Votive Offerings

People from all over the Mediterranean traveled to a sanctuary at Kourion, Cyprus, to worship, consult, and seek the protection of the god, Apollo. People would place objects as votive dedications to stand in for them before their god. At Kourion’s Sanctuary of Apollo, an area or precinct made sacred to the god, many of the votives are small terracotta figurines of people and animals. Among the dedications were also sculptures of stone and bronze, pottery vessels, and—no doubt—votives made of cloth and wood that have left no trace in the archaeological record. These people and their votives crowded together, creating a dynamic whole, a community made up of individual parts.

Greek and Roman Apollo is the god of shepherds, music, dance, prophecy, plague, and healing. He and his twin sister, Artemis, were both gods of archery. At first only named in inscriptions at Kourion as “the god,” he is called Apollo by the 4th century BCE. By the 3rd century BCE, Apollo at Kourion is specified as “Hylates” (of the woodland).

In the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, the sanctuary of Apollo display uses as a backdrop a photograph of the Roman period palaestra, a building for athletic competitions. Pilgrims entering by the Kourion gate would pass by this building on their way into the sacred precinct (see Hubbard, page 58). Today the sanctuary is partly reconstructed. The monumental buildings were sponsored by the Roman emperors Nero (54–68 CE) and Trajan (98–117 CE). A limestone paved street points the way to the Temple of Apollo.

During the Roman expansions of the sanctuary, many thousands of earlier dedications were cleared away and buried or simply built over. Worshippers had dedicated these votive objects in a more open-air precinct. The Penn excavations at Kourion (1934–1954) documented over 3,000 terracotta figurines, most from the Sanctuary of Apollo, as well as hundreds of other votives. Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1874) unearthed and Diana BuitronOliver and David Soren (1978–1984) recorded many more dedications there. The total of votives brought to light is estimated to be over 10,000.

In the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, 23 terracotta votive figurines stand together in the display about the Sanctuary of Apollo and 9 other dedications found there and made of stone, terracotta, faience, and bronze appear in other parts of the gallery. A limestone statue in Assyrian dress on display may have been found nearby (54-28-22). A further 14 objects—terracotta figurines, limestone and marble sculptures, as well as lamps and arrowheads—from the Sanctuary of Apollo are on display in the Greece and Rome Galleries.

The Penn excavations found terracotta figurines mainly in two deposits. One is a semicircular altar in the area known as the Archaic Precinct, used from around 800 to 475 BCE. The figurines on view connect with Apollo’s many roles: an archer (54-28-118), worshipper (54-28-114), lyre player (54–28-109), and ring-dancers, as well as a man (shepherd?) with an animal, a woman with a plant (54-28-116), a six-toed figurine that may be Artemis, and a centaur with a thick snake-like tail (5428-106). The centaur is half man and half horse, possibly representative of Apollo’s foster son Chiron. Only the woman with the plant was made outside Kourion, at nearby Amathus.

A deposit from around 100 CE known as the Votive Deposit represents a massive clearing away of votives that had been dedicated over the course of seven centuries. This 13-foot wide, semicircular pit was given a prominent position on the east side of the entry to the street leading to the temple. This placement perhaps was in recognition of the history upon which the new Roman edifices were being built.

Figurines on display from the Votive Deposit include a lyre player (54-28-101) and a squat figure (54-28-97) from 500 BCE or earlier, a bust of the Hellenistic period Queen Arsinoe II (54-28-92) on view in the gallery’s display about Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus, and an early Roman figurine of a maltese dog (54-28-98). The majority of the figurines, however, represent horses (5428-94) and men, both warriors on horseback (54-28-49), some carrying dedications like a ram (54-28-48), and charioteers. Their bright colors and dynamic features bring this miniature army to life.

Kourion grew into a pan-Mediterranean destination. The warriors on display were made at Kourion, Amathus, and the island’s north coast. One found in the street leading up to the temple was made at Paphos (5428-127). Outside Cyprus, one likely was made in Syria (54-28-93) and people brought terracotta figurines from Greece, some of which were used to make new molds at Kourion. The faces of some men riding the horses are based on these Greek images of non-horsemen (54-2875), including youths or women (54-28-63), and the gods Pan and Eros (54-28-66). Although the faces were made in molds, the handmade bodies and alterations to the molded parts make each figure unique.

Figurines crowd together in the precinct and the pit. Singly, the details of each figurine are fascinating to look at from all sides. Their small size invites handling, making them seem easy to manipulate. Yet, the visitor to a sanctuary experienced these objects as a group rather than singly. In such crowds, people must overcome the distances that usually separate them. A tension develops between the unity of the crowd and those outside. These figurines acted and act in unison, attracting the attention of the god, drawing in worshippers, and now engaging the attention of visitors to the Penn Museum.

The impact of these miniatures at Kourion, including a miniature army that grew over time, felt and feels large. They form an interesting contrast with the Roman period tendency at this place for grand architecture and larger-scale dedications. On view in the Penn Museum’s Rome Gallery, for example, is a marble head from a statue of a goddess or a member of the Roman imperial family (54-28-21). Another large dedication of the Roman period was found in the Temple to Apollo. It is a storage vessel (pithos), large enough for a person to squeeze inside. Large dedications before the Roman period come from several Cypriot sanctuaries, but at Kourion’s Sanctuary of Apollo they are few in comparison with the thousands of smaller objects.

Prior to the Roman period, votive dedications included other miniature objects called seals as well as unusual examples of them made large. Seals were highly personal objects that people wore as amulets and used to make impressions in clay in administrative and legal contexts. The Penn Museum team at Kourion found many seals in the street leading up to the temple. Most take the form of an Egyptian scarab beetle, less than two centimeters in length, and have minute designs that are hard to see, like one in the gallery’s display about Phoenicians.

At the Sanctuary of Apollo, however, there are seals of double or nearly triple the length of a scarab and of much larger dimensions overall. They have bold, deeply carved designs that are easily seen from a distance. In the gallery’s display about the Iron Age city-kingdom of Kourion are a large cylinder-stamp seal showing a scene of combat (54-28-8) and a multi-sided rectangular stamp seal with a flying scarab on one side. These seals may have been displayed as badges of office, either worn on the body or prominently displayed in the sanctuary. Such large seals might instead have been made as seals of the god, as in the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.

Sanctuaries were places for competition among worshippers. People would display their wealth at the Sanctuary of Apollo by offering objects made of costly materials, like the bronzes in the gallery’s display about the kingdom of Kourion: a warrior in a short kilt and pointed cap (54-28-3), part of a votive plaque with a sphinx or a griffin at a votive tree (54-28-4), and part of a large bronze vessel with a deer perched on the rim. The gallery’s display about Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus includes a bronze figure of Artemis (54-28-1).

Reconstructing a Pithos

George H. McFadden, III, sponsored the Penn Museum’s excavations at Kourion. On the first day of excavation at the Sanctuary of Apollo, November 6, 1935, the first object he recorded in his notebook was part of a large ceramic pithos storage vessel. The fragment he recorded joins with part of the same pithos found 60 years earlier by Luigi Palma di Cesnola. Today all the pieces are at the Penn Museum (55-9-1) (see Byler, Expedition 64:1).

A text in the Greek alphabet inscribed on the shoulder of the vessel tells us that Polyktetos, son of Timon, made it and dedicated it to Apollo Hylates and a second Apollo that is reconstructed by comparison with other inscriptions as Apollo Caesar. Apollo Caesar refers to a Roman Emperor, likely Nero (54–68 CE) or possibly Trajan (98–117 CE).

The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery includes both the original pithos fragment, in the gallery’s display about the alphabet, and a replica, next to which is a cut-away view of what the full vessel may have looked like, reconstructed to be nearly four feet in height. This reconstruction derives in part from measurements of the surviving fragments, which give us the thickness and diameter of its rim and upper body.

The proportions of the lower body and the vessel’s height can only be determined through comparison with similar pithoi. A rare complete example comes from a well at Corinth, Greece; it is tall rather than squat and has a knob-shaped base. It was made about 400 years before Polyktetos lived, but it compares closely with the surviving parts of his pithos.

The handmade techniques for crafting pithoi have changed little from antiquity to today. Pithoi (pitharia) made on Cyprus into the 20th century also have knob-shaped bases, share some details of the Kourion vessel’s shape, and frequently bear inscriptions on their upper bodies. Comparisons with these other vessels helped to suggest what the full size of the enormous jar Polyktetos dedicated to Apollo Hylates might have been.