ABSTRACT
On 18 September 1956, Franz Miltner, head of the Austrian team of archaeologists
working at the ancient site of Ephesos, near modern Selçuk in the Izmir province of
Turkey, was informed by an enthusiastic Turkish excavation worker about the
unearthing of a golden statue in the Prytaneion (see triptych1).2 On closer examination,
the statue turned out to be not gold but, most probably, coated in gold on the upper
half. The perfectly worked marble statue was named ‘Artemis the Beautiful’ by Miltner
on the basis of its high-quality workmanship, distinguishing it from the later-discovered
‘Artemis the Colossal’, again from the Prytaneion, thus named because of its size. A
third, smaller-than-life-size statue again from the Prytaneion would soon join the two.3
