Summit sanctuary

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A summit sanctuary is a mostly open place of worship on a mountain that was either on the summit itself or on a hill or knoll below. The height of the mountain was not decisive for the choice of the location of such a sanctuary. A summit shrine often only consisted of a surrounding wall and an ash altar in the center, where the offerings and votives were laid.

Summit sanctuaries are detectable for Minoan Crete from phases FM III / MM I (from 2200–2100 BC). Similar shrines were later laid out in places outside Crete that were under the influence of the Minoan culture, for example on Kythera . Most of the Minoan summit shrines were abandoned in phase MM III (around 1800–1600 BC). Summit sanctuaries from Attica , Central Greece and the Eastern Peloponnese are known from the Geometric Period (900–700 BC) . They experienced a decline in classical times . The summit shrines on Crete were used again in Hellenistic and Roman times.

Examples

Atsipades Korakias

See also

literature

  • Donald W. Jones: Peak Sanctuaries and Sacred Caves in Minoan Crete: A Comparison of Artifacts (=  Studies in Mediterranean Archeology and Literature . Pocket-Book, 156). Åström, Uppsala 1999, ISBN 978-91-7081-153-1 (English).
  • Steven Soetens, Jan Driessen, Apostolis Sarris, Sofia Topouzi: The Minoan Peak Sanctuary Land scape through a GIS Approach . In: François Djindjian, Paola Moscati (Ed.): XIV Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Science . Université de Liège, Liège 2001 (English, digital version [PDF; 1,2 MB ; accessed on January 19, 2018]).
  • Daniel Tobias Nieß: Minoan summit shrines . Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg 2008 ( digitized [PDF; 236 kB ; accessed on January 19, 2018]).
  • Krzystof Nowicki: Some Remarks on New Peak Sanctuaries in Crete: Topography of a Ritual Area and Relation with Settlements . In: Yearbook of the German Archaeological Institute (JdI) . No. 122 . de Gruyter, 2008, ISSN  0070-4415 , p. 1–31 (English, online [accessed October 1, 2018]).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Katja Sporn: "The Divine Helicon". Mountain cults or cults on the mountains in Greece? In: Rupert Breitwieser, Monika Frass, Georg Nightingale (eds.): Calamus. Festschrift for Herbert Graßl on the occasion of his 65th birthday (= Joachim Hengstl, Torsten Mattern, Robert Rollinger, Kai Ruffing, Orell Witthuhn [eds.]: Philippika. Marburg antiquity treatises 57 ). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-447-06856-7 , pp. 465–466 ( digitized [accessed January 19, 2018]).

Web links