The Date of the Ephesian Foundation-Deposit

Abstract

Nearly fifty years have passed since Hogarth wrote, and it would be useful and pleasing to comment afresh on the votive offerings from the Artemisium, this treasure of gold and silver, of ivory and amber, with a touch of the gynaikonitis and the East. My purpose is narrower: a study of the objects from the Basis, and narrower still, their chronological implications for the date of the coins found with them. These coins are the only ones from the excavation found in what might be called a closed context. They can in principle be later than their latest co-finds; they can be earlier than the earliest, but it is reasonable to assume that they are contemporary with the majority of the objects associated with them. A few objects were found outside the Basis under stratigraphical conditions which make their inferior limit of time almost as certain as that of the objects from the Basis, and many pieces from outside resemble Basis types so closely that they can with certainty be dated to the same period (Hogarth p. 235): I think it, however, prudent and safe to leave these, where possible, on one side and to keep to the specimens from the Basis. The objects from the Basis are almost all of them of the seventh century B.C., a very few are later, and one piece only is possibly of the eighth century, pl. 4. 34. It is silver, gold-plated, ‘most probably detached from a hilt’ (Hogarth p. 114). The description gives no clear idea of technique and purpose: it is too small fora hilt. The decoration consists of engraved zigzags and compass-drawn ‘wheels’: these are no indication of an early date, as they still occur as border-decoration of the chiton of an acroterion figure from the Acropolis, but the whole somehow recalls those aimless designs on Late Geometric bronze sheets from Argos (Waldstein pls. 103, 104).

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