On Mozia, a tiny island off the west coast of Sicily, the Phoenicians founded in the 8th century BC. A busy trading city. And where the seafarers built branches from the east of the Mediterranean area, they created ports. The island in the lagoon of Marsala, which is now operating under the name San Pantaleo, owned a large harbor basin in the southwest. Supposed. Because a team led by archaeologist Lorenzo Nigro from the University of La Sapienza in Rome has now found out what function the pelvis originally had and what was in the environment of the artificial water.
According to Nigro, the rectangular complex, which was surrounded by temple buildings and bordered by a circular wall, served as a natural mirror: "The reflecting surface of the basin could have been used for astronomical observations, " Nigro writes in the archaeological journal Antiquity. "It is possible that rods were inserted into the basin to mark star positions that were reflected in the water – this made it possible to observe and determine celestial bodies." Perhaps scholars or sailors used the basin for navigation by reading the constellations in the night sky.
After 1200 BC BC, when the Phoenicians in the Levant were no longer under the dominance of the Hittites and Egyptians, they spread west and built a trade network throughout the Aegean. Not only in Greece, but into the western Mediterranean room, they opened up further locations. Some of their trading posts developed into cities that finally moved into their sphere of influence.
This is what happened to the Phoenician city of Mozia. In the 7th century BC, it had grown into an important port city, mainly trading with regions in the west and the centre of the Mediterranean region. Almost inevitably, Mozia came into conflict with the great power on the other side of the Strait of Sicily. The result: The Punics devastated the island city around the middle of the 6th century BC. Mozia recovered, as the construction of an imposing city wall testifies, and was probably economically important for some time, as the sole ruler Dionysius I of Syracuse (431–367 BC) had it finally destroyed in 397 BC.
The surviving inhabitants then founded a new settlement on the west coast of Sicily not far from Mozia: Lilybaion. The place was later named Marsala, probably after its port with the Arabic name Marsa Allah or Marsa Ali. The Arabs had taken Sicily bit by bit in the 9th century and started their conquest in the old Lilybaion.
Wine and Whitakers made Marsala famous
It is likely that people continued to produce what they had already produced at the time of ancient Mozias and distributed throughout the Mediterranean: Sicilian wine. The sweet wines from Marsala were particularly famous. The lucrative business with grape juice led the British Whitaker family to the place at the beginning of the 19th century. She negotiated the wine to England and became rich with it.
A sprout of that family then ensured that the Phoenician legacy of Mozia was not forgotten: The scholar Joseph Whitaker (1850–1936), who researched the bird world of Tunisia and Sicily throughout his life, also devoted himself to the ancient remains of Mozias. At the beginning of the 20th century, Whitaker found that the rectangular pool in the southwest of the island was surrounded by a spacious, circular wall and connected to the sea over a canal. For the excavator, the artificial waters had great resemblance to the war port of Carthage, which Greek and Roman authors of antiquity referred to as a kothon.
This Phoenician type of port is an excavated basin that was connected to the sea by a canal. In the case of Carthage, the Kothon was accessible via the commercial port. It was a circular complex with an artificial island in the middle. A canal and a basin can also be found on Mozia, but two aspects cast doubt on the interpretation as a port: on the one hand, the facility is located on an island in the middle of a lagoon, which already offered a lot of space as a natural port – a built facility seems almost superfluous. On the other hand, the basin seems much too small to accommodate individual ships or even the entire fleet of a Phoenician city like Mozia. The rectangular installation measures only 37 by 52.5 meters.
Another excavations between 1955 and 1970 led to a slightly different interpretation. British archaeologists had excavated the pelvis in places. Her conclusion: it is a kind of dry dock to repair ships.
Whether it is a port basin or a dry dock – in the scientific literature the Mozia basin is often cited as one of the few well-preserved Phoenician port facilities in the Mediterranean region. For Nigro and his team, it was therefore necessary to tear down a cemented doctrinal opinion with good arguments.
The pool was fueled by natural water sources.
For about 60 years, archaeologists from La Sapienza University in Rome have been digging on Mozia. When they began to look more closely at the supposed port 20 years ago, they laid the basin dry and exposed its edging of stone blocks. In the process, they found that underground sources fed the basin with water through channels. In addition, the researchers discovered the remains of buildings belonging to three temples in the area: a large building for the weather and sky god Baal, east of the basin. Not far from the house of Baal, to the north of it, there was a temple of Astarte – the important Phoenician goddess is assigned to the war, but was also worshiped as a deity of love similar to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. In addition, there was a sanctuary to the west of the basin with buildings including a brick sacrificial pit under the open sky, which was filled with the bones of sacrificial animals. Perhaps the blood of the animals was also offered here. The pit had been closed with two stone anchors. Also due to hydraulic engineering installations, the excavators around Nigro assume that the remains were a kind of water sanctuary.
The remains of numerous smaller buildings, steles, altars, sacrificial pits and votive gifts were also found on the circular area. The function and location of this finds, the temple and the pelvis suggested to each other that everything belonged to a large temenos, a sacred area. The cult activities are likely to have turned around the sky, water and the associated deities, as it was typical of Phoenician beliefs. In particular, the element of water was probably of outstanding importance: it turned out during the excavations that at the time of the Phoenicians - from the 8th to 5th centuries BC. BC - the pool was never connected to the lagoon. Only after the destruction of Mozia by Dionysos I was a channel to the sea shore. Later, in Roman times, fish were bred here, and in modern times the pelvis had been converted into a salt.
A sanctuary aligned with the starry sky
Many centuries earlier, the Phoenicians had probably carried out rituals in and around the pelvis, with the aim of making the gods cheaply and to ask for safe seafaring. This thesis supports Nigro with reference to the buildings and their orientation: The longitudinal axis of the Baal temple, for example, points to the east southeast-where the constellation Orion opens for the winter solstice. The Phoenicians identified Orion with the God Baal. In addition, a find indirectly confirmed Nigros thesis: In the context of the Baal Temple, the excavators came across a bronze needle that once belonged to an ancient navigation device.
The main entrance of the Temple of Baal faced south-southwest – as was the Temple of Astarte. On this axis, the planet Venus appears in the summer night sky, with which the goddess Astarte was equated. Inside the temple, in a niche on the north side, there was probably an image of the goddess – in the extension of the niche in western Sicily lies Mount Eryx. There was a settlement of the Elymians of the same name in Phoenician times. They were part of the pre-Greek population of Sicily and had also built a temple to Astarte or Aphrodite or Venus, which, according to Cicero, was known for its wealth and temple prostitution.
The day-and-night equinoxes were also marked with steles and niches in the Temenos, to be more precise, certain stars rose at the marked points at these times, such as Sirius in the southern sky at the day-and-night equinox in autumn. Last but not least: according to Nigro, the water sanctuary, which is located in the west at sunset, is associated with underworld ideas. This is indicated by the sacrificial pit, which leads down into the ground.
A statue of the Baal stood up in the middle of the pelvis
During the excavations, the researchers documented a number of protruding blocks at the northern edge of the basin. At this point, the visitors of the sanctuary could have drawn water or performed ritual ablutions. In any case, it was easy to get to the water here, which did not reach very deep: just one and a half meters. So ships certainly could not navigate the basin, which contradicts an interpretation as a port or dry dock.
Like geophysical examinations of the pelvis, there was once a podium in the middle of the water. Nigro and his team reconstruct it as a statue base. Researchers know a similar ensemble from a Phoenic sanctuary in Syria. Finds from Mozia also provide concrete information: So there was a basis with the rest of a statue foot not far from the pelvis. This fragment assigns Nigro to another fragment: the torso of a Baal statue, which was rested by the lagoon of Marsala in 1933 and is now in the Archaeological Museum in Palermo. The portrait, which once towered around 2.4 meters, might have stood in the middle of the artificial waters. In 2019, the archaeologists placed a cast of the statue at that point to imitate the ancient appearance.
There is much to suggest that the complex with basins and temples in the southwest of Mozia formed a sacred area. At night, when the water surface in the basin remained smooth and unclouded, the planets and constellations were reflected in it. Buildings and stelae in the sanctuary district had referred to certain star constellations and their positions, for example at the solstice or equinox. Nigro is therefore convinced "that the circular temenos and the sacred basin formed a large astronomical observatory".
