Sterling Silver Jewelry: The 7th Wonder The Temple Of Artemis

The ‘Seven Ancient Wonders’ were the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Hanging Gardens at Babylon, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse at Alexandria and finally the temple at Ephesus in Asia Minor.

The Anatolian Temple at Ephesus, located near the modern city of Izmir in Turkey, was one of the most beautiful architectural structures ever built. Originally constructed in the 7th century B.C. under the patronage of the immensely rich Lydian king Croesus, the marble temple was built in honor of the Greek goddess of hunting, fertility and the Moon, Artemis. The interior of the temple was lavishly furnished with bronze statues, sculpted by the most skilled artists of their time: Pheidias, Polycleitus, Kresilas, and Phradmon.

Croesus’ intentions behind the building of the temple were not only related to the Goddess Artemis herself, known as Cybele to the Anatolians, but also to strengthen ties between his Lydian kingdom and the expanding Greek empire. Both countries were rich; Lydia from the wealth of electrum in the Paktolas River and the Silver laden Tarsus Mountains and Greece from the Laurian Silver mines on which the expansion of Athens was founded. Furthermore, under the reign of Croesus the first coin, the Lydian Trite, used as monetary exchange was introduced, an idea the king shared with the Greek Solon who later formed the weight standards for the Athenian silver drachmas.

The temple of Artemis, much like the Hephaisteion of Athens built in honor of Hephaestus the god of the forge and jewelry, was used both as a place of religious worship and a marketplace. It was tradition at this time to share wealth with the gods, so the temple itself was strategically placed at the end of the royal trade routes that stretched all the way from southeastern Europe to the Indus valley and beyond in India. King, Queen, Merchant and Tourist pilgrims came from the far reaches of the Earth to pay homage to the goddess Artemis, recent archeological excavations have shown evidence of artifacts from as far as Persia and India. These included gold and silver jewelry, ivory statuettes, and precious and semi-precious gemstones such as sapphire, garnet and lapis lazuli.

The healthy political and financial climate between Lydia and Greece deepened the already existing association between Artemis, or Cybele, the Moon and Silver. Artemis was of the ‘Silver Age’ of Olympian goddesses; she was the daughter of Zeus and Leto and the twin sister of Apollo. A symbol of fertility, and also mysteriously virgin, she was often depicted riding a silver chariot through the night sky, shooting arrows of silver moonlight to Earth below. She was the goddess of wild animals and was believed to roam mountains and forests with her nymphs hunting deers, lions and panthers killing them softly with her silver bow and arrows.

Artemis was a friend to mortals, dancing through the countryside in silver sandals and giving her divine protection to wild beasts and the very young. Greeks sometimes called her Cynthia after her birthplace on Mt. Kynthos on Delos. In the Odyssey (15.403) Odysseus is told a story of a wondrous island, Syria, where neither hunger nor old age exists. When the inhabitants of this island had reached the end of their lives as decreed by the Fates, Artemis would fly down and painlessly kill them with their silver bows.

On the night of 21 July 356 BC, a man named Herostratus burned the temple to ground in an attempt to immortalize his name, that same night in Macedonia Alexander the Great was born. Plutarch the Greek historian wrote later: ‘Artemis was too busy taking care of the birth of Alexander and couldn’t send help to her threatened temple’. A few years later ‘en route’ to conquer the world, Alexander the Great offered to rebuild the destroyed temple, but Artemis’ temple wasn’t rebuilt until after his death in 323 BC. Surviving ensuing occupations by Romans and Goths, the temple eventually fell to Christianity when in 401 A.D. St John Chrysostom ordered the temple to be torn down.

This article was written by David-John Turner for the Silvershake website, an online retailer of silver jewelry at wholesale prices. Purchase today and get gemstone silver jewelry worth up to $60...Free!
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