ABSTRACT
The long-sacred site of the Artemis temple at Ephesus has taken us back into the Archaic phase of Greek art and architecture and beyond that through the dark ages of Greek history into the time of the Mycenaeans, in the second half of the second millennium BCE. The Greeks usually identified her with their mother-of-the-gods Rhea, but it seems that at Ephesus the identification was between Artemis and this not simply Phrygian but widely Anatolian Great Mother. But, unlike the situation at Olympia, it wasnt what was inside the temple at Ephesus that made it a wonder of the world: it was the temple itself. It was large and it was surpassingly beautiful. Stonehenge, for example, which impresses us well enough for its prodigious achievement of engineering and its subtlety of astronomical alignments, hardly seems like the sort of thing the listers would have rated as a must-see wonder.
