Brauron 2003 Overview

The Corpus of the Inscriptions of the Artemis Sanctuary in Brauron, Greece
Dina Peppas Delmousou

The grant will be used for the publication of my final 2-volume report entitled "The Corpus of the inscriptions of the Artemis Sanctuary in Brauron". The Corpus will contain more than 300 transcriptions of the inscribed pieces, which have also been analyzed, but a large number of them not yet photographed.

The sanctuary was excavated by Ioannis Papadimitriou from 1948 to 1963 when they ceased because of his sudden death. Immediately all activities stopped and the storerooms with a plethora of findings closed, the newly constructed "Museum of Brauvron" remained empty till its inauguration in the summer of 1970. The Museum came to house many finds belonging to several other excavations from various areas of Attica.
The toponym of Brauron has remained the same with the exception of an old popular pronunciation "Braona". Brauron is situated close to Athens; 8-9 Km from Marcopoulo and 4 km from the new airport "El. Benizelos" at Spata. The prehistoric settlements in the surroundings and on the south slope of the Acropolis, the rock-cut stairways and the so-called "Iphigeneia's tomb" and the remains of the 6th c. B.C temple, justified the fabulous description of this site by Euripides in "Iphigeneia in Tauris" v. 1446-1467 concerning the destiny of the virgin to be the first priestess at Brauron.

It is well testified that "Brauronia" was one of the five "penteteric" festivals announced previously by Theoroi. At the very beginning of the excavations, the arkteia, a "rite of transition" where the arktoi, girls devoted to Artemis, received a kind of guidance to their future marriage has provoked enormous scholarly interest. The literary tradition on the rite was combined with the imagery on the various vases found at the excavation and subsequently the so-called crateriskoi by Lili Kahil who first, studied them. Till now, this remains the only completed study concerning the vases of the excavation; however it is missing a "Corpus Vasorum".

During that period, I have also worked at this excavation and contributed by joining several marble fragments and making their transcripts. In doing so I have retrieved valuable historical information concerning the political organization, the religious cult practices, the social movements of the devotees, and other important details concerning the topography of the sanctuary. All these remain to be analyzed and published. In doing so, however, "the life in Brauron" must be compared with the findings from the Brauronion on the Acropolis in Athens (IG II2, 1514-1531) since duplicates of the inventories on marble steles of Brauron were also erected in Athens.