How do you document a Greek temple? The Temple of Artemis at Sardis in Turkey is one of the most beautiful temples in the world, and archaeologists have been studying it for more than a century. The first full publication, published by Howard Crosby Butler in 1925, was illustrated with oversize, crisp pen-and-ink hand drawings of the beautifully worked capitals and bases. At that time, architects focused primarily on the finely carved marble elements of the building and dated the whole building by the style of their carving. Almost a century later, Fikret Yegül drew every stone at a scale of 1:20. In all, the mylar drawings are more than 18 feet long, and document key technical features like clamps and dowels, which were of no interest to Butler.
Even with such detailed documents, we are still learning new things about the temple. Phil Stinson is studying the incredibly subtle curvature of the building. Like the Parthenon, the walls and foundations of the Temple of Artemis are not perfectly horizontal, but
swell and lean slightly, as if the building were alive. This has been studied since the 1980s using traditional surveying equipment, but Phil brings a relatively new technology, a 3d laser scanner. A Turkish team scanned the entire temple in a couple days, creating a 3d model of 3.6 billion points, accurate to a fraction of a millimeter. The model can identify the slightest divergence from perfect horizontal and vertical, and shows, for instance, that the central columns are about 5 cm higher than those at the edges, and that the courses of the east wall are likewise a few centimeters higher in the center than at the corners. This is particularly interesting since the columns were not added to the temple until centuries after the main building was built, yet they both employ curvature. Centuries after the temple was begun, then, architects still understood process of implementing this subtle curvature, and presumably also the reasons for the curvature. This latter still escapes us, though. Despite many studies of curvature in Greek temples, the exact reasons for this sophisticated treatment of ancient buildings, described as the most subtle curves ever created in world architecture, remain uncertain.
To learn more about the courses that Professor Cahill teaches, click here.