Three - Worship in Space and Time

Summary

The first aim of this chapter is to revisit the still-resonant idea of the general eastern orientation of Greek temples,¹ most commonly known through William Dinsmoor’s 1930s analysis of 110 temple orientations. We briefly discussed this idea in Chapter 2. Here, an analysis of a data set more than twice as large as Dinsmoor’s examines anew the placement of Greek temples in their spatio-temporal context. The 232 religious structures surveyed date from the Mycenaean to the Roman period and are located geographically in Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Cyprus. These structures have revealed a total sample of 240 orientations if we include the side entrances. The structures with side entrances are the Telesterion of Eleusis, the temples of Despoina in Lykosoura, Alea in Tegea, Apollo in Bassae, the Thesmophorion of Pella, and the Oikos of the Naxians in Delos.