ALTARS OF DEMETER IN SICILY

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 212, 4 June 1929, Page 12

ALTARS OF DEMETER IN SICILY

VOTIVE VASES OF 2000 B.C. ACCIDENTAL FIND BY PEASANTS Three complete votive altars dedicated to the worship of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone were unearthed recently at Girgenti, m Southern Sicilv, and unusual importance is given to the find (states a corre' pondent of the “Morning Post”) because on the same site there have also been found implements belonging to the aboriginal Sicanian age of 2000 B.C. So are furnished data hitherto absent for the study of how and when Hellenic culture superimposed itself on the island and on the Eastern Mediterranean.

The design and construction of the Greek altars and the nature of the votive vases discovered in great quantity around them establish that the relics definitely belong to the Sixth Century B.C. and will be of considerable help to archreologists in determining more accurately the dates of the other remains of Greek worship profuse in this locality—once the site of the flourishing lonian colony of Agrigentum.

The find was made accidentally by some peasants while digging near the Colimbetra—a locality already noted for the columns and cornice of the Temple of the Dioscuri and also identified with Pirandello’s romance, “The Old and the Young.” Excavations were at once started under the direction of Professor Pirro Marconi, Director of Antiquities in Sicily, and an altar area was soon cleared, which has proved to be more perfect, though slightly smaller, than that discovered in 1927. The altar proper is encircled by a flat table-like wall, and this in turn is enclosed by rectangular walls — all standing about four feet high and built with three layers of dressed stone, diminishing in size towards the top. A fourth or coping layer has been destroyed in course of the agricultural operations of centuries.

The centre of the altar is like a wellhead. It is made of tiny blocks and it has a deep conical cavity, which the explorers found full of votive offerings, statuettes, clay models of heads in miniature, and many vases of varied design and colouring. Many offerings have also been found around the containing walls.

When the excavations were continued the two other altars were unearthed, one of them practically identical with that above described, only smaller, and both rich with an unusual quantity of votive objects, including lamps, wickcups, bowls, cups, vases of all sizes, fired and unfired, all more or less decorated, and innumerable fragments of heads and statuettes.

But what makes the whole discovery of outstanding importance has been the unearthing on the same site of the already-mentioned implements of the Sicanian age. Among these objects, which have been definitely identified as dating back to 2000 8.C., are two stone hatchets. Archreologists here are confident that the discoveries will assist in the fixing of - a date for the emergence in Sicily of Hellenic civilisation. i