Ephesus and the Temple of Artemis

The cult statue of Artemis Ephesia is one of the most recognisable images to survive from antiquity and nobody can agree on what it depicts.

The figure stands frontally, rigid, arms out, legs sheathed in a tapering column covered with rows of animals: bulls, lions, griffins, bees. Across the chest and abdomen hang rows of large oval objects, usually numbering somewhere between ten and twenty. The identification of those objects has been argued for four centuries.

• Breasts. The oldest reading, going back to antiquity itself, and the source of the standard label "many-breasted". Against it: the objects have no nipples, they are not modelled as breasts, and they hang in a way breasts do not.
• Bull testicles, from sacrificed animals. Proposed in the twentieth century and widely repeated. Against it: no ancient source says so, and no depiction shows the removal.
• Amber ornaments. Excavation at the temple recovered amber pendants of a broadly matching shape, suggesting the sculptural form recalls actual jewellery hung on an earlier wooden image.
• Gourds, eggs, or dates.

No reading commands agreement, and the honest position, which this entry takes, is that the meaning is unresolved. What is clear is that she is not the Greek huntress. Artemis Ephesia is a local Anatolian deity of much older standing, identified with the Greek Artemis under a shared name while retaining an iconography and a cult that have almost nothing to do with her.

The temple was among the seven wonders, burned in 356 BC, rebuilt on a larger scale, and sacked by Goths in AD 262. It held rights of asylum and functioned as a bank, taking deposits and making loans, a reminder that a great sanctuary was an economic institution as much as a religious one. John Turtle Wood searched six years for the site on behalf of the British Museum, found it in 1869, and the sculpture went to London. Almost nothing remains in the field but one reassembled column.

One caution about the sequel. The Council of Ephesus in 431 declared Mary Theotokos, the God-bearer, in a city that had housed a great goddess for a millennium, and the two facts are routinely joined into a causal claim: that Marian devotion absorbed the cult of Artemis. The sequence is real; the causation is asserted far beyond what anyone has demonstrated, and the council's dispute was a christological argument about the nature of Christ, not a negotiation with local paganism. Similarly, the nearby House of the Virgin Mary was identified in the 1890s on the strength of the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German nun who never left Westphalia. It is a place of genuine devotion for Catholic and Muslim visitors alike, and it has no ancient warrant whatever.

The atlas entry above is about the Greek Ephesus and the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders. The same ruined city is also one of the most important sites of early Christianity, and that layer is worth setting out on its own.

Paul and the silversmiths. Paul spent some years at Ephesus in the 50s CE, and the Acts of the Apostles records the riot his preaching provoked among the silversmiths who made shrines of Artemis and saw their trade threatened, the crowd chanting "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" in the theatre that still stands. The letter to the Ephesians is addressed to the community there.

John and Mary. A strong early tradition placed the apostle John's later life and death at Ephesus, and the great Basilica of Saint John was built over the site venerated as his tomb. A related tradition holds that Mary, entrusted to John, spent her last years nearby; the House of the Virgin Mary on the hill above the city is a Catholic pilgrimage shrine today, visited by several popes.

The Council of 431. Ephesus was the setting for the Third Ecumenical Council in 431, which affirmed the title Theotokos, "God-bearer," for Mary against Nestorius, a decision central to how mainstream Christianity came to speak of Christ and his mother. The council met in a church of Mary in the city.

The Seven Sleepers. On the edge of Ephesus is the cave of the Seven Sleepers, whose legend, of young Christians who slept through a persecution and woke generations later, is shared, in variant form, by Christianity and Islam, where it appears in the Sura of the Cave.