Art* (Notes) ... (a Greek Design)

Tholos temple, sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, 4th century B. Greek temple plans photo source. Early examples, often employing the Doric order, were usually composed of a single level, although later examples Hellenistic and Roman came to be two-story freestanding structures. These later examples allowed interior space for shops or other rooms and often incorporated the Ionic order for interior colonnades. Greek city planners came to prefer the stoa as a device for framing the agora public market place of a city or town. The South Stoa constructed as part of the sanctuary of Hera on the island of Samos c.

Many cities, particularly Athens and Corinth, came to have elaborate and famous stoas. View of 20th century reconstruction of the Stoa of Attalos, Agora, Athens original c. View of the theatre at the Sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus, c. Theatre at the Sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus, c. These select representatives assembled to handle public affairs and represent the citizenry of the polis in ancient Athens the boule was comprised of members.

Greek houses of the Archaic and Classical periods were relatively simple in design. Houses usually were centered on a courtyard that would have been the scene for various ritual activities; the courtyard also provided natural light for the often small houses. The ground floor rooms would have included kitchen and storage rooms, perhaps an animal pen and a latrine; the chief room was the andron— site of the male-dominated drinking party symposion.

The city of Olynthus in Chalcidice, Greece, destroyed by military action in B. While some rooms were fairly plain, with earthen floors, the andron was the most well-appointed room of the house. Fortifications and gate, Palairos Greece. The Mycenaean fortifications of Bronze Age Greece c. While these massive Bronze Age walls are difficult to best, first millennium B.

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Greece also shows evidence for stone built fortification walls. In Attika the territory of Athens , a series of Classical and Hellenistic walls built in ashlar masonry squared masonry blocks have been studied as a potential system of border defenses. At Palairos in Epirus Greece the massive fortifications enclose a high citadel that occupies imposing terrain. Stadium, Gymnasium, and Palaestra. The Greek stadium derived from stadion , a Greek measurement equivalent to c.

Long and narrow, with a horseshoe shape, the stadium occupied reasonably flat terrain. This facility tended to include areas for both training and storage. Greek ceremonies and rituals were mainly performed at altars. These were typically devoted to one or a few gods, and supported a statue of the particular deity. Votive deposits would be left at the altar, such as food, drinks, as well as precious objects.

Sometimes animal sacrifices would be performed here, with most of the flesh eaten, and the offal burnt as an offering to the gods. Libations , often of wine, would be offered to the gods as well, not only at shrines, but also in everyday life, such as during a symposium. One ceremony was pharmakos , a ritual involving expelling a symbolic scapegoat such as a slave or an animal, from a city or village in a time of hardship. It was hoped that by casting out the ritual scapegoat, the hardship would go with it.

Ancient Greek art

Worship in Greece typically consisted of sacrificing domestic animals at the altar with hymn and prayer. The altar was outside any temple building, and might not be associated with a temple at all. The animal, which should be perfect of its kind, is decorated with garlands and the like, and led in procession to the altar, a girl with a basket on her head containing the concealed knife leading the way.

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After various rituals the animal is slaughtered over the altar, as it falls all the women present "must cry out in high, shrill tones". Its blood is collected and poured over the altar. It is butchered on the spot and various internal organs, bones and other inedible parts burnt as the deity's portion of the offering, while the meat is removed to be prepared for the participants to eat; the leading figures tasting it on the spot. The temple usually kept the skin, to sell to tanners. That the humans got more use from the sacrifice than the deity had not escaped the Greeks, and is often the subject of humour in Greek comedy.

The animals used are, in order of preference, bull or ox, cow, sheep the most common , goat, pig with piglet the cheapest mammal , and poultry but rarely other birds or fish. The Greeks liked to believe that the animal was glad to be sacrificed, and interpreted various behaviours as showing this. Divination by examining parts of the sacrificed animal was much less important than in Roman or Etruscan religion , or Near Eastern religions, but was practiced , especially of the liver, and as part of the cult of Apollo.

Generally, the Greeks put more faith in observing the behaviour of birds. More formal ones might be made onto altars at temples, and other fluids such as olive oil and honey might be used. Although the grand form of sacrifice called the hecatomb meaning bulls might in practice only involve a dozen or so, at large festivals the number of cattle sacrificed could run into the hundreds, and the numbers feasting on them well into the thousands. The evidence of the existence of such practices is clear in some ancient Greek literature, especially in Homer 's epics.

Throughout the poems, the use of the ritual is apparent at banquets where meat is served, in times of danger or before some important endeavor to gain the favor of the gods. For example, in Homer's Odyssey Eumaeus sacrifices a pig with prayer for his unrecognizable master Odysseus. However, in Homer's Iliad , which partly reflects very early Greek civilization, not every banquet of the princes begins with a sacrifice.

These sacrificial practices share much with recorded forms of sacrificial rituals known from later. Furthermore, throughout the poem, special banquets are held whenever gods indicated their presence by some sign or success in war. Before setting out for Troy, this type of animal sacrifice is offered.

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Odysseus offers Zeus a sacrificial ram in vain. The occasions of sacrifice in Homer's epic poems may shed some light onto the view of the gods as members of society, rather than as external entities, indicating social ties. Sacrificial rituals played a major role in forming the relationship between humans and the divine.

It has been suggested that the Chthonic deities, distinguished from Olympic deities by typically being offered the holocaust mode of sacrifice, where the offering is wholly burnt, may be remnants of the native Pre-Hellenic religion and that many of the Olympian deities may come from the Proto-Greeks who overran the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula in the late third millennium BC.

One rite of passage was the amphidromia , celebrated on the fifth or seventh day after the birth of a child. Childbirth was extremely significant to Athenians, especially if the baby was a boy. The main Greek temple building sat within a larger precinct or temenos , usually surrounded by a peribolos fence or wall; the whole is usually called a "sanctuary". The Acropolis of Athens is the most famous example, though this was apparently walled as a citadel before a temple was ever built there. The tenemos might include many subsidiary buildings, sacred groves or springs, animals dedicated to the deity, and sometimes people who had taken sanctuary from the law, which some temples offered, for example to runaway slaves.

The earliest Greek sanctuaries probably lacked temple buildings, though our knowledge of these is limited, and the subject is controversial. A typical early sanctuary seems to have consisted of a tenemos, often around a sacred grove, cave or spring, and perhaps defined only by marker stones at intervals, with an altar for offerings. Many rural sanctuaries probably stayed in this style, but the more popular were gradually able to afford a building to house a cult image, especially in cities. This process was certainly under way by the 9th century, and probably started earlier.

The temple interiors did not serve as meeting places, since the sacrifices and rituals dedicated to the respective deity took place outside them, at altars within the wider precinct of the sanctuary, which might be large. As the centuries past both the inside of popular temples and the area surrounding them accumulated statues and small shrines or other buildings as gifts, and military trophies, paintings and items in precious metals, effectively turning them into a type of museum.

Some sanctuaries offered oracles , people who were believed to receive divine inspiration in answering questions put by pilgrims.

The most famous of these by far was the female priestess called the Pythia at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi , and that of Zeus at Dodona , but there were many others. Some dealt only with medical, agricultural or other specialized matters, and not all represented gods, like that of the hero Trophonius at Livadeia.

The temple was the house of the deity it was dedicated to, who in some sense resided in the cult image in the cella or main room inside, normally facing the only door. The cult image normally took the form of a statue of the deity, typically roughly life-size, but in some cases many times life-size. In early days these were in wood, marble or terracotta , or in the specially prestigious form of a chryselephantine statue using ivory plaques for the visible parts of the body and gold for the clothes, around a wooden framework.

The most famous Greek cult images were of this type, including the Statue of Zeus at Olympia , and Phidias 's Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon in Athens, both colossal statues, now completely lost. Fragments of two chryselephantine stutues from Delphi have been excavated. Bronze cult images were less frequent, at least until Hellenistic times.

Gebel el-Arak Knife with Master of Animals motif at the top of the handle. Rosette designs from Meyer's Handbook of Ornament. The Grammar of Ornament Egyptian No 7 plate 10 , image Illustration from The Grammar of Ornament From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Motif disambiguation. Persian boteh motif on textile. Plant motif, Taj Mahal. Retrieved December 13, Myths and Legends from Korea: