Reading into the mysteries of Artemis Ephesia

Abstract

On 18 September 1956, Franz Miltner, head of the Austrian team of archaeologists working at the ancient site of Ephesos, near modern Selçuk in the Izmir province of Turkey, was informed by an enthusiastic Turkish excavation worker about the unearthing of a golden statue in the Prytaneion (see triptych1).2 On closer examination, the statue turned out to be not gold but, most probably, coated in gold on the upper half. The perfectly worked marble statue was named ‘Artemis the Beautiful’ by Miltner on the basis of its high-quality workmanship, distinguishing it from the later-discovered ‘Artemis the Colossal’, again from the Prytaneion, thus named because of its size.