently, sometimes connecting a block to its neighbors on all four sides or more. Square dowel holes often have channels. This type of construction is used consistently in the east cross wall, the new west wall of the cella (built ca. 12.80 m west of the cross wall), and all the foundations of the peristyle columns, including those of the east and west porches (Figs. 7, 8).

If we were to view the Temple of Artemis sometime during the late Hellenistic or early Imperial era, we could be startled by its simple and uncommon appearance: an oddly elongated, tall marble box shining with white walls accentuated by exquisite details and covered by a simple, hipped roof of all-marble tiles and pedimented ends—no peripheral columns, just the cella. This marble box was probably raised over a low earth embankment, sloping from east to west. The early altar might have stood free on the lower ground on the west side, which was probably connected to the higher west (or front) porch of the cella by natural ramps or marble steps or both. It is perhaps these steps that were dismantled and rebuilt on the northwest side of the same porch during the Imperial era. There must have been trees and plantings around the temple, softening the stark geometry of the cella and the altar, and many, smaller votive monuments associated with the altar. One of these dedications was carved on a block and supported a statue of a priestess of Artemis, and it honored the goddess with the following words: “O, Artemis, ever preserve Sardis in concord by the prayers of Moschine, the daughter of Diphilos!”¹⁸

After an unusually long period of inactivity, major construction must have resumed at the Artemision of Sardis around the middle of the second century AD. The cella was divided into two chambers of almost equal length (east chamber 25.76 m, west chamber 25.20 m long) by a wall 0.90 m thick; the original west wall and probably its door were brought forward (westward) to create a new west porch exactly the same depth as the east porch (6.07 m). Since the floor of the west pronaos was ca. 1.60 m lower than that of the cella, the new west addition had to be filled up to the level of the original cella. The blank east wall of the back porch was cut open and rebuilt with a monumental door displaying handsomely ornamented jamb profiles, and it was approached by stairs, in imitation of the original west door of the temple. A stylistic analysis of the fully modeled jamb ornament (which is composed of bead-and-reel, egg-and-dart ovolo, and a cavetto of palmettes) in comparison to other relevant examples of architectural ornament from Asia Minor favors a late Hadrianic date.¹⁹ A new image-base, preserved in its mortared rubble foundations, was constructed at the back of the new "west cella," placed against the dividing wall. The six-column prostyle porches of the east and west ends must have been created at this time by moving forward and re-erecting the two middle pairs of original, in antis columns that were raised on pedestals (#11 and #12 on the east, #53 and #54 on the west) and adding four new columns to each.²⁰ The prostyle porches thus created enclosed magnificent hall-like volumes, probably open to the sky due to their great spans (13.5 m x 18.0 m) (Fig. 9).

The two well-preserved columns of the east porch (#11 and #12) are unusual elements in Classical architecture (Fig. 10). Raised on very tall, unfinished, pedestal bases (2.17 m high), they carry slender columns with fluted shafts—the only instances of finished fluting in the temple. These shafts, and the finely crafted Ionic capitals they once carried, are attributed to the Hellenistic phase of the temple, possibly reused shafts from the cella interior, while the pedestals, composed of roughly hewn, reused column drums from the original building, belong to Roman construction. One of those capitals, ‘C,’ smaller than those of the peristasis, is at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Butler suggested that the tapering and projecting upper zone of the pedestals was intended for relief sculpture comparable to the sculpted pedestal drums (columnae caelatae) of the Archaic and Classical Artemisions in Ephesus.²¹ This might have been so; or the outward tapering blocks could have been intended to accommodate a strongly projecting crown molding for the pedestal. In either case, these rough pedestal columns supporting finely finished, slender, fluted, Ionic columns are extremely attractive, eye-catching features accentuating the strong central axis of the temple.

Impressed by their extraordinary design, “a feature so unusual, so foreign to anything known in the whole range of Hellenic architecture,” Butler also conjectured that these columns raised on “cubical,” quarry-faced pedestals—and those of the Ephesus Artemision—might represent a line of design or aesthetic going back to Anatolia’s own distant past, as in the Near Eastern and Hittite temples, “where columns are elevated upon sculptured sphinxes as pedestals” and were very likely copies from an earlier Lydian temple.²² Although we have found no Lydian predecessor to our Hellenistic temple, Butler’s imaginative point about the continuity of Lydian culture and manners in Sardis well into the late Classical era is worth considering. We may remember that carved on the apophyge (the slightly curving bottom profile of a column shaft) of column #12 (the southern pedestal column, a reused Hellenistic element) is a single line of inscription in Lydian that records a dedication to Artemis by a relative (son ?) of ‘Bakivas,’ perhaps the donor of the column and pedestal; and another such Lydian dedicatory text was inscribed, probably on one of the Hellenistic columns reused in the west porch (No. 37). If these columns belonged to the original temple, dated ca. 300–280 BC as surmised, the Lydian language and Lydian lineage obviously still carried meaning and prestige in Croesus’ old capital well into the Classical period.²³

The transformation of a colossal, unfinished Greek temple into a Roman pseudodipteros with back-to-back cellas posed certain problems and produced an unorthodox architectural solution. Unlike the typical pseudodipteral temples in Asia Minor (such as the Temple of Augustus and Roma in Ankara and the Temple of Zeus in Aezane), with their simple tetrastyle-prostyle internal porches and static, uniform, double-intercolumnation-wide ambulatories around the cella, the side ambulatories at Sardis are connected to triple intercolumnation-wide pronaos porches. These tall, cubical volumes, probably open to the sky, must have created and exploited a dramatic sense of space not commonly found in the canonical temple architecture of Hermogenes and his world.²⁴ The Sardis Artemision was undeniably rooted in the history and traditions of Anatolia, but there were also mixed sources and traditions behind it that lay outside.

The deep, tetrastyle-prostyle, box-like porches of Sardis find distant parallels in the traditional Roman temples of Italy, such as the Republican Temple of Portunus in the Forum Boarium in Rome or the Augustan Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus. Roman temple design, from its inception, always emphasized the space in front of the cella by adopting a wide frontal porch, this width sometimes even equaling the width of the cella itself (such as the Temple of Divus Julius in the Roman Forum and the Temple of Apollo Palatinus in Rome), a specification underlined by Vitruvius when describing the Etruscan temple (Vitruvius, 4.7.1).²⁵ It is interesting that the three relevant pseudodipteroi of the Roman Imperial era in Anatolia, namely the Temple of Aphrodite at Aphrodisias, the Temple of Augustus and Roma at Ankara, and the Temple of Zeus at Aezane, resisted the formation of deep, frontal porches. The alleged Italian influence in the creation of an independent and spatial internal porch in Sardis can be demonstrated by comparing it to various Italian temples, but particularly to the Hadrianic Pantheon, with its "pseudodipteral," three-aisled porch.²⁶ The Pantheon, with its frontal porch grafted onto a circle, is not a pseudodipteral temple; it is not a peristyle temple at all. But the Pantheon’s octastyle porch, with its wide three-intercolumnation-wide central “nave” flanked by two-intercolumnation-wide “aisles,” mimics a pseudodipteral composition (Fig. 11). The Hadrianic connection is further underscored by comparison of the back-to-back cella arrangement of Sardis to the original layout of the Temple of Venus and Roma in Rome.²⁷ All this is not to suggest that there was a direct and exclusive connection between these projects in Rome and Sardis (although there are demonstrably architectural connections between Asia Minor and Rome under Trajan and Hadrian). There is little reason to assume the employment of an Italian architect or a design imported from Rome. In fact, we believe that the closest guides for the unknown architect for the Roman phase of the Sardis Artemision were the already existing facts on the ground, particularly the narrow and elongated design of Hellenistic cella. Still, in the expanding world of the Roman Empire, ideas on art and architecture were exchanged between the capital and the provinces, and no period was more fertile and conducive to such porosity of intellectual and artistic borders than that defined by Hadrian.

It is impossible to assign an exact date for the Roman reconstruction of the temple. The widespread and competent use of mortared rubble is in keeping with the middle-Imperial era, but mortared rubble does not allow close and reliable dating. More suggestive is the architectural ornament of the east door jamb, dated stylistically, but still tentatively, to the late Hadrianic period. An inscription carved on the bottom fillet of one of the columns of the east colonnade (#4) proudly declares that its torus and the plinth are made from a single block of marble, and that "of all the columns I was the first to rise." Based on letter forms and epigraphic style, a Hadrianic-Antonine date (ca. AD 140) has been suggested, and supported by circumstantial considerations.²⁸ Hadrian traveled widely in Asia Minor, and several temples were granted to him “as god,” including the massive pseudodipteros at Cyzicus and temples in Ephesus and Sagalassus. The emperor probably included Sardis in his visit to Phrygia and Lydia in 123/4 AD, as suggested by the discovery of a statue base dedicated to the traveling emperor.²⁹ Sardis may already have had its first neokorate honor (the privilege of possessing a provincial temple to the cult of the Roman emperor) by the time of Hadrian’s hypothetical visit to the city and may have received a second neokorate on this occasion (multiple honors were not unusual for major cities); if not, the honor would have been long overdue.

At least five colossal portrait heads attributed to the Antonine family were discovered inside or close to the temple. These have been tentatively identified as Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius (Zeus ?), Faustina the Elder, Lucilla (Artemis ?), and Commodus (found in 1996) (Figs. 12, 13).³⁰ Hadrian’s head is missing, but this does not mean it did not exist. Hence, the renewed construction at the temple—significantly, the cella subdivision—might have been occasioned by the much coveted neokorate (first or second time) awarded to Sardis during the late-Hadrianic or early-Antonine era.³¹ In this new arrangement, Artemis might have kept the west-facing cella (perhaps even sharing it with Faustina, the Roman empress) and the Imperial family might have occupied the newly fashioned east-facing cella (perhaps sharing it with Zeus Polieus).³² The heads are 3.5 to 4 times life size and belong to cult figures reconstructed at ca. 6–8 m tall. With each addition of a new member of the Antonine family, these cult images (agalma), standing or sitting singly or in groups, would have crowded even the vast interior space of the 18-meter-high cella.³³

The Temple of Artemis at Sardis can best be described as a transitional building between the Hellenic and Roman worlds. Situated in the capital of the Lydian kingdom, it displayed some of the curious local archaisms that the city was known for while embracing the post-Alexandrian sense of modernism. Poised in a world that encouraged freedom of design but also sought to devise and impose new canons, following the aesthetics of conventional massing as well as the drama of spatial articulation, addressing the traditions of a venerable local cult but aspiring to a new political alignment of religion under its Imperial masters, the Temple of Artemis at Sardis is a creative experiment in Greco-Roman architecture. Above all, it reflects the Empire's successful attempt at the amalgamation of its cherished dual cultural and artistic heritage, combining Greek models and inspiration with new ideas in shaping structure and space.

• 1Principal publications on the temple by Sardis Excavations are: Butler 1922; Butler 1925; Hanfmann and Waldbaum 1975.
• 2This might have been the altar recalled by Xenophon as the site of the meeting between Cyrus II and Orontes in 402 BC Anabasis 1.6.7.
• 3On early travelers to Sardis, particularly the visit of R. Wood and his draughtsman G. Battista Borra, see Scott 2001, 143–55; Hutton 1927, 102–28. See also Butler 1922, 5.
• 4Bodnar 2003, Letters 6.4–6.6.
• 5See note 3 on Wood and Borra. See also Greenewalt 2003, 25–29, esp. 26, figs. 6–9, 13.
• 6These sketches and some of his observations are included in Leake 1824, 342–345. See also Yegül 2003, 34–35.
• 7Butler 1922, 7; Hanfmann and Waldbaum 1975, 74.
• 8Mendel 1905, 127–135.
• 9Hanfmann and Frazer in Hanfmann and Waldbaum 1975, 74–103.
• 10Gruben 1961, 155–196; Hoepfner 1990, 1–34, esp. 3–7; Howe 1999, 199–210.
• 11Forthcoming publication by F.K. Yegul.
• 12T.N. Howe, who had measured the north and south walls for curvature in 1982, suggested similar conclusions. Howe 1999, 199–201, fig. 11.1.
• 13Hanfmann and Frazer in Hanfmann and Waldbaum 1975, 74–87.
• 14Buckler and Robinson 1932, no. 86, 91, 92. pl. XIII; Butler 1922, 43; Franke 1961, 196–208. See also Macurdy 1932, 78–82.
• 15Buckler and Robinson 1932, no. 1, 1–7; Buckler and Robinson 1912, 15–84, esp. 22–26. See also Atkinson 1972, 62–67. For further dating considerations of the original, Hellenistic phase, see also the "Sacrilege Inscription" from Ephesus: Knibbe 1961–63, 175, 182; Sokolowski 1965, 427–431; Hanfmann 1987, 1–8.
• 16Hanfmann and Waldbaum 1975, 75–77; Franke 1961, 205; Seyrig 1963, 23–4.
• 17Gruben 1961, 160 f., 181–184; Akurgal 1978, 127–131; Şahin 2002. More recently, W. Hoepfner proposed that the original design, with a tetrastyle-prostyle porch, was conceived as a pseudodipteros, predating Hermogenes by a century or more. Excavations inside the east porch in 1996 disproved this idea, showing undisturbed clay in the position where one of these hypothetical columns was supposed to have stood ( Hoepfner 1990, 1–7, fig. 2).
• 18Buckler and Robinson 1932, no. 50.
• 19Vandeput 1997; Pülz 1989, 74–77; Kadıoğlu 2006, esp. nos. 240, 309, 489, 508. See also Raumscheid 1994 and Strong 1953, 118–51.
• 20Gruben 1961, 181–84.
• 21Butler 1922, 106–7; Butler 1925, 93–96.
• 22Butler 1925, 97.
• 23Butler 1922, 106; Buckler 1924, no. 21, pl. 9; Gusmani 1964, 259, no. 21. A second Lydian inscription carved on a similar astragal fragment was found north of the temple in 1978. Following the same epigraphic formula, it also recorded a dedication to Artemis by one (son of) Srkastus, who must have donated a similar column (#11, or one of the two pedestal columns from the west side, #53 or #54). Greenewalt, Jr., Sterud, and Belknap 1982, 24–25; Gusmani 1980–81, 21–27.
• 24Howe 1999, 199–200.
• 25For Etruscan and Republican temples (with many illustrations), see Boethius and Ward-Perkins 1970, 29–42, 51–56, 108–114, 132–33; Coarelli 1974, 279–282; Stamper 2005.
• 26 Ward-Perkins 1981, 133–42; MacDonald 1982, 94–118; MacDonald 1976; Stamper 2005, 184–205, esp. fig. 151.
• 27 Ward-Perkins 1981, 122–23; Stamper 2005, 206–12; Barattolo 1978, 397–410; Opper 2008, 126–7; Howe 1999, 204; Cassatella and Panella 1990, 52–55; Gros 1996, 178–80.
• 28The Hadrianic-Antonine date has been suggested by the late Peter Herrmann, who also provided a more plausible translation of the inscription than the one given by Buckler and Robinson 1932, no. 181, 144. Herrmann (currently also supported by Georg Petzl) questioned the interpretation of the word anistemi as “to rise again,” which infers a rebuilding and restoration process for columns, preferring simply “to rise.”
• 29Bowersock 1969, 121–3; Birley 1997, 159, 168; Weiss 1995, 213–24.
• 30Hanfmann and Ramage 1978, no. 79, figs. 196, 197; no. 102, figs. 223, 224; no. 251, fig. 434; no. 252, fig. 435; Greenewalt and Rautmann 2000, 675–76, fig. 32. For Antonine portraiture in general, see Wegner 1939, 54–65, 226–49, pls. 42–45.
• 31For a comprehensive discussion of the possible times and nature of neokoria received by Sardis, see Burrell 2004, 100–115, which includes opinions on the identifications of the Sardis colossal portraits, 103–6.
• 32Hanfmann and Frazer believed that the cella division had occurred during the Hellenistic period, probably in the short reign of usurper Achaios (220–214 BC), when the temple might have been rededicated to Artemis and Zeus. Hanfmann wished to identify one of the colossal heads as Zeus/Achaios. The cella division is now firmly established as Roman. If there was a joint Hellenistic cult (the existence of a cult and sanctuary of Zeus in Sardis going back to the Persian days is known from epigraphic evidence, although no independent temple or sanctuary has been found), the images probably shared the same, original base. See Hanfmann and Waldbaum 1975, 75. For the cult of Zeus Polieus/Zeus Baradates in Sardis, see Herrmann 1996, 315–348, esp. 321–329.
• 33Price 1984, 193–95; Burrell 2004, 317–21. For the arrangement of Antonine sculptural groups, see Fittscher 1999. For the arrangement and positioning of cult images in temples, see Rüpke 2007; Kreikenbom 1992; Burrell 2004, 107–8.