 I would like to start my speech by thanking the organizers of this session for accepting my contribution and especially Tobias Krupp for inviting me to visit the site of Amarinto this summer and to Samuel Verdan for his tour at the Temple of Apollo at Eretria this July. Today my presentation will focus on the connectivity of the Temple of Apollo at Eretria during the early Iron Age by giving you an overview of the site its main finds and reinterpreting them. So as you know the sanctuary of Apollo of Neforza Eretria is located in the center of the island of Ubiya facing the southern coast and it was in fact located around 200 meters away from the seashore which made it very accessible not only for those who lived in the island but also for the seafarers that would reach the Ubiya coast from the sea. The Temple of Apollo of Neforza was the main urban sanctuary of Eretria and the use of the site starts well before the archaic and classical periods. The three early Iron Age periods that well Xenia already mentioned are established by the protogeometric and the geometric buildings indicated with the red line drawings in the picture and most of them have these horse shaped structures one of them being longer than the others this one and it's located right in front of the geometric altar which would be here where only it will animal sacrifices have been attested and then we've got these smaller semi-circular buildings the one in the north having traces of metalworking activities and the northern sacrificial area where most egyptian and near eastern material were found. The function of these structures has not been clearly attested and so we will go through the finds to see how the site could have been used in the early Iron Age. The ceramics found inside the horseshoe structures of the temple have provided a number of imports from Attica, Argos, Corinth, East Greece, Cyprus and the Nearies. The Cypriot shirts are biochromelechithia, white painted wear and some black and red bowls. Some shirts of amphorae are from East Greece, Cyclades, North Aegean, Cyprus and Phoenicia. Some belly shirts decorated with concentric circles belong to Cypriot amphorae of phases two and three. We also have a Phoenician shoulder number 254 and a piece of a jar with a horizontal handle which is number 251 which also belong to phases two and three. These are the finds from the horseshoe structures but then in the north sacrificial area located at the northeast end of the temple there was also pottery as we've heard before. From all the ceramics found in the area most of them were being used for rituals such as Idria with the geometric and orientalizing styles and 10% of the ceramics were pots with different shapes, some of them open shapes as we heard ski foil craters or vases and others with closed shapes such as lechithia and amphorae. Amphorae seem to occur only in the archaic period of the northern sacrificial area. Those shirts have been found for the geometric period therefore based on the presence of amphorae shirts. We could say that the horseshoe buildings were connected to some kind of trade or storage whereas the northern area would not be linked to any of these activities but mainly to eating and drinking activities or the deposition of votive pots. Some bronze objects found in the longest horseshoe structure of the temple appear to have Syrian provenance and they present similar characteristics to those objects found at the Arion of Samos. Two horse blinders appear to have been made in a north Syrian workshop around the 9th century BC although the way they arrived at UBS still under debate and they reproduce an identical scene a naked central character wearing a line cloth who holds two lions and on the right a eagle is depicted on the top blinder and two rosettes are depicted on the bottom one which also presents an aramic inscription regarding a donation by Haddad to King Hazel in order to cross the river and this is precisely the same inscription found at one figurine from the Arion of Samos. A bronze statuette of a female figure with Egyptian traits was also found in the long building she's wearing a long cloth holding a lotus flower in each hand and she has a disc around her head some similar representations are found in Syria and Palestine and this piece was probably made with a mold using the technique of the lost walks the metal sheet is too thick for repuse it and it does not have any hammering hints and the details are incised afterwards the hairstyle and the disc are very Egyptian and iconographically it might represent Anak, Asaute, Asherah or Kedeshet a similar figure of raised arms same dress and lotus flower is found in Nimrod a masculine bareheaded figure wearing a tunic with short sleeves and sitting on a stool was also linked to Syrian or Phoenician manufacture and dated to the 8th century BC he wears a necklace and earrings and he's holding a conic bowl with both hands this figurine might come from Biblos or alternative alternatively from Encombe and Cyprus or even it might come from some western side and it presents similarities to a statue found again at the Arion of Samos a badly preserved bronze bowl is also tested from the eastern Mediterranean between the 9th and 7th centuries BC probably from the area of Assyria and according to Skiaka these plates are exported and imitated also in Etruria so here we can see some connections with the west as well the temple area yielded just a few examples of Egyptian objects a scarab made of Egyptian blue faience and two scarabs made of stone the stone one seemed to belong to the group of the smith from Lyre in north Syria and then the northern sacrificial area however gave a great amount of Near Eastern and Egyptian material different types of scarab white seals were found in this northern sacrificial area and they appear to belong to the group of the juror of Lyre as well representing scenes of musicians two men a sitting man and a palmerette which find parallels in the scarabs from Rhodes scarabs from Mialisos from Lindos and from Kamitos they are made of different materials including amber stone and glass and belong to different dynasties of Egypt some of them being suspected of being Phoenician due to its iconography such as scarab 168 which has an Assyrian looking tree and the scarabs from Kamitos in Rhodes and an example from Kythion also resembles scarab number 163 so that connects it even more to Phoenician manufacture other scarabs such as the ones made of glass resemble the ones found at the Erayon of Perakora some other scarabs found in Phoenicia in Syria in Rhodes in Sparta the Erayon of Argos, Kyos, Creeks and Cyprus other metallic objects were discovered at the northern area as well a few rings of silver bronze and electrode these present similarities to rings found in Rhodes, Creek, Amantus on Cyprus, Artemis Orpheus, Sparta and Egypt as well as these Crees and Almenon. Amulets in the shape of Egyptian divinities include Bess, Isis Hattor, Nefertum, Da, Tot, Sekhmet or Bastet and the presence of figurings of foreign divinities at a temple presumably dedicated to Apollo suggests a few things one option A it could be that these statuettes were only seen as exotic products due to luxurious commerce happening in the area that had no repercussions in the beliefs of local populations B that those people visiting the temple presumably eastern seafarers would at first only worship Egyptian divinities and later on it would become a temple dedicated to the Greek god Apollo or see that Greek gods were confused or associated with foreign divinities which is a similar phenomenon to what could have happened at the temple of Komod in southern Crete which is a sanctuary also associated to Apollo where we have found sculptures of Sekhmet and Nefertum and Sekhmet and Nefertum together with a form the Egyptian triad so this could have been associated to the Greek triad of Apollo let one items and the same phenomenon could have happened in Eretria in conclusion the temple of Apollo Eretria has several successive buildings for the geometric and geometric structures with a horseshoe shape below the archaic and classical structures and the northern most of these geometric buildings is where we would have had metal working the longer building of the same period is where the horse blinders and the other figurines were found the altar where there where would have been the animal sacrifices and the northern sacrificial area with Egyptian material so we can maybe say that one building had one function so each building would have its own function or we can say that a group of buildings would have had one function or maybe a group of buildings would have had several functions which is probably this case so what we have in Eretria would have been a religious area not just a religious building would have been a religious group of buildings um there would have been a space of dedication to the divinity at the northern area where votives would have also been placed a space for animal sacrifices at the altar followed by the construction of a building that could have been related to a temple even though up to the moment of construction there would have been no formal temple and probably religious activities would have presumably been outdoors and this space would have not just been a religious space it would have not just been a religious group of buildings but also a commercial group of buildings the portrait finds in the other buildings indicate that the southernmost building would have been probably used for eating and drinking and the elongated building provided us with shirts of amphorae some of them from Near Eastern origin and this could mean that the area was used for both purposes commerce and eating uh since protogeometric times um the presence of transporting storage jars as well as other kinds of open shapes could indicate the use of the building as a stopping point for merchants not just for resting and eating but also for trading and with the time or maybe around the same time as it started being used as a port of coal around the eighth century merchants and locals frequenting the site would have also uh reclaimed the need of a worshiping area so the establishment of an altar and later on of a religious building would have been organized accepting this assumption the second theory about the beliefs in egyptian divinities from the moment of creation of the temple could be accepted even though an association between egyptian divinities could have also occurred one more aspect to take into account is the international character of a temple with such a proximity to the seashore which attests connections with other aegean sites such as samos and specifically its temple dedicated to era which is a sanctuary that would have had similar characteristics and functions to the one from eretria as well as the temple of kition bamboola in cyprus where metalworking practices also took place and the temple b of komos on creed and possibly the port's temple of brulla in southern rhodes moreover eretria could have been a port of entry of egyptian and neo eastern objects to ubia even though sites like lefkhandi seem to have yielded a lot more of oriental materials it seems that lefkhandi maybe would have been an end to these exchanges where whereas eretria would have been the the port of entry the temple of apolodaph nephorus would therefore form part of the network of aegean temples integrated in commercial districts often controlled by oriental merchants and these districts would have been a stopping point where seafarers would have rested who worshiped their gods eaten and sold products therefore the structures forming the early iron age temple of the temple of apolo at eretria was where commercial exchanges between foreigners and locals took place as well as a hybridization of religious practices that denote that cultures cannot be considered in isolation thank you very much now we will have olivia dank we want to begin with a question is it a match a religious relations between the island of ubia and the calcidus north of aegean what are some there yeah thank you and i also thank the organizers for inviting me and yeah i think now it is time to travel from ubia to the north more precisely to my research area the khakidiki or khakidike and i will start with an introduction about this region followed by a study of the relations between ubia and khakidi and peninsular the first example of the ties between those two regions is represented actually in the famous philosopher Aristotle who was born in star gira on khakidiki and died in chalcis on ubia and speaking of chalcis on ubia i want to say it's also yeah controversial for khakidiki where the name for this peninsular derives and chalcis is one of the answers so and what i want to note in advance since i discuss both the khakidiki and the ubia in city chalcis i will use the adjectival form khakidikian for khakidiki and khakidian for chalcis in hope of avoiding confusion just to let you know the khakidiki is a peninsular in northern greece itself trident like shaped with three promontories named palena in ancient times flekara modern kassandra also the first finger the first leg as you say in gree and then syphonia and you have aphels and octel and those three promontories extending into the gnc and today the territorial border of khakidiki is shown by the following red line missing of course the independent region of mount aphels and i have expanded my research area what i call khakidiki a little bit and defined it by geographical aspects rather than political the west east border is formed by the temai gulf and the stremonico while the inland extends to the edges of the coronea and the boulder lake and just describing like a boundary curve as you see here but of course i'm leaving out tessaloniki and also argilos yeah just a short introduction my doctoral thesis called since century on khakidiki is an official project of the swiss nation science foundation based at the university of vasel in switzerland and together with my two supervisors professor martin kubisberg from vasel and professor butiras from tessaloniki i'm seeking to present the first overview of the sacred landscape of the khakidian peninsula beginning in the late rome sage down to the roman empire and in this regional study the sites are evaluated with the help of literary epigraphic numismatic and archaeological resources and in total i deal with 25 places and about 12 sanctuary sites if i want to use this term here and the number it depends on how you want to count them you see i put there some question marks though and the results seek the results seek to complete the religious studies in north and greece where the regions of upper and lower macedonia have been already analyzed already out of stuc tested the khakidiki a special existence and the latest version for the definition of khakidiki comes from stapanos gemaciles who divides the area of north and greece into different micro regions and for khakidiki he says that this is the song with the strongest saufan greek influence and this saufan greek influence is especially connected with the impact of the ubeans so here's the connection and their role in the early colonization of the northern aegean produced a discourse about formation of settlements on khakidiki and the rich resources made khakidiki really an attractive area for settlers because the peninsula provided so much like mineral deposits timber and also natural bays and fertile land so the khakidiki became like something we can call a colonization hotspot especially in yeah in terms of scholars who want to see it like this this is an old perception and modern scholars have only very recently cut free from this colonial ideology that dominated the discipline from its beginning and with my first example i will show you why this traditional view of ubeans as colonizers of the north needs an update i start with dikaya dikaya for a long time the location was uncertain and the most recent evidence plays it in the region of nea calicatea as you can see here and from literary sources dikaya is known as a colony of erratria also an onomastic studies done by denny knöppler and immanuel erratiras proved the attribution as a writing colony now let's see what the numismatic evidence can tell us i show you here three coins without any name where you might yeah get an idea where it comes from and this like it's not just a test for you it was like you see they share the same types on the uppers you can see a cow standing facing its hind leg raised to scratch its muscle and on its back we have two types here this is also a bird while the rivers is with a middle sail in cues for german windmühlenziegel and yeah now you can argue is this carnage from the same place if i give you the solution you see both of them two of them are from dikaya and one is from caristos which is on ubea so i just informed you before the dikaya was supposed to be a colony of erratria so why we find in dikaya coins that have relations with caristos another example from the carnage here you can see the well-known coin type for erratria with the cow on the uppers and the octopus on the rivers so the left one shows you the one from erratria you can guess it from the epsilon and on the right there's an example from dikaya so coins from dikaya shows also the same types here another interesting comparison on the coins from dikaya is also the cock represented which is just known from the carnage of caristos you see here an example of the rivers on the right side so what we can recall so far that the carnage of dikaya is combining the types like the cow the cock the octopus used also by erratria and caristos and the traditional view presumed that ubean carnage influenced coin production in dikaya rather than vice versa because the scholars are thinking like in this way of course if erratria or let's say the ubeans are colonizing the moth then dikaya should follow um yeah the ubean carnage but i didn't put here a date for a purpose actually the well-known or prominent numismatist pete van alvin delivered in his paper about the beginnings of the ubean carnage the following explanation the picture that emerges of the beginnings of ubean and dikaya and minting suggests that the coin production began earlier in the so-called northern colonies than it did in the mother cities to the south to explain everything in detail we don't have time here but one of his main statements is this picture effectively reverses previous thinking which plays priority of minting with the ubean mother cities informed to some extent no doubt by suppositions that colonies would be dependent followers rather than independent innovators and this suggestions suggestion aligns as well as the argument made elsewhere of northern colonies initiating carnage before the south on the tropolas so here we have to really change our point of view and think a little bit vice versa because the normal idea is about that everything is coming from the south that are colonizing the north but actually here we have a really good example because for especially dikaya we have those coins away earlier or the same at the same time like we have the carnage from erratia or canisters and actually it was the opposite so the ubeans came into the north and saw this well-established carnage system and they adopted it also recent studies demonstrated that the north venetian colonies were some of the first outside of asia minor to adopt coinage after its invention indelidian and ion in heartland and therefore it's important to know that the rich gold and silver mines provided perfect conditions to feed developing mines because especially on Chakitiki we have a lot of mineral deposits and also Mount Pangaeon is close by and I would I wanted to show a quick you can also divide the Chakitiki into zones east and west which the so-called here ubeic ionic standard and a reduced Malaysian one in the east and it's interesting that this ubeic ionic standard moved actually also this is a modern term moved from the north to the south it's extended into ubea and this is why we found all those types in carristos and erratria for example. What we can learn from this is that the shared types of the cities of dikaya erratria and carristos showed that they would have been acceptable for payments in all locations so this was in terms of trade a really good thing to do. For the coinage of dikaya exist until now no study but from the few dozen examples that survive of this coinage they can come in a surprising range of varieties so and all those arguments we have until now they stress that the north was way earlier than we have it on ubea. I am sorry just um here a card or a map you can see the deficits so they had a lot of material to use on Chakitiki. Now we move on to aphytos modern califea to a cave and this cave is situated in a seaside sanctuary which belongs to the nearby ancient city of aphytos as you can see here and this is a modern view so we just focus on the cave and the attribution of a cave to a particular diety is not always clear especially codes of Dionysos are rarely detectable. The exception is the cave of califea which is one of the few securely identified caves for Dionysos in Greece and the cave fits into the Dionysian landscape where the god was associated with several features like mountains, woods, caves and springs and also we know already from Homer in the hymn to Dionysos that he has a strong connection with caves and he was also raised by the names of Nesa so for this cave we have literary evidence that also reveals the therapeutic function of the place so we know this from Xenophon so I just give you a short overview so this is actually the entrance to the cave what you see before just ignored for the moment and behind you see a staircase and inside the cave there is nothing bound unfortunately but we have some other evidence and here I make a comparison of aphytos and the school of Aristotle because both share the same reconstruction in the fourth century where this staircase was added to reach a niche the upper one as you can see here I know it's a little bit difficult to to look at it and just to give you the proof that it's actually for the Dionysos we have inscribed shirts for the Dionysos then we have a model head and inscription with a priest of the Dionysos and also we have the numismatic evidence where you can find images from which are related to the Dionysian canon like a calphoros or also crepes so and what I want to show you now is Katja Spoon was mapping the sacred caves of Greece and has shown that other caves of the Dionysos are only known through literary sources the list is quite short there's just Yubia, Naxos and Mount Pangeon where you can find a cave connected to Dionysos so this makes the importance of the cave of aphytos even yeah more important yeah the cave of aphytos becoming more important and yeah this cave on Yubia we just know it from Pozanias and it's still yeah we have to find it this would be interesting comparison then and now some other small ties between Chakitiki and Yubia I just want to show you Arephosa it's a place on Chakitiki located here in the north and here it's interesting on Chakitiki Arephosa appears at Poseidon's wife and together they had a son named Abbas or Abantas and this son of Poseidon and Arephosa is declared as the guinarish of the Yubians which is quite interesting so for Chakitiki Arona Perez has shown a different move in connection with Poseidon and Arephosa and according to this move Poseidon had intercourse with the young mortal Arephosa and then abandoned her and then we have Hera and she took mercy of Arephosa and transformed her into a spring so in fact as we find a spring of Arephosa then because we are talking about a lot of Artemis I just put this in on Chakitiki there's also a Lagoon sanctuary for Artemis which might be for Limneia or for Pithia and Artemis was here to worship between 7th and 5th century and it was really you can call it Lagoon sanctuary which we already talked about so there certain similarities of course to locate sanctuary for Artemis near shore or in this area where you find those natural features and then because we were talking about Blackavi here is just my example for the one hilltops sanctuary I have on Chakitiki which is on Papenoras you can see the hill here so this one and the site needs more research of course but there's something like you see on top of this hill there is something like this yeah rocky features and you find some niches there but what is also interesting is the site is in the middle of an optical line which can be drawn between Mount Olympus and Mount Athos and seen therefore a special point in the landscape which is quite interesting for this hilltops sanctuary it's not clear which deity was worshipped there it can be related with Zeus but this has to prove still we don't know and the last example I want to give you is Posidi the sanctuary is of great importance because it represents the one safely identified sanctuary of Poseidon in the area of ancient Macedonia its position is here and it's on a as you can see in this picture it's located on a flat sandy cape on the Panela Palene Peninsula in Chakitiki and lies about four kilometer west of the ancient city of Mende and yeah what I want to stress out here is that Mende is always is also from literary evidence always called the colony of Aratria and Irina Lemos stated that Posidi appears to fit well the model of an extra urban sanctuary founded near a colony to strengthen the territorial claims of the nearby settlement of Mende but whether is this the actual reason for its foundation or whether in fact it may have been founded before the settlement will remain uncertain until the publication of the site is complete and she stated this actually some years ago and we're still waiting for the publication so this is actually still not clear but it's a really important sanctuary just to give you a quick overview this absolute absolute building ST as you can see here stated into this 10th century and inside there was also ash altar which is dated earlier which about started or we have the earliest evidence there from the late machinium period and just on the opposite you see building Rama which has two different phases and it's just like like the structures are kissing each other into it and it's super interesting because in the in this labeling of to call this the extra urban sanctuary of Mende we have to be a little bit more aware that although we have evidence for Mende that there is something in the 12th century because there we have found refuse pits and also we have evidence that you beings were there of course they have a presence but to call everything a colony of Heretria I just want to give you here more awareness that you really have to show on the details and to make a really more differentiate few on this and for example what I want to see here you see on the map also Mende and the sanctuary for city together it's it's a nice explanation to label the city extra urban sanctuary I mean it's just about four kilometers which you can declare the distance what makes sense for an extra urban sanctuary but still I I don't like this term for for this and also the knee clapper the knee clapper was asking the question if actually this code for Poseidon comes from you via actually I would say he was asking the wrong question here because as we've seen so far the whole day we don't have a main sanctuary for Poseidon on you via we know just from literary sources we have Garestus and I guy which is uncertain to late which is not certainly located and I would presume that the influence also goes here more from the north than to the yeah from the north to the south so this old perception we yeah we have still in our minds I want to have an update here or just to make you more aware of this yeah and with this I hope I could give you a quick overview about there are a lot of relations as you as you saw between Chakiriki and you via and I thank you for your attention