The Temple of Artemis or Artemision (Greek: Ἀρτεμίσιον; Turkish: Artemis Tapınağı), also known as the Temple of Diana, was a Greek temple dedicated to a localised form of the goddess Artemis (equated with the Roman goddess Diana). It was located in Ephesus, near modern day Selçuk in Turkey. While it had been destroyed and rebuilt many times in ancient history, the last incarnation of the temple was destroyed in 401 CE. Only foundations and fragments of the last temple remain in the present day.
The beginning of the history of the temple is unclear. It is known, however, that the earliest version of the temple was destroyed by a flood in the 7th century BCE. A more elaborate reconstruction of the temple began around 550 BCE under the leadership of the Greek architect from Crete Chersiphron, funded by Croesus of Lydia. This version of the temple lasted until 356 BCE, when it was burned down by an arsonist, popularly identified as Herostratus.
The final form of the temple was funded by the people of Ephesus. The temple was central to Ephesian life, as it had great political and social value to its citizens. The Ephesian Artemis, which was considered as separate from the Hellenic version of the god, had unique features and artifacts associated with her and was seen as a protector of the city.
The Temple of Artemis (artemisia) was located near the ancient city of Ephesus, about 75 kilometres (47 mi) south from the modern port city of İzmir, in Turkey. Today the site lies on the edge of the modern town of Selçuk.
The sacred site (temenos) at Ephesus was older than the Artemision itself. Pausanias was certain that it antedated the Ionic immigration by many years, being older even than the oracular shrine of Apollo at Didyma. He said that the pre-Ionic inhabitants of the city were Leleges and Lydians. Callimachus, in his Hymn to Artemis attributed the earliest temenos at Ephesus to the Amazons, legendary warrior-women whose religious practise he imagined already centered upon an image (bretas) of Artemis, their matron goddess. Pausanias believed that the temple pre-dated the Amazons.
Pausanias's estimation of the site's antiquity seems well-founded. Before World War I, site excavations by David George Hogarth seemed to identify three successive temple buildings. Re-excavations in 1987–1988 and re-appraisal of Hogarth's account
confirmed that the site was occupied as early as the Bronze Age, with a sequence of pottery finds that extend forward to Middle Geometric times, when a peripteral temple with a floor of hard-packed clay was constructed in the second half of the 8th century BCE.
The peripteral temple at Ephesus offers the earliest example of a peripteral type on the coast of Asia Minor, and perhaps the earliest Greek temple surrounded by colonnades anywhere.
In the 7th century BCE, a flood destroyed the temple, depositing over half a meter of sand and flotsam over the original clay floor. Among the flood debris were the remains of a carved ivory plaque of a griffin and the Tree of Life, apparently North Syrian, and some drilled tear-shaped amber drops of elliptical cross-section. These probably once dressed a wooden effigy (xoanon) of the Lady of Ephesus, which must have been destroyed or recovered from the flood. Bammer notes that though the site was prone to flooding, and raised by silt deposits about two metres between the 8th and 6th centuries, and a further 2.4 m between the sixth and the fourth, its continued use "indicates that maintaining the identity of the actual location played an important role in the sacred organization".
The new temple was sponsored at least in part by Croesus, who founded Lydia's empire and was overlord of Ephesus.
It was designed and constructed from around 550 BCE by the Greek Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes. It was 115 m (377 ft) long and 46 m (151 ft) wide, supposedly the first Greek temple built of marble. Its peripteral columns stood some 13 m (40 ft) high, in double rows that formed a wide ceremonial passage around the cella that housed the goddess's cult image. Thirty-six of these columns were, according to Pliny the Elder, decorated by carvings in relief. A new ebony or blackened grapewood cult statue was sculpted by Endoios,
and a naiskos to house it was erected east of the open-air altar.
A rich foundation deposit from this era, also called the "Artemision deposit", yielded more than a thousand items, including what may be the earliest coins made from the silver-gold alloy electrum. The deposit contains some of the earliest inscribed coins, those of Phanes, dated to 625–600 BCE from Ephesus, with the legend ΦΑΕΝΟΣ ΕΜΙ ΣΗΜΑ (or similar) ("I am the badge of Phanes"), or just bearing the name ΦΑΝΕΟΣ ("of Phanes").
Fragments of bas-relief on the lowest drums of the temple columns, preserved in the British Museum, show that the enriched columns of the later temple, of which a few survive (illustration below) were versions of this earlier feature. Pliny the Elder, seemingly unaware of the ancient continuity of the sacred site, claims that the new temple's architects chose to build it on marshy ground as a precaution against earthquakes, with lower foundation layers of fleeces and pounded charcoal.
The temple became an important attraction, visited by merchants, kings, and sightseers, many of whom paid homage to Artemis in the form of jewelry and various goods. It also offered sanctuary to those fleeing persecution or punishment, a tradition linked in myth to the Amazons who twice fled there seeking the goddess's protection from punishment, firstly by Dionysus and later, by Heracles. Diogenes Laertius claims that the misanthropic philosopher Heraclitus, thoroughly disapproving of civil life at Ephesus, played knucklebones in the temple with the boys, and later deposited his writings there.
In 356 BCE, the temple burned down. Various sources describe this as an act of arson by a man, Herostratus, who set fire to the wooden roof-beams, seeking fame at any cost; thus the term herostratic fame.
For this outrage, the Ephesians sentenced the perpetrator to death and forbade anyone from mentioning his name, although Theopompus later noted it. Aristotle describes the temple's conflagration, but not its cause. In Greek and Roman historical tradition, the temple's destruction coincided with the birth of Alexander the Great (around 20–21 July 356 BC). Plutarch remarks that Artemis was too preoccupied with Alexander's delivery to save her burning temple; he does not specify a cause for the fire.
Herostratus' part in the temple's destruction has been questioned in modern scholarship. Stefan Karweise notes that any arsonist would have needed access to the wooden roof framing;