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Temple of Zeus rises again
Column reconstruction reveals
an obsession with engineering perfection that dates back to 4th
century B.C. Greece
by Jenn Shreve
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Ancient
Nemea was one of four 'crown' game sites in the early Panhellenic
Games, precursor to the Olympics. This site was named for
wild celery, the victory prize out of which winners’
crowns were woven.
STEPHEN MILLER PHOTO, Courtesy Nemea Excavations Archive,
UC Berkeley |
At the site of Ancient Nemea in the Greek province of Corinthia,
where mythology records Hercules’ first labor with the ferocious
Nemean lion, life goes on much as it has for the last two millennia.
Here, in the seismically active eastern foothills of the Arcadian
Mountains, the land is studded with olive trees and grape fields
and is home to a small village of farmers. The Temple of Nemean
Zeus, although mostly in ruins, still dominates the valley as
it has for more than 2,300 years.
Last August, as the world’s Olympians descended upon Athens,
the New Nemean Games were wrapping up 80 miles to the west. Revived
in 1996 by Berkeley classics emeritus professor Stephen Miller,
the games attracted more than 700 runners from around the world.
They competed B.C. style—barefoot and sporting tunics. Their
course was a clay track, dug out millennia ago in the shadow of
the Temple of Zeus. Among the runners was Berkeley civil engineering
professor and Greek native Nicos Makris.
“The games were a shower of information from how things
were done in the past,” says Makris. A specialist in earthquake
engineering who joined the Nemean Temple project in the fall of
2002, Makris served with Miller as codirector for one year, then
took over as director last January.
Miller, who retired in December, felt his work at Nemea would
not be complete until attention turned to the Temple of Zeus.
“It’s this temple, which has been in ruins for centuries,
which will provide links to the site’s sacred and cultural
origins as well as valuable insights into ancient Greece’s
innovative engineering techniques,” says Miller.
While it is standard fare for archaeologists to preserve and analyze
the monuments they excavate, Miller made the decision more than
20 years ago to go beyond that at the temple, taking on the ambitious
task of trying to reconstruct the temple’s columns.
“For me,” he says, “the impetus for reconstruction
is preservation. Yet when it came time to literally put the pieces
back together again, I had to confess there were problems with
the temple I wasn’t prepared to handle because I’m
not an engineer.” Miller, a classical archaeologist, began
excavations in ancient Nemea 30 years ago, unearthing the town’s
athletic stadium, entrance tunnel (covered in ancient graffiti
with the athletes’ names), track, bathhouse, and what is
likely the world’s oldest locker room. “What it has
meant is that we get an interesting discussion back and forth:
archeology-engineering. There’s a spirit of cooperation
that Nicos and I have that’s very productive.”
Built in 330 B.C., the Temple of Nemean Zeus was an architectural
and engineering triumph, combining elements of the Classic Doric
temples with a creative twist of Hellenistic experimentation.
Its presence had always dominated the Valley of Nemea. “The
temple was the religious focal point of the Nemean Games and the
one monument that every member of the crowd was sure to visit,”
says Miller.
Fourth century B.C. visitors, who came by the tens of thousands
every two years for the festival games—athletes, trainers,
judges, lawyers, slaves, and priests—made their way through
a bustling crowd of magicians, fortune-tellers, historians, poets,
and peddlers to the temple’s altar to offer sacrifices and
prayers to Zeus.
They approached the 9,240-square-foot temple from the east, arriving
at the temple’s facade, which was elegantly formed by six
34-foot-high Doric columns. The outer colonnade of the temple
consisted of 32 columns—six along the short east and west
sides, and 12 along the long north and south sides. The building
had an interior colonnade of 14 Corinthian-style columns and stone
stairs at the back of the main chamber leading into a sunken crypt,
where local oracles dealt out predictions throughout the festival
games. It was in front of the stairs that the imposing statue
of Zeus resided. Long gone, the cult statue was most likely taken
to Argos when the games were moved there in 271 B.C., according
to Miller.
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“We
share a fundamental creativity with the ancient Greeks that
marks the human spirit at its best,” says Professor
Stephen Miller, working at the Nemean Archives in Dwinelle
Hall.
PEG SKORPINSKI PHOTO |
The temple was meticulously oriented by its ancient architects
so that, at sunrise on the late July day the festival began, the
sun’s rays were precisely angled to pierce directly through
the open temple doors, bathing the statue of Zeus in bright light.
Over the years, the temple weathered wars and the erosion of time,
but it was the persistently recurring temblors in this seismically
active region—some exceeding a 7.0 magnitude—that
most experts believed brought the temple down. However, in the
course of his analysis, Makris learned otherwise. “It was
people who brought the columns down,” he says. “They
used the foundation and other square stones to build other structures,
including a 5th century basilica to the south, built from the
‘borrowed’ stones.” Early Christians of that
era, say Makris and Miller, threw down the 34-foot columns surrounding
the temple to gain access to the square blocks inside. What this
meant was that the three remaining columns possessed incredible
seismic integrity, Makris says.
“This was a crucial discovery. We proved that the Greeks
had state-of-the-art knowledge in engineering. This temple was
designed to withstand earthquake motions much stronger than those
expected in the province of Corinthia. This is the most solid
proof of the brilliance of the ancients’ structural design.”
Unlike the monolithic columns of earlier Greek temples, this temple’s
architects designed columns made of mounted stone cylinders, called
drums. Each of the 32 outer columns and two inner columns on the
entrance porch was constructed of 13 separate limestone cylinders.
Measuring an average of 1.5 meters in diameter, three-quarters
of a meter in height, and weighing some 2.5 tons each—massive
enough, say the experts, to keep them from being looted—these
huge cylinders were stacked with astonishing precision in a multidrum
column typical of the era. The joints between the drums were carefully
sealed and the porous limestone completely coated with a plaster
made from the dust of Pentelic marble—fine white marble
mined from quarries near Athens—giving the humble limestone
structure the grand appearance of a marble monument.
So why then, did these ancient architects choose the awkward
drums as building blocks instead of single monoliths as the Greeks
had been so fond of using in earlier temples?
“I’d always been told that the Greeks in early days
adopted column drums for economic reasons,” says Miller.
“It was cheaper.” But as the team began replicating
the precise fit of the ancient drums—26 hand-worked surfaces
per column—it became clear that they were neither easier
to use nor more affordable. Makris tested the stability of different
column designs and found a more compelling reason for the switch
to the multidrum design.
“It was seismic safety,” he says. The Greeks had a
strong belief in the perfect fitting of stones, Makris explains.
“They often created surfaces that would fit together within
1/32 of an inch, which is tremendously difficult to do when working
with a material as porous as limestone. Despite the fact that
they were building with a poor material, they managed to create
a monument with amazing acuity and craftsmanship."
It was their obsession with perfection that gave the temple superior
stability, says Makris. “At the same time, the temple was
built in such a way that, should a strong earthquake occur, the
stone blocks were not tied together with rigid connections up
the center, so there was the necessary mobility, and the temple
could absorb the incoming energy from the earthquake.”
This discovery, Miller realized, was supported by a key linguistic
clue: The Greek word for column drum, spondylos, also
means vertebra. “We’ve come to understand that the
flexibility and shock-absorbing principles of the spinal column
were what they were after,” says Miller.
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Aerial
view of the Temple of Zeus. The column drums, weighing a hefty
2.5 tons each on average, can be seen scattered around the
temple. "Because its interior had been robbed of so much
building material," says Makris, "fully reconstructing
the Temple of Zeus may not be possible."
STEPHEN MILLER PHOTO, Courtesy Nemea Excavations Archive,
UC Berkeley |
The process of rebuilding is a painfully slow one, one column
per year, Makris estimates. At a quarter of a million dollars
per column, it’s also tremendously costly. Rebuilding each
column requires restoring the stones along the foundation, the
column drums, as well as the large stone beams that once ran along
the tops of the columns, many of which are badly damaged.
The Greek Ministry of Culture mandates that ancient materials
be preserved wherever possible and that building techniques of
the past be emulated. This means that when repairing damaged stone,
workers preserve the look of the original piece by making a plaster
cast of the broken surface, then replicating it using a complicated
system to create a negative impression of the ancient surface
on the new replacement block. A cement-based adhesive that combines
the dust of the new stone is mixed in so that the original physical
and chemical properties of the stone are replicated as nearly
as possible, allowing moisture in the stone to pass through instead
of rotting the stone away at the joint, as would happen if an
adhesive like epoxy were used.
“In a simple world we’d just pour concrete,”
says Miller. “But since our task is to put back into place
all the ancient material that has survived and reproduce the same
techniques used in antiquity to the best of our ability, there
is a great deal that goes into this.”
A growing archive of engineering discoveries has already emerged
from the site. The team discovered that wooden pegs placed in
the center between two drums were used as rivets, so the ancient
Greeks could rotate one drum atop another to achieve a perfect
fit. In the summer of 2003, cement was discovered below the top
of the foundation.
“I always believed the Greeks used cement more frequently
than we gave them credit for,” says Miller. “Porous
limestone has lots of holes. In putting new blocks together [in
modern construction], when we run into a block with a lot of holes,
we fill it with cement. The ancient Greeks did the same thing,
something we’ve recently learned.”
By the end of summer 2002, Miller and his team had successfully
reconstructed two new columns, bringing the number of standing
columns to a total of five. Over the next two years, Makris hopes
to complete the work already under way on the next four columns
to fill out the northeast corner of the temple. But one of the
main obstacles the team faces on the next four columns is the
need to reconstruct nearly 80 blocks missing from the foundation.
In compliance with the Ministry of Culture, new material is sourced
from the same ridge that the temple’s original builders
mined. Several unused drums remain there to this day. Large boulders
displaced from the construction of a nearby highway have also
been cut into rough shape using a chainsaw fitted with a diamond
piece, then hand finished to create the final surfaces.
“The ancient Greeks were not building these temples out
of necessity. They built them because they wanted to express the
greatness of their civilization,” says Makris, who is on
sabbatical in Greece. “This is a remarkable opportunity
to preserve a valued part of my country’s heritage. There’s
a lot we don’t know yet. Every step in the process has yielded
long-lost information about the ancient Greeks’ remarkable
abilities as engineers and architects.”
JENN SHREVE is a freelance writer who covers
technology and culture. She lives in San Francisco and is earning
her M.F.A. in fiction writing at San Francisco State University.
SARAH YANG, UC Berkeley Media Relations, contributed
to this story.
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