Old Smyrna Excavations: The Temples of Athena (Supplementary Volume)

Excavations at the early Greek city of Old Smyrna were carried out jointly by British and Turkish teams. The rich finds from its successive temples have already been published in Ekrem Akurgal's Alt-Smyrna I. This volume presents a detailed account of the temples themselves, as cleared by the British team. The most important was that under construction c 610-600 BC, though this was never completed: most of its superstructure ended up in emergency walling, evidently constructed during the siege and sack of the city by Alyattes of Lydia in c.600 BC. Nevertheless it was already a monumental Aeolic temple of superb quality, and it is of the greatest importance for our understanding of the emergence of East Greek architecture. The evidence for its increasingly ambitious predecessors and. mostly more modest, successors is also presented.