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| Looking over the Ancient Agora in Athens, with the Acropolis up on that hilltop. |
The Ancient Agora is a large fenced area on the northwest side of the Acropolis, and was once the public centre of the city. It is home to the ruins of extensive buildings which stood over 2,000 years ago. Still standing are the well-preserved Temple of Hephaestus (400 BC), and the huge "Stoa of Attalos" built about 100 BC but completely reconstructed in the 1950s. The Stoa is believed to have been a row of shops - a sort of ancient "mall", but today houses a museum some items from which I've shown below.
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| The Temple of Hephaestus. Just a small one by Greek standards. |
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| Tourists in front of the temple. |
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| Outside the large Stoa of Attalos |
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| Most of the Stoa is open to the weather, but there is a museum gallery inside the back wall. |
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| A gold signet ring and beads, from 1,400 BC! |
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| Jewelry from a burial, about 850 BC. |
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| Teracotta boots! Aboute 900 BC. |
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| Clay voting tokens for an "ostracism". |
Greeks had a interesting system of democratic "ostracism". Qualified citizens would vote for someone they wanted to see expelled from the city, and if enough votes were cast that person would have to leave Athens! These circular disks have candidates' names scratched on them by voters.
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| An ancient "machine" for selecting jurors. About 300 BC. |
This stone was a machine used for impartially selecting citizens for jury service. The name of every eligible juror was inscribed on a little metal tag (bottom left), and these tags would be inserted into the rows of slots in the stone. A simple mechanism (a bit like a Lotto machine) would then drop random black or white balls out of the hole on the left. The colour of each ball determined whether the names in one horizontal row of tags would serve as jurors that day. Pretty much what I saw last time I went to jury service in Wellington!
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| Nike, goddess of victory. 200 BC copy of an earlier sculpture. |
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| There is a large collection of fine pottery in the museum. |
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| These columns marked the entrance to the theatre, and are all that remains. |
That still-standing Temple of Hephaestus is remarkable as almost all structures we've seen at the numerous ancient sites around Greece have been reduced to a metre or two high at the most, and probably that high only because they were protected by the soil they were buried under until rediscovered in recent times.
