"The Ionians at War?" Dedications of weapons in the sanctuaries of Ionian and the Apollo sanctuary at Didyma
Abstract
Weapons and armour were among the most frequent kinds of offerings made in the sanctuaries of the Greek world during the Archaic period. There exists an extensive bibliography and important theories concerning their significance.
It was, however, only recently that most of the weapon votives preserved from about 130 cult places were analysed in summary. This synopsis pointed out certain differences in terms of chronology and chorology: the finds of weapons and armour were unearthed mainly in the Panhellenic or supra-regional sanctuaries in the southern and central Greece (Olympia, Delphi, Kalapodi etc.), whereas the cult places in the eastern Aegean remained relatively poor in these dedications; in Attica and Magna Graecia on the other hand the amount of the votives only started to increase in the 6th c.
BC. The aim of this study is to complement the picture of weapons and armour dedicated in sanctuaries of the ancient Greek world with the recently published and excavated finds from the eastern Aegean region of Ionia.