Archaeologists resume the search for the home of
drama in a majestic Greek sanctuary
By MARCO MEROLA
Monday, March 18, 2019
Going to the theater was an essential part of ancient Greek civic and religious life. Plays such as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, and likely numerous other works that have not survived, were regularly staged at religious festivals. Masked actors and a chorus whose role was to comment on the play’s action in song, dance, and verse entertained festivalgoers and paid honor to the gods. “Since the very beginning of Greek civilization, a theater was always a religious building housed in a sanctuary,” says archaeologist Luigi Maria Caliò of the University of Catania. “In the Greek world, everything was related to holiness, and theaters were built in sacred areas.”
At first, theaters were likely just open areas or hillsides with no cavea, or tiered seating area. From about the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C., says Caliò, Greek theaters were built of wood. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Electra, for example, were performed in wooden theaters. Beginning in the fourth century B.C., theaters were often built in stone. “When theaters were monumentalized, they became a crucial part of cities around the Greek world,” Caliò says. Though nearly all traces of the wooden structures have been lost, remains of ancient Greek stone theaters—almost 150 have been discovered to date—still stand from Italy to the Black Sea, at sites such as Epidaurus in the Greek Peloponnese, the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, and Taormina in Sicily. As one of the most important cities in the ancient Mediterranean during the classical era and home to one of its grandest sanctuaries, Akragas (now Agrigento), on Sicily’s southern coast, must have had a theater as well. But no ancient sources mention one there and, until recently, no archaeological evidence of such a structure had ever been found.
The city-state of Akragas was founded in 582 B.C. by Greeks from Gela, a flourishing Sicilian colony some 40 miles away that had been established a century earlier. Akragas reached its zenith under the tyrant Theron, who ruled from about 489 to 472 B.C. In 480 B.C., Theron and his ally and brother-in-law Gelon, ruler of the powerful colony of Syracuse, were part of a coalition that defeated the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera, ending, temporarily at least, the Carthaginians’ threat to take over Sicily. To celebrate their victories, Akragas’ rulers launched a series of monumental building projects, including construction of the immense temple dedicated to Olympian Zeus, which, at 340 by 160 feet, was the largest Doric temple in the Greek world. Akragas was razed by the Carthaginians in 406 B.C. and then left largely abandoned until 338 B.C., when the Carthaginians were defeated and the city was rebuilt.
A century later, Akragas was the site of the first pitched land battle of the Punic War, which pitted the resurgent Carthaginians against the newly expanding power of Rome. The Roman victory in 262 B.C. signified the beginning of Roman influence in Sicily. Later, Akragas became Roman Agrigentum. Throughout its history, when the city thrived, building projects and religion did, too. Temples were regularly constructed and dedicated to gods and demigods including Hercules, Zeus, Hera, Athena, Concordia, Hephaestus, Castor and Pollux, Demeter and Persephone, and Isis.
The search for Akragas’ theater began almost a century ago when archaeologist Pirro Marconi directed a large archaeological campaign funded by his English patron, Alexander Hardcastle. Hardcastle was a captain in the British Navy who became fascinated with the site while living in a home known as the Villa Aurea, located between two of Agrigento’s still-standing temples. Until the Englishman died in 1933, he sponsored Marconi’s work. The only written source available to guide Marconi in his search for the theater was De Rebus Siculis Decades Duae, the first printed book on the history of Sicily, written in the middle of the sixteenth century by Dominican monk Tommaso Fazello. Fazello had located what was left of the theater “not very far from San Nicolò church,” adding, “I barely recognize its foundations.” Marconi, however, failed to uncover significant evidence of the structure, ending the pursuit of Akragas’ theater for the next eight decades.
Slideshow:
Beyond the Temples
It wasn’t until the summer of 2015, when Maria Concetta Parello, one of the supervising archaeologists of Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples archaeological park, decided to investigate the southern boundary of the agora, the ancient city’s main market and gathering place, that the hunt was renewed. About 300 yards from San Nicolò church, experts from the University of Molise and Italy’s Institute for Applied Technology were using 3-D tomography to explore deep underground. “At the end of the workday they told us about some height differences on a steep slope,” says Parello. “Specifically, they saw some strange curved lines in a nearby limestone embankment. We asked a geologist what he made of that, and he said this type of curve definitely wasn’t natural. We thought it might be the theater and became very excited.” After a short walk to the top of the slope, Parello also noticed some stone blocks arranged in a curvilinear shape. “They were always there, but we had never really seen them before,” she says. Although it would take them several more months of work to be certain—during which time they refrained from calling the structure “the theater” for fear of jinxing their find—Parello and her team had finally located Akragas’ missing theater. Marconi, it turns out, hadn’t found the structure because he had been looking in the wrong place.
Over the past three field seasons, Parello’s team has continued to uncover what remains of Akragas’ stone theater. They have identified two phases, one dating to the fourth or third century B.C., and the other to the second century B.C., when the building’s diameter was expanded from about 213 feet to more than 300 feet by the Romans. “This makes it one of the biggest theaters in Sicily, comparable to those in Syracuse and Catania,” Caliò says. The project has been complicated by the fact that, since at least the thirteenth century, locals have been disassembling the structure stone by stone and using the blocks to build the churches and private buildings of medieval and modern Agrigento. When the team reached the level of the foundation trenches for the theater’s west side, for example, nearly all the foundation stones were gone. However, the surviving remains indicate that the foundation could have supported walls up to 30 feet tall. Thus far, the team has fully excavated the summa cavea, the highest part of the stands, where commoners sat. In the future, they hope to uncover the ima cavea, where the most coveted seats reserved for elders and high-ranking individuals were located.
In addition to the remains of the theater’s structure and seats, Parello and her team have uncovered numerous votive artifacts in and around the structure, including a deposit of objects related to a good-luck ritual. Most of these are vessels for everyday use, such as a guttus, a kind of baby bottle, and unguentaria, small terracotta vessels used to hold perfumed ointment. The team has also unearthed many fragments of high-quality fourth- to third-century B.C. black-glazed pottery, as well as three coins, one of which is well preserved. This coin, which dates from the classical period and was minted in Agrigento, depicts an eagle, the symbol of Zeus, with folded wings on the front and a crab on the back. A small statue dating to the fourth or third century B.C. depicts a musician playing the double flute, or aulos, in a style typical of Greco-Sicilian artists. Although only fragmentary, an unearthed terracotta theatrical mask still shows the original colored paint. A better-preserved fourth-century B.C. mask depicts a fearsome Gorgon.
Atop a hill not far from the stone theater, the team made a surprising find: 20 holes dug into the earth to hold wooden poles. “Our hypothesis is that this is evidence of an older, rectangular wooden theater that was replaced by the one made of stone,” says Caliò. “This confirms what we know about the architecture of Greek theaters.” Recently, archaeologists excavating at the base of the Acropolis in Athens identified holes similar to the ones found in Agrigento. “These holes seem to have belonged to the Theater of Dionysus, which collapsed in the fifth century B.C.,” Caliò explains. “We believe that theater was contemporaneous with Agrigento’s wooden theater.”
Parello’s excavations will resume in the spring of 2019, when she hopes to find the stone theater’s orchestra. “After investigating with a magnetometer, we know there are some unidentifiable structures about 12 feet below the surface,” she says. “It’s probably the orchestra. I can’t wait to see what it looks like. And it would be great if we could find the original stage.”
Once the most sacred site on the Nile, Heliopolis was
all but forgotten until archaeologists returned to
save it from disappearing forever
By ANDREW CURRY
Friday, February 08, 2019
As geographical guides, creation myths can be unhelpfully vague. Christians, Jews, and Muslims have long searched in vain for the location of the Garden of Eden. For the ancient Egyptians, things were a bit easier. The world, they believed, began on a low hill just outside modern-day Cairo. There the sun rose for the first time and made order out of a roiling sea of elemental chaos. There the Egyptian creator, Atum, and sun god, Ra, first appeared, and there they held court for millennia. And there the Egyptians built their most enduring sacred site, a city known today by its Greek name, Heliopolis, or City of the Sun. At the center of the city, contemporaneous sources and recent archaeological excavations show, was the Temple of the Sun.
Egyptians worshipped at Heliopolis over the course of countless lifetimes and thousands of years. The earliest known temples there date back nearly 4,600 years, to the first days of Egypt’s pyramids. Inscriptions reveal that generations of pharaohs bolstered their claim to have descended from Atum and Ra by building grand shrines there. At its peak around 1200 B.C., the holy site was marked with dozens of colossal obelisks.
Heliopolis was known far and wide in antiquity. Called On in Hebrew, the city is mentioned multiple times in the Old Testament. It also served as a reference point for other Egyptian sacred sites. Although Thebes, Egypt’s capital during the Middle and New Kingdoms (ca. 2030–1070 B.C.), is now far better known, ancient Egyptian sources referred to it as the “Heliopolis of the South,” and its temples were modeled on those at Heliopolis. Even in its final centuries, Heliopolis was a popular destination supposedly visited by the Greek philosopher Plato, according to an account written four centuries later by the geographer and historian Strabo. Strabo also includes a first-person account of his own visit to the site’s nearly deserted ruins in his book Geographica.
Both physically and theologically, Heliopolis was at the heart of Egyptian religion. It was both city and temple, every corner of it holy, but also filled with everyday activity. “You can compare it to the very center of Vatican City,” says archaeologist and University of Leipzig Egyptian Museum curator Dietrich Raue. “Everyone inside the city was somehow connected to the sun cult or temple.”
Yet today, Heliopolis is virtually unknown. After almost two and a half millennia of continuous worship there, the importance of its temples declined. By the second century B.C., the city was abandoned, for reasons archaeologists are still trying to discern. It was subsequently plundered and stripped of anything that could be burned or reused. Beginning in the late Roman period, nearly all of its limestone architecture was carted away to build Cairo, leaving little to see above the surface. Over time, most of the city’s obelisks were removed, carried off first to decorate Alexandria, and then to Rome, Paris, London, and even New York (see “The Obelisks of Heliopolis,” page 30). Only one still stands at the center of the site, a 68-foot-tall red granite monument erected by Senwosret I around 1950 B.C. that juts out of the ground in the impoverished Cairo neighborhood of Matariya like a hieroglyph-inscribed spike. By the 1800s, Heliopolis had all but vanished under the silt that builds up during the Nile’s annual floods. It was buried under farm fields on the outskirts of Cairo. What was left of Heliopolis is now covered by between six and 20 feet of soil and debris. “It’s extraordinary that one of the most famous cities of the ancient world is now a ghost of a name,” says Stephen Quirke, head of the Petrie Museum at the University of London. “It’s a black hole in our knowledge of ancient Egypt. Heliopolis is the great site.”
Slideshow:
The Obelisks of Heliopolis
Heliopolis’ fate wasn’t unique. Many ancient Egyptian metropolises, including Thebes and Memphis, were also abandoned and later covered over by modern settlements or fields. There was little interest among early Egyptologists in exploring these urban sites. Quirke traces this to the fact that scholars of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries were more intent on discovering inscribed temples and tombs than the cities and urban environments that surrounded them. Furthermore, by this time, most of Heliopolis was long gone. “If you’re looking for standing monuments, you don’t come to Heliopolis,” Quirke says.
Still, the city was never truly lost. Napoleon’s forces fought at Heliopolis in March of 1800, and contemporary paintings of the battle often include its ruins and lone surviving obelisk. As recently as the early 1900s, the outlines of its walls were visible, and anyone studying ancient Egyptian religion or royalty would have recognized it from ample references in ancient texts. In the later twentieth century, Egyptian authorities protected the site from development. Much of Heliopolis’ central temple precinct was owned by Egypt’s government and was left undisturbed as Cairo grew to the north. The large nearby necropolis—the final resting place of many of the ancient city’s priests, workers, and officials—was protected by heritage laws that required archaeological excavation before any new construction. A nearby suburb was named Heliopolis in the ancient city’s honor, but a small open-air museum and the solitary obelisk were all that remained above ground to mark the location of the sacred site. “The area was completely empty and waiting for archaeologists,” says geophysical archaeologist Tomasz Herbich of the Polish Academy of Sciences. “Unfortunately, archaeology wasn’t interested.” While Egyptian archaeologists from Cairo University and the Supreme Council of Antiquities worked on the site’s edges and conducted salvage excavations in the surrounding neighborhood, foreign archaeologists flocked to more accessible sites elsewhere in Egypt. Until, that is, Dietrich Raue came along.
As an Egyptology student at the University of Heidelberg in the early 1990s, Raue found his mind wandering as he toiled over a difficult early Middle Egyptian translation in the library. He recalls staring at the stacks surrounding him and his eye lighting on an enticing name: Heliopolis. The volume he saw was a report on early work conducted by Egyptian archaeologist Abdel-Aziz Saleh, who documented a small corner of the site in the 1970s. Other accounts included that of an Italian team that worked in Heliopolis for a few years in the early 1900s. A report by pioneering British Egyptologist W. M. Flinders Petrie, who spent a number of weeks excavating and sketching the ruins in 1912, described the excavation of obelisk fragments, statue heads, and amulets, all of which had once decorated the city’s temples. But when Raue searched for more information, he came up empty-handed. “I remember thinking there must be many more books,” he says. “But those were the only ones.”
Slideshow:
The Obelisks of Heliopolis
A few years later, the doctoral student was looking for a niche of his own in the crowded field of Egyptology. On his way to work at the pyramids of Dahshur south of Cairo, he thought back to his experience in the library. Arriving in Egypt a few days early, he visited Heliopolis. To his surprise, one of the most important sites in ancient Egypt, with more than two millennia of history, lay virtually unexplored under what amounted to a suburban park. Raue was tantalized. “My Egyptian colleagues always knew about this, but, for me, it was incredible to see that the huge area where the temple stood was not yet completely occupied,” Raue says. “I stood at the obelisk and thought, ‘Maybe something can be done here.’” To Raue’s frustration, local officials told him high costs and a complicated legal situation made digging there prohibitive. While working on a series of other sites in Egypt as part of German and Swiss projects there, Raue went to Heliopolis regularly, staying in touch with local archaeologists and keeping track of construction projects and development plans. “If it was going to be easy,” he says, “it would have been done many years ago.”
Here and there, small windows of opportunity would open up. In 2005, for example, Raue joined Egyptian colleagues excavating more than three acres of the ancient temple area ahead of planned shopping center construction in the middle of Matariya. Some of the first objects to emerge were fragments of inscribed statues that provided promising physical evidence of the city’s importance. During the excavation, Raue helped document a life-size depiction of the pharaoh Ramesses II (r. ca. 1279–1213 B.C.) dressed in priestly attire that illustrates not only Heliopolis’ religious significance but also its political function as the place where generations of rulers reaffirmed their claim to power over all of Egypt. Hieroglyphs on the statue’s base read “King of Upper and Lower Egypt, lord of the two lands / Son of Ra, lord of crowns / He lets the lord of crowns reunite with the throne of Horus.”
Other inscriptions the team unearthed demonstrate that Heliopolis’ special status as the birthplace of the gods and origin of the world helped protect it during times of religious upheaval. During the reign of Akhenaten (r. ca. 1349–1336 B.C.), who attempted to reform Egyptian worship by eliminating polytheism, Heliopolis continued to thrive. Even after Akhenaten built his own city at Amarna, carvings on stone blocks called talatat, bearing his name and that of his queen, Nefertiti, were placed at Heliopolis. “Heliopolis is the only place in Egypt with new temples and statues throughout the Amarna period. It’s the only temple we know of that is continuously open in that period,” Raue says. “The Temple of the Sun had an uninterrupted cult for at least 2,400 years. The continuity is amazing. Heliopolis wasn’t like anywhere else in Egypt.”
After that first brief campaign, Raue wasn’t certain he would ever have the chance to excavate in Heliopolis again. He spent many years working near Aswan, far to the south. Then came the Arab Spring of 2011. In the chaos that followed, Egyptian authorities lost control of the area, unleashing an unauthorized building boom. At the same time, the center of the ancient temple site became an illegal trash dump. Raue estimates that thousands of tons of garbage—a stinking layer of construction debris, animal carcasses, and burned plastic from about 20 to a shocking 42 feet thick—accumulated on top of the site of the Temple of the Sun in the space of just two years.
For Raue and Aiman Ashmawy, the head of the archaeological sector at the Ministry of Antiquities, the chaos offered an opportunity. In 2012, even before the situation in Egypt had stabilized, they returned to Heliopolis and began an ambitious joint program of rescue excavations in the parts of Matariya threatened by illegal development, which is to say, almost the entire neighborhood. For the past six years, Raue and Ashmawy have been working just ahead of the Ministry of Endowments’ bulldozers, scouring construction trenches and building sites for traces of the ancient city and its temples as part of the Heliopolis Project, a joint Egyptian-German excavation. The process sometimes resembles looking through keyholes to draw conclusions about the rooms behind. Raue can’t select his dig sites, and often has just days to work. “The best discoveries aren’t scheduled,” he says. They are looking for the footprint of the central Temple of the Sun, but also trying to understand more about the city’s end. “One of the project’s aims is to find out who gave up the temples and when and why,” Raue says. The excavations have played a role in shaping other research questions, such as how the holy city’s outer walls were constructed or what its residential precincts might have looked like.
Slideshow:
The Obelisks of Heliopolis
Before they did anything else, the team, together with a force of more than 100 local residents and multiple bulldozers, spent weeks removing the garbage. Underneath the refuse, they confronted six, or sometimes more, feet of modern topsoil. Another six to 10 feet of ancient loam packed almost as hard as concrete lay under that. Beneath it all, they came upon the debris left behind when Heliopolis was dismantled to serve as construction material. “Heliopolis has always been too close to Cairo,” Raue says ruefully. And that’s not all. Even once the layers of garbage and soil were removed, there was a final obstacle—much of Heliopolis’ ancient ruins are actually submerged. “All of our finds are between zero and eight feet under the water table,” Raue says. During the excavations, pumping creates small lakes, which cause huge logistical problems and added pressure for a team already under enormous constraints. For example, it took a tremendous effort to remove an eight-ton fragment of a standing sculpture of pharaoh Psamtik I (r. 664–610 B.C.) from under more than six feet of groundwater.
In 2015, Raue and Ashmawy excavated a corner of the central temple precinct. They found the foundations of walls three feet thick, with workshops and evidence of butchery. North of the temple, Egyptian teams had previously found multistory residential buildings. Raue believes that priests and thousands of support staff lived behind the city walls in extremely close quarters, packed into these high-rise mudbrick tenements. “Imagine Manhattan,” Raue says, or the densely packed brick apartment buildings that crowd in on the modern-day site. “These were houses a nineteenth- or twentieth-century Egyptian would recognize.”
Meanwhile, the Heliopolis Project has turned up workshops and small grain silos at the southeastern corner of the temple. Rough ceramic trays found near the silos suggest the existence of a bakery that served hungry priests, and a wooden scribal palette bearing a New Year’s inscription is evidence that the city’s holy character was never far from mind, even in its residential quarters. The opportunistic nature of the dig, colleagues suggest, has revealed details that an excavation focused on the Temple of the Sun might have missed. “We have a chance to understand daily life,” Quirke says. “The advantage of rescue archaeology is you get sharp glimpses of the city in its detail. We’re beginning to get snapshots that all add up to a kaleidoscope of urban life. Any opportunity to know more is really precious.”
That’s not to say that the team is ignoring the spectacular statuary left behind by generations of pharaohs. When Cairenes looted the site for building materials in the Middle Ages, they took the limestone but left the remains of toppled sculptures of red granite, quartzite, and basalt in place. Among these are intact reliefs 15 feet square and granite falcons that once graced a temple gate dedicated to the pharaoh Nectanebo I (r. 380–362 B.C.). Other finds point to even more impressive monuments—a recently uncovered foot-and-a-half-long stone claw suggests the existence of a sphinx statue 50 feet long. “Whatever sculpture we get is extremely high quality,” Raue says. “Heliopolis was such an important site that we just get the best.”
The team has also uncovered evidence of smaller temples dedicated to Egyptian deities including the falcon god Horus, cow goddess Hathor, mother goddess Mut, and the king of the gods, Amun. But the sun god Ra and the Temple of the Sun were the site’s epicenter. A few rushed days of excavation in 2015 yielded pottery that helped Raue date its massive mudbrick walls, which he estimates enclosed an area of 31 acres. The dating of these walls suggests that in antiquity, too, Heliopolis was a dynamic place. In around 1500 B.C., parts of the city’s necropolis were leveled to wall in what ancient sources dubbed the “High Sand”—the exact spot where Egyptians believed the world was created, and Heliopolis’ holy of holies. This temple-within-a-temple was the center of the sun god’s cult, and, thus, of Egyptian religion.
Slideshow:
The Obelisks of Heliopolis
Ashmawy, Raue, and their team are now juggling small excavations scattered across nearly a square mile of teeming urban neighborhoods. They’re just beginning to get a sense of the city of Heliopolis as a whole. Geomorphological investigations by Ghent University geoarchaeologist Morgan De Dapper reconstructed the height of the primordial hill upon which the first temple was built. Drilling in spots where they could not conduct full excavations, the team mapped archaeological layers more than 20 feet thick. Geophysical techniques are enabling Herbich’s team to look below the ground in places that haven’t yet been built over. Using differences in the electrical resistance of mud and stone, he’s able to trace and measure the temple’s foundations and walls, even under many feet of silt and groundwater. The results, guided in part by century-old surveys drawn by Petrie and his Italian predecessor, Ernesto Schiaparelli, as well as maps from the mid-nineteenth century, include sections of the city’s outer walls. Based on their width—some sections revealed by recent excavations are 55 feet across in some spots—Raue estimates that Heliopolis might have been guarded by walls up to 60 feet high. “In a flat landscape, it must have looked more like a fortress than a city,” he says. “Imagine a wall in front of you a kilometer [more than half a mile] long.” The team is also starting to envision Heliopolis’ inner temple districts. “Suddenly, we have an idea of the sacred topography for the first time,” says Raue. Understanding how the city and its temple buildings were laid out could add to what scholars know about how Egyptian religion developed. “It would be valuable to know if the design of these shrines to the sun followed those of conventional temples,” says University of Cambridge archaeologist Barry Kemp, who excavates at Akhenaten’s city of Amarna, “or whether, in deference to the visibility of the sun, the shrines were more open in plan.”
Heliopolis’ remains may soon be completely inaccessible, covered over by rapidly expanding housing projects and other construction in the booming Egyptian capital. Cairo is one of the most crowded cities in the world. With 50,000 people per square mile, it’s almost twice as densely populated as New York. Matariya, the neighborhood surrounding Heliopolis, packs more than twice that many people per square mile into brick and cinderblock tenements, many directly overlooking the open spots where Raue and his colleagues work. “It’s more under threat now. It’s like trying to stop Central Park or Hyde Park from getting built over,” Quirke says. “But Cairo is growing in a way New York and London are not. It’s remarkable there’s anything left of Heliopolis at all.”
Ashmawy and Raue’s work is a race against this seemingly inevitable loss, a struggle to excavate and document one of the most important places in ancient Egypt before it’s gone forever. “Heliopolis is not just a cult site like everywhere else,” Raue says. “It’s completely different, from its very first moment.”
Andrew Curry is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.