Public Release:  Sardis dig yields enigmatic trove: Ritual egg in a pot

University of Wisconsin-Madison


IMAGE: An enigmatic ritual deposit, found intact beneath the floor of a first century Roman house in Sardis, a key archaeological site of the classic world in modern Turkey. The deposit,... view more

Credit: Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/Harvard University

MADISON, Wis. -- By any measure, the ancient city of Sardis -- home of the fabled King Croesus, a name synonymous with gold and vast wealth, and the city where coinage was invented -- is an archaeological wonder.



"The two deposits each consist of a small pot with a lid, a coin, a group of sharp metal implements and an egg, one of which is intact except for a hole carefully punched in it in antiquity," explains Will Bruce, a classics graduate student a the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been digging at Sardis for the past six years. Bruce made the finds last summer.



Digging beneath the floor, Bruce and his colleagues first uncovered a thin-walled, nearly intact jug and, nearby, an assemblage of mostly unbroken pottery. "It looked like we were reaching a more intact deposit instead of fill," says Bruce.


"The ritual offerings were dug into pits in the floor, after the room was constructed," says Cahill. "We know they were renovating the room periodically, because in another part of the space there was a dump of painted wall plaster buried under the floor, presumably in a renovation."

"The meaning of these deposits is still quite open to interpretation," notes Cahill, "but burying votive deposits below ground or in a wall was a fairly common practice," perhaps as a ritual offering to protect the house. Roman literary sources suggest eggs were used in particular rituals.

For the archaeologists, part of the intrigue is that similar groups of bowls, needles, coins and eggs were discovered at Sardis more than 100 years ago when the temple of Artemis was excavated by Princeton University archaeologists. "It is an exact parallel to what they found in the early 20th century," according to Cahill.



"The coin has a portrait of Nero on the front. The original reverse was hammered flat, and the image of a lion engraved in its place, which is very odd." Expert numismatists have never seen anything like it. "The image of the lion is important because it is emblematic of the Lydian kings and of their native mother goddess Cybele," Cahill says.

The discovery is unusual, Cahill notes, because finding ritualistic objects intact and in place after thousands of years is no everyday discovery, even in a rich archaeological context such as Sardis. "Ancient ritual was important to people. It is most unusual to find such fragile things so perfectly preserved."


Terry Devitt
