Anaximander's Columns Page

On the main web page for this course there is a picture of the Temple of Athena at Priene, a few miles from Anaximander's home town of Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. That temple dates from about 325 BCE, over two centuries after Anaximander's time. However, the technique for building very tall columns from shorter cylinders (called "column-drums," because they are shaped like drums) was developed by the Egyptians well over a thousand years before Anaximander.

Consider what this technique had to accomplish:

• The columns had to stand up,
• the columns had to support the stone roofs of the temples without falling,
• the whole assembly (columns plus roof)  had to stand on a base in such a way as not to sink into the ground, and
• the columns and roof  had to be assembled so as to avoid any tilting or uneven stress.

To do this effectively and reliably requires tremendous precision in building, in measurement, and in calculation, as well as a well-developed grasp of principles of geometry and mechanical physics.

There is evidence of Persian temples built with this technique at least as far back as 700 BCE. Remember that the Persians lived in Asia Minor too; both the Persians and the Egyptians traded extensively with the Ionian Greeks. By about 600 BCE, large temples supported by columns made of stone cylinders began to appear in Greek territories, especially Ionia. It was costly to build such a temple, and only in certain areas such as Ionia were any Greek communities wealthy enough to build on such a massive scale at that time. Within the next decades, more and more Greek communities began large building projects.

Evidence such as architectural drawings on stones, and some stone-cutters' marks, makes clear that the Ionian Greeks learned from the Egyptians how to make large column-drum temples. Here are two examples of Greek column-drum temples from the 6th century BCE, at and shortly after Anaximander's time.



Above is a column from a temple at Assos, a few dozen miles up the coast from Miletus. The temple dates from about 580 BCE (Anaximander's time). The columns had all fallen or been knocked down, and today workers are restoring them. Here, workers have put the original pieces of a column back together. (This picture also comes from the Perseus web site.)





This is a temple from Akragas in Sicily (home of Empedocles). It dates from about 510 BCE. The people next to it give some idea of the scale. Sicily isn't that close to Miletus, but there was trade between the two, and there was trade between Akragas and Egypt. This picture also comes from Perseus.

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Questions, comments?

Contact me at rcherubi(at)gmu(dot)edu.