Ancient Marion and Arsinoe and the Votive Terracotta Corpus

Nancy Serwint of Arizona State University presents the excavations conducted by Princeton University since 1983 at Polis Chrysochous, the site of ancient Marion and its Hellenistic successor Arsinoe, followed by her technical study of the site's corpus of votive terracotta figurines and large terracotta sculpture.

Whereas earlier work by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition and the Department of Antiquities concentrated on the cemeteries, the Princeton project opened more than 300 trenches across five urban and suburban zones to investigate the ancient settlements. Ptolemy I destroyed Marion in 312 BC and deported its population to Paphos; in 270 BC Ptolemy II Philadelphus refounded the town as Arsinoe. Serwint walks through the five excavated areas. Trench E.F2 yielded workshops of Arsinoe producing lamps, glass, metal and terracottas, beneath a sixth-century three-aisled basilica with mosaic tesserae and 250 burials. Area E.G0 contained a seventh-century basilica with twelfth-century Paphos-region glazed bowls in its graves, alongside a large Ptolemaic courtyard building overlooking Chrysochou Bay with painted wall plaster, a five-metre bottle-shaped cistern, and Scythian-type arrowheads that suggest a military garrison. Near the local high school, a monumental building of the late sixth century BC with metalworking evidence and imported Greek pottery from Athens, Corinth and East Greece is identified as a possible palace of Marion.

The remaining two areas are sanctuaries that produced the bulk of the 30,000 terracotta fragments. An Archaic sanctuary on the outskirts of Polis, in use from 750 to 450 BC, yielded over 25,000 terracotta fragments, mostly small female figurines with raised arms or holding their breasts in the Near Eastern Astarte tradition, together with life-size heads showing Nubian, Phoenician and Greek features, Egyptianizing faience, an inscribed cylinder seal, terracotta masks and 154 miniature clay sacred trees. A later Classical temple beside the city wall yielded nearly 5,000 fragments, including a statuette of Aphrodite and Eros, a three-metre colossal male statue, and coins of King Stasioikos II (330 to 312 BC) pairing Zeus and Aphrodite. Deliberate mutilation of the heads and a ten-centimetre ash layer point to destruction by Ptolemy's soldiers.

In the final part of the lecture, Serwint explains how her team documents the 49 moulded figural types, clay inclusions and forming methods. With graduate student Casey Gibson, she replicated four variants of the miniature sacred trees in coloured plasticine to reconstruct the sequence of wheel-throwing, thumb-mounting, stick-building and loop application, and introduced digital microscopy to scan ancient fingerprints on the clay.