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Ancient Wonder / Temple Ruins

Temple of Artemis, Ephesus

TEM-pul of AR-tuh-miss · Modern Selçuk, İzmir Province, Turkey · 37.9497° N, 27.3639° E

One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis was the great pagan shrine whose cult and lucrative silver-shrine trade form the backdrop to the Ephesian riot in Acts 19:23-41, where the crowd chanted "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" (Acts 19:28, 19:34) after the silversmith Demetrius accused Paul's preaching of threatening the goddess's worship and his trade. By Paul's time this was the massive Hellenistic-era reconstruction (begun 323 BC), roughly four times the size of the Parthenon. Only a single reconstructed column and scattered foundation stones remain on the site today.

Archaeology

The temple had at least three major building phases: an 8th-century BC peripteral shrine, the mid-6th-century BC Archaic temple funded by Croesus of Lydia (burned in 356 BC), and the Hellenistic rebuild begun in 323 BC that stood in Paul's day. The site was rediscovered in 1869 by John Turtle Wood in a British Museum-sponsored search; excavations continued to 1874, with further work by David George Hogarth (1904-06) and re-excavations in 1987-88. Little survives above foundation level — most sculptural fragments were removed to the British Museum.