Selinunte: world’s largest agora discovered
Selinunte, city in the province of Trapan is most famous city in the province of Trapani, for its Archaeological Park. As work resumes after the pandemic, the latest findings may finally shed light on its origins.
During the last archaeological excavation campaign conducted by Clement Marconi of the German Archaeological Institute, discoveries were made from “findings of the highest importance.”
The intervention, in fact, unearthed the boundaries of theagora, an impressive 33,000 square meters, the largest in the ancient world. In the center of the large sacred area, moreover, another trapezoidal-shaped section emerged identified with the tomb of the city’s founder, Pammillo of Megara Hyblea. On the Acropolis, however, the remains of the very first sacred place of Greek settlers following the Selinunte ecist.
Archaeologists have also found amulets and very fine objects equal to those found in Delphi, Greece. Among these, drawing the most attention from scholars was one stone mold used by matrix to make most likely a bronze scepter.
The excavation campaign
What really impressed the archaeologists of the two missions was precisely theagora. Twice the size of Piazza del Popolo in Rome, this one is presented as “an empty basin” so large that it gives “an idea of the magnificence of the city.”
The archaeologist who has been studying the site for decades says excitedly that the discovery is “crucial to our knowledge of Selinunte in the Archaic and Classical periods.” The excavation was carried out on a territory of 270 hectares, the largest in Europe, and was initially aimed at defining the time of construction of the two most recent and considered twin acropolis temples, A and O.
The work identified under the foundations of Temple A a water fault leading to speculation that it was here that the first settlement of Greek settlers took place. So in the southern part of the Acropolis would have arisen the ancient Selinus.
Excavating around the third temple called R, however, they identified the walls of a ritual enclosure Dated 610 a. C., a date not far from that of the arrival of the Greeks led by Pammilus, 628 B.C. C. according to the historiographer Thucydides. A stone matrix of a scepter, a probable missing part of an earlier find of the same kind ten years earlier, emerged inside the temple. The archaeologists’ hypothesis is that the object to be made must have been so valuable that it could not be replicated. This involved dismembering the matrix and burying the two parts in different places.
Two other very interesting objects also resurfaced in Temple R: a amulet in the shape of a hawk, Of probable Egyptian provenance and dating from the 7th century BCE. C., and a Ivory statuette depicting a mermaid in miniature that archaeologist Clement Marconi says is definitely of Greek import and dates back to the 6th century BCE. C., the period of greatest wealth attained by the city of Selinunte.
by Annapasqua Logrieco