Archaeologists say that an inner harbor built for military or trading purposes on a Sicilian island may have been a sacred pool that reflected starlight from certain constellations.
A new study suggests that the sacred pool would have been the center of a giant sanctuary that honored several deities. The pool on the island city of Motya was built after the attack by Carthage.
Lorenzo Nigro, a professor of Near Eastern and Phoenician Archaeology at Sapienza University of Rome, said in a statement that it was a sacred pool at the center of a huge religious compound.
The study was published online on Thursday (March 17) in the journal Antiquity, and it states that the site has been interpreted after 60 years of archaeological work.
The Ancient Greek shipwreck yields the Antikythera mechanism.
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There is a small island off the western coast of Sicily. The abundant supply of fish, salt, fresh water and its protected location within a lagoon made Bronze and Iron Age populations thrive there. Phoenicians settled there in the eighth century B.C., bringing their culture to the island.
The settlement grew into a bustling port city with a trade network stretching across the central and western Mediterranean. Carthage is a rival power with Phoenician roots on the North African coast. The Carthaginians destroyed the city of Motya in the sixth century B.C.
But he bounced back. The artificial basin, which was discovered in the 1920s, was rebuilt quickly by the population. The basin was thought to be the same as the Kothon, an artificial harbor that served as a military port at Carthage. The basin was thought to be a place to repair ships in the 1970s.
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Between 2002 and 2020 archaeological work was done at the basin. There are a number of clues found at the pool, which spans an area of 172 by 121 feet. The Temple of Ba&al was found at the edge of the basin. Nigro said the port would likely have harbor buildings, not a temple.
Nigro and his colleagues discovered that the basin was filled with natural freshwater springs, not connected to the sea. The remains of more temples were found around the basin, along with altars, engraved stone slabs, and special objects that people left for religious purposes.
The discovery that the pool actually collected freshwater from an underground aquifer was one of the key clues, according to Nigro.
The archaeologists found that the pool reflected important constellations. Nigro wrote that the sanctuary's spatial layout may have represented a vault. He said that there is a niche in the sanctuary that marks the position of the sixth-brightest star in the night sky, when it rises to the north during the autumn equinox. He found that a stela in the enclosure's south marked the bright star in the night sky when it rose to the south during the autumn equinox.
There are stunning summer solstice photos.
The first and second images are image 1 and image 2.
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The Temple of Ba'al is located in the east-southeast at the winter solstice, while the east-southwest rise of the Phoenician god of Ba'al is identified by Nigro.
During the excavation of the Temple of Ba&al, archaeologists found the bronze pointer of an astrolabe, an ancient navigation tool. The statue of a dog-headed baboon was found and was associated with the Egyptian god of astronomy and often featured in zodiacs.
The evidence shows that the basin was not an inner harbor for ships, but a sacred pool, according to an associate professor of Phoenician-Punic archaeology at the University of Sassari in Italy.
Guirguis told Live Science in an email that he was in agreement with the interpretations proposed by Nigro.
From this we should draw a precious lesson, which pushes us to safeguard the most relevant commodity that we could ever find on the planet in any era of human development, the freshwater.
The sacred pool is once again filled with this precious resource. After finishing the excavation, the team filled the basin with water and put a replica of Baal on the pool's center pedestal.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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