Which are the deepest roots of that mix of cultures that we use to call ‘Mediterranean Civilization’? Which are comminglings and exchanges which produced its most complete fruit, i.e. the city, a place for landscape-modelling communities? And which elements did contribute to build up that baulk of customs, ideas, and innovations which compelled to confrontation and hybridizations different peoples for millennia? What did it made, from pottery to metallurgy, from gastronomy to architecture, from art to religion, of a sea a cradle of civilization? Archaeology may help in disentangling such questions, seeking unexpected answers , by tinkering what ancient Mediterranean peoples left buried in the ground. A privileged point of view of our course is the ancient Phoenician city of Motya, located exactly at the centre of the “sea in the middle”. Throughout the live experience of excavation, with images taken on the field, this course will let you touch the many tesserae of the great mosaic of the Mediterranean Civilization. The field diary of the archaeologist, and the handpick will be the two tools, which will lead us across the sea to discover what such early cities actually were, and how their contribute is still a major part of our shared memory.
5.2 Astarte: the thousand faces of the goddess
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Do curso por Sapienza University of Rome
At the Origins of the Mediterranean Civilization: Archaeology of the City from the Levant to the West - 3rd-1st millennium BC
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Sapienza University of Rome
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Stars sparkling in the waters
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Lorenzo NigroProf.
Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia
[MUSIC]
We are in one of the most ancient places in Mocia.
This was the Temple of Astarte.
And it is a crucial place in the island, for our understanding of its history.
And if we can, of the overall history of the Mediterranean.
Because this goddess has a basic role in this sea.
We can say the thousand faces of the goddess.
Astarte actually is the successor of one of the major deities of
the ancient Near East.
Her name was Inanna.
She was invented by the Sumerians,
the most ancient civilization in Mesopotamia.
Sumarians develop a day society basing it
upon cultivation and animal breeding.
They were able to cultivate therefore for the first time,
were able to have cows and cattles, and sheeps, and so on.
And this goddess of fertility was at the center of their ideological world.
So all happened that Inanna arrived in Molencia in the dresses of Astarte.
It is a fascinating story.
Inanna was transformed into Ishtar by king.
King Sargon of Akkad, one of the greatest kings of the ancient Near East.
Sargon, when he became king, he succeeded in mixing up Inanna,
which was the goddess of the Sumerian, with Easter,
which was the goddess of the Acadians, and which was a goddess of war.
So the goddess of fertility and
the goddess of war were unified in one big female deity.
And this deity was inherited by the population of the by Syria,
Palestine and so on and became the goddess of Sumarian Phoenicians.
It was worshipped in Sidon, one of the major cities of Phoenicia.
And this give us her [INAUDIBLE].
It is possible that the earliest settlers of [INAUDIBLE]
were not from Tyre like the founders of Carthage, but
they were from Sidon which is the city of [INAUDIBLE] of
Phoenicia where Astarte was mainly worshipped.
And why Astarte?
Because this goddess has a power.
She had many faces.
She's known in several other ways, or
representations, in the other population of the Mediterranean.
Like Isis in Egypt, like the great model in the population of Sicily.
The [INAUDIBLE] or the population of Sardinia or
the population of North Africa.
So when the Phoenicians arrived they built up a temple to this
goddess because this place could become the place in which.
Meeting other people, attracting other people, and
to be in touch with local people, and to be accepted by the local population
since they arrived in very small numbers, and they had to survive.
This is why this place is one of the oldest places in the island,
is an example of how it worked, Phoenician colonization.
And we have the very proof of this.
We have a solid proof, and we will now, and watch it.
The temple of Astarte was one of the smallest temples in
but one of the most ancient one.
It had a specific typology,
with a porch in the entrance, two pillars and
an axial door facing a niche.
The niche was a small chamber protruding from
the rear side of the building where the simulacrum,
that is the statue of the goddess was standing there.
And of course, we have always to remember that they were worship at a statue,
they worship at an idol.
This is what they are always charged by the Bible to do.
During the long history of this building,
the salutary encloses into the circular terminals into the circular.
And for this reason, they had to reduce the size of the cellar
that is the main chamber the main room into the temple.
For this reason, they built up this partition wall and
they reduced the cellar and they moved the focus
of the cult on this red stone on this red slab.
This was the place which they used to do libations.
That means pouring oil or perfumes dedicated to the goddess and
they used red stone, which was a symbolic one,
even though the statue was still standing in the niche.
We have seen that Astarte was in some ways the passport to
Venetians to being touched with local population.
And we found very interesting monument in
that is a very small shrine which has a very great importance,
because this shrine is surely devoted to this goddess, and this is very old one.
So this is the Temple of Astarte as we could escalate it in
the last seasons in 2012 to 2016.
And you see it is a very simple cellar with a single room,
a niche and an entrance which is a porch.
So its shape actually is Taken from a very common
typology of traditional religious architecture of
the Lavant which has been again replicated in Murcia.
They are very nice furbishing.
So, you'll see here the plan of the building.
The small blocks of sand stones were used in the passages, in the porch, and
especially in the protruding niche which is on the rear side of the building.
This is very interesting because the building is oriented exactly north-south,
and to the south there is the planets of Venus,
which was connected to this goddess.
While to the north, there was the mount of the city of the local population,
the where there was one of the most famous sacred temples of this goddess,
the temple dedicated to Venus, Astarte, Aphrodite.
And you see here the temple in it's second configuration in the 5th century BC.
You see it was transformed when the circle, the sacred compound was closed,
and the belief was in some ways restricted because of this.
And you see that we found a very nice lamp and they deposit foundation
in this pot which was exactly reduced so this is very interesting.
So we see the temple, its orientation and
the magnificent top hill Temple of Venus in Eryx
that is also known from a statement of Cicero
mentioning it during his work against.
The governors of Sicily,
who had robbed this temple which was very rich already in antiquity.
And we go now to the finds, because the finds are in some ways again
connected with all the count, we are dealing with in the secular of Motza.
That you see that there was a deposit that means the pit that was filled with
offerings with two signals, which are actually two round stones.
One is a basal stone, so it is black, and the other is white.
And these two signals possibly hint at the gods Baal and Astarte.
Then we found in the deposit some very interesting items.
One is a bronze symbol.
Everything was broken in half, and this is very interesting because
it means that there was a ritual which is called obliteration.
It means objects are broken into halves,
one is deposited in the deposit, the other is thrown away.
And this is a way for meaning that everything is dedicated to the goddess,
and no one can use it again as it was used for air.
So again, we found the the flute, but not a traditional flute,
a flute made of a goat metacarpal, that is an old-fashioned flute.
As it was done in the Near East by the Canaanites and
other people already in the third and second millenium B.C. so it was a way
of giving to the goddess special items which are this old fashioned style.
Then of course, there were some inscriptions,
some inscribed vaulted object.
Unfortunately they are not very well preserved, but
there was a tortoise shell, with the name.
That means to the great goddess,
which is the epitaph of Astarte.
And there is another find which is very interesting,
is a antique cup with the ring base and in the ring base there was
a cross in the middle meaning that it was dedicated to the goddess.
And an inscription mentioning the Greek epithet of this goddess
which was [INAUDIBLE] a very nice name that means shining.
So you see how powerful was this ideology started.
It was able to connect together Greeks, local populations, and Phoenicians,
three parts of the Mediterranean, which were meeting together.
And they were mixing up by melting together by means
of this goddess, this very important one.
You see, some moments during the recovery of items,
again, the mound for bread a`nd again is a knife and these vessels.
Actually, there were foot of Greek vessel of important vessel which
had been cut to be reused as funnels to pour offering liquids for libations.
So it's a very special right that we trust them and document it by these finds.
You see that also there's small weight had been cutting off.
So everything was cut into two pieces to be dedicated to the goddess.
And there is also a very nice paint of the.
In the same area, an ivory miniature door was found.
This actually was possible was on top of the lid of a,
cap or a small vessel, like a to conceal,
to contain perfumes or an oil, which an ointment,
which was offered to the goddess.
And this ivory miniature dove is suggests us
that this was the sacred animal of Astarte.
And that was very common in temples of Astarte to have these white doves.
And this was very, very nice discovery.
So we give a glance to this goddess.
As we are Italian, we give this tribute to our masterpiece,
which is now, of course, in Florence in the city by Botticelli.
But what is very interesting is this goddess her birth was in Cyprus.
There is a place which is known from antiquity where she
was born under Cyprus coastline.
And definitions where responsible of bringing her from
there from Cyprus to the Mediterranean to have this way to
let's say connect with all the other peoples of the area.
Just inside the temple of Astarte, we did the discovery which give
us a great deal of information about the cult performed into the temple,
and about the significance of this goddess.
And in a general scenario,
about what they thought of the goddess.
So there was a deposit, that means an area in which several object
which had been cut or destroyed were dedicated to the goddess.
And they deposit two stones.
One was a dark stone, a black stone,
which represented the goddess.
And the other was a white stone, which represented her companion, Baal.
The major deity of the whole sacred area.
So the two are in couple, they are a divine couple.
And here spread all over this area we found off course animal bones,
which was food which was offered to the goddess.
Then we found off course seashells, the same, and then we found some old objects.
One of these was a flute, a flute made of a goat bone, a pierced goat bone.
Then we found a cymbal.
A cymbal is a copper or a bronze dish which they use to be ring.
While I talk.
And so all of these objects remind us the role of the deity.
Astarte had in the Phoenician religious reconstruction
of this mythic past had a specific role.
She was playing these ancient instruments like the flute or
the cymbals to wake up her companion, Bal,
who died and it was in the netherworld.
And to take him back into life at the beginning
of the year at the solstice of winter, and
then thus assuring that in spring everything was going to rebirth and
to return to life in the island as everywhere in the world.
So this religious conception was conceived among these stones on the soil of
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