Abstract
Constantin Doxiadis has argued that the apparently haphazard layout of Greek temple sites can be explained by a planning system of ‘polar coordinates’. His analysis of 29 ancient sites revealed two systems of ancient planning. In both cases, buildings were carefully sited so that their outer edges (stylobates, cornices, etc.) appeared to the viewer at canonical angles of vision, thus creating a ‘unified composition’ of the visible landscape. This theory is confirmed by the discovery of a 30° angle between sight lines from the top western step of the Propylaea to the outer edges of the temple of Athene Nike. A similar system of planning might have been used in Italy by augurs practising the ‘Etruscan Rite,’ which was also based on a ritual division of the visual templum (sacred space). The many irregular Italian sites might have been ritually planned by methods analogous to the Greek system and involving a ‘Pythagorean’ world-view based on an ‘harmonic’ division of space and time.
First published as: Graham Pont , “Inauguration: Ritual Planning in Ancient Greece and Italy”, pp. 93–104 in Nexus VI: Architecture and Mathematics, Sylvie Duvernoy and Orietta Pedemonte, eds. Turin: Kim Williams Books, 2006.
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Notes
- 1.
Doxiadis cites the famous dictum of the fifth-century sophist Protagoras of Abdera: ‘Man is the measure of all things’. This certainly seems relevant, even though Doxiadis’s system is found in sixth-century sites.
- 2.
Was this remarkable difference of layout associated with gender stereotypes? The Greeks considered Doric to be masculine, and Ionic feminine.
- 3.
When the other principal buildings are viewed from the eastern end of the Propylaea, the angles of vision are all 30° (Doxiadis 1972: 32); except for the angle between the west porch of the Erechtheum and the nearest corner of the Parthenon , which is 36° (a tenth part of 360). This change to the Ionic ten-part system may have been an imperial gesture towards reconciliation of the western and eastern systems just as the Periclean rebuilding included two Ionic temples as well as incorporating Ionic columns in the Doric Propylaea. See Scully (1991: 83–84).
- 4.
- 5.
Joseph Rykwert in three editions of an influential book, The Idea of a Town (1976; revised 1988; reissued 2002).
- 6.
Rykwert ’s argument is further weakened by his admission that ‘orthogonal planning… is not immediately dependent on the Etruscan or any other related rite…’ (Rykwert 1988: 72).
- 7.
In other words, Rykwert ’s reconstruction of the Etruscan rite is not supported, to any significant degree, by the available archaeological evidence. However, his fifth chapter, ‘The Parallels’, confirms that he will not abandon his fundamental urban paradigm, the rectilinear grid: this turns out to be a Procrustean bed which simply cannot accommodate the irregular sites so neatly explained by Doxiadis .
- 8.
- 9.
Since ancient times, trees have been revered as sacred sites and boundary marks. Cf. the Australian colloquialism ‘beyond the Black Stump’ (meaning the remote outback or inland).
- 10.
On possible connections between early Greek and Etruscan planning, see Rykwert (1988: 85–88, 195).
- 11.
Thus ‘templum’ usually denotes the demarcation and limits of space; and, by extension, a sacred building erected therein; but ‘templum’ was sometimes also used to denote a ‘cut off’ portion of time. Cf. Rykwert ’s suggestive inference that, according to Roman law, ‘the sunlit day is the equivalent in time to the space of the templum’.
- 12.
The old British custom of ‘beating the bounds’ was clearly a ritual means of preserving the memory of parish boundaries. The ancient Romans observed a similar rite on 23 February in the festival of Terminalis (god of boundaries).
- 13.
The classic study of the harmonic world-view and its pervasive vocabulary is Spitzer (1963). A similar study of the harmonic vocabulary in Asiatic languages would doubtless yield similar results.
- 14.
The English term is derived, not from the tem root, but a (related?) Indo-European root di-mon whose base da also means ‘cut off’.
- 15.
Duodecimal forms of music include the 12-bar Blues and the Jig, Tarantella and Siciliana in 12/8. The chromatic octave scale is divided into 12 semitones.
- 16.
- 17.
While I have proposed a common anthropocentric basis to ancient Greek and Italian planning, I doubt that the methodologies and conclusions of Doxiadis and Rykwert could be entirely reconciled. Doxiadis has offered a precise, quantitative and empirically testable hypothesis which is supported by hard evidence and remains open to further testing. Rykwert has offered a less precise theory, with some supporting evidence of cardinally-oriented and orthogonally-planned cities. But he has no explanation for the far more numerous early cities that are irregularly planned and non-aligned: that is, which exhibit characteristics already explained by Doxiadis at least in some Greek and Graeco-Roman cities. To account for these would require a radical revision of Rykwert’s foundation scenario; whereas Doxiadis has already shown that his theory extends to orthogonally planned sites.
References
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Pont, G. (2015). Inauguration: Ritual Planning in Ancient Greece and Italy. In: Williams, K., Ostwald, M. (eds) Architecture and Mathematics from Antiquity to the Future. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00137-1_11
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