Aphaea

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Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina.
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Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina.

Aphaea (Greek Aphaia; not dark or vanisher) was a Greek goddess who was worshipped exclusively on the island of Aegina. Under Athenian hegemony she came to be identified with the goddess Athena and Artemis and, by the time of Pausanias, with the nymph Britomartis.

On the Greek island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, 13 km of the town, there is a ruin of the Late Archaic Doric peripteral Temple of Aphaea, of ca 500-480 BCE, which was built on the foundations of an earlier temple that had burned in the previous century: elements were buried in the infill that created a larger flat terrace. Cult statuettes of pregnant women attest to a cult at the site from the beginning of the second millennium BCE, suggesting a Minoan connection for the cult.

Pausanias mentioned the site in the second century CE. The temple was made known in Western Europe with the publication of the Antiquities of Ionia (London, 1797). In 1811, the young English architect Charles Robert Cockerell, finishing his education on his academic Grand Tour, and Baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg removed the fallen fragmentary pediment sculptures. On the recommendation of Baron Carl Haller von Hallerstein, who was also an architect and, moreover, a protégé of the art patron, Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, the marbles were shipped abroad and sold the following year to the Crown Prince, soon to be king Ludwig I of Bavaria. Today they are on display in the Glyptothek of Munich, where they were restored by the Danish neoclassic sculptore Bertel Thorvaldsen and exerted a formative influence on the local character of Neoclassicism in Munich, as exhibited in the architecture of Leo von Klenze. Each pediment centred the figure of Athena, with groups of combatants and fallen warriors filling the pediments, of which the eastern in the older, to judge by its more archaic style. The museum at Aegina was the first institution of its kind in Greece, but the collection was transferred to Athens in 1834 (EB), where it can be seen in the National Archaeological Museum.

Systematic excavations have been carried out in the twentieth century by the German School in Athens, at first under the direction of Adolf Furtwängler. In the 1960s-1980s, an extensive second German excavation under Dieter Ohly, Ernst-Ludwig Schwandner, and Martha Ohly was performed, leading to the reconstruction of the structure of the older temple and discovery of the oldest (of three) consecutive structures.

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