Delos

The island of Delos (Greek: Δήλος, Dhilos), isolated in the centre of the roughly circular ring of islands called the Cyclades, near Mykonos, is one of the most important mythological, historical and archaeological sites in Greece. The excavations in the island are among the most extensive in the Mediterranean; ongoing work takes place under the direction of the French School at Athens.

Delos had a position as a holy sanctuary for a millennium before Olympian Greek mythology made it the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. From its Sacred Harbour, the horizon shows the two conical mounds (image below) that have identified landscapes sacred to a goddess in other sites: one, retaining its archaic name Mount Kynthos, is crowned with a sanctuary of Dionysus.

Established as a cult centre, Delos had an importance that its natural resources could never have offered. In this vein Leto, searching for a birthing-place for Apollo, addressed the island:

Delos, if you would be willing to be the abode of my son Phoebus Apollo and make him a rich temple --; for no other will touch you, as you will find: and I think you will never be rich in oxen and sheep, nor bear vintage nor yet produce plants abundantly. But if you have the temple of far-shooting Apollo, all men will bring you hecatombs and gather here, and incessant savour of rich sacrifice will always arise, and you will feed those who dwell in you from the hand of strangers; for truly your own soil is not rich.

—Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo

History

A number of "purifications" were executed by the city-state of Athens in an attempt to render the island fit for the proper worship of the Gods. The first took place in the 6th century BC, directed by the tyrant Pisistratus who ordered that all graves within site of the temple be dug up and the bodies removed to perimeter locations. In the 5th century, during the 6th year of the Peloponnesian war and under instruction from the Delphic Oracle, the entire island was purged of all dead bodies. It was then ordered that no one should be allowed to either die or give birth on the island due to its sacred importance and to preserve its neutrality in commerce, since no one could then claim ownership through inheritance. Immediately after this purification, the first quinquennial festival of the Delian games were celebrated there.

After the Persian wars the island became the natural meeting-ground for the Delian League, founded in 478 BC, the congresses being held in the temple (a separate quarter was reserved for foreigners and the sanctuaries of foreign deities.) The League's common treasury was kept here as well until 454 BC when Pericles removed it to Athens.

Since 1873 the Ecole Française d'Athenes ("French School of Athens") has been excavating the island, the complex of buildings of which compares with those of Delphi and Olympia.

The island had no productive capacity for food, fiber, or timber, with such being imported. Limited water was exploited with an extensive cistern and aqueduct system, wells, and sanitary drains. Various regions operated agoras (markets). The largest slave market in the larger region was also maintained here.

In 1990, UNESCO inscribed Delos on the World Heritage List, citing it as the "exceptionally extensive and rich" archaeological site which "conveys the image of a great cosmopolitan Mediterranean port".

Landmarks

• The small Sacred Lake in its circular bowl, now dry, is a topographical feature that determined the placement of later features.
• The Minoan Fountain was a rectangular public well hewn in the rock, with a central column; it formalized the sacred spring in its present 6th century BC form, reconstructed in 166 BC, according to an inscription. Tightly-laid courses of masonry form the walls; water can still be reached by a flight of steps that fill one side.
• There are several market squares. The Hellenistic Agora of the Competaliasts by the Sacred Harbour retains the postholes for market awnings in its stone paving. Two powerful Italic merchant guilds dedicated statues and columns there.
• The Temple of the Delians is a classic example of the Doric order; a pen-and-wash reconstruction of the temple is illustrated at Doric order
• The Terrace of the Lions dedicated to Apollo by the people of Naxos shortly before 600 BC, had originally nine to twelve squatting, snarling marble guardian lions along the Sacred Way; one is inserted over the main gate to the Venetian Arsenal. The lions create a monumental avenue comparable to Egyptian avenues of sphinxes. (There is a Greek sphinx in the Delos Museum.)
• The meeting hall of the Poseidoniasts of Beirut housed an association of merchant, warehousemen, shipowners and innkeepers during the early years of Roman hegemony, late 2nd century BC. To their protective triad of Baal/Poseidon, Astarte/Aphrodite and Echmoun/Asklepios, they added Roma.
• The platform of the Stoibadeion dedicated to Dionysus bears a statue of the god of wine and the life-force. On either side of the platform, a pillar supports a colossal phallus, the symbol of Dionysus. The southern pillar, which is decorated with relief scenes from the Dionysiac circle, was erected ca. 300 BC to celebrate a winning theatrical performance. The statue of Dionysus was originally flanked by those of two actors impersonating Paposilenoi (conserved in the Delos Museum). The marble theatre is a rebuilding of an older one, undertaken shortly after 300 BC.
• The Doric Temple of Isis was built at the beginning of the Roman period to venerate the familiar trinity of Isis, the Alexandrian Serapis and Anubis.
• The Temple of Hera, ca 500 BC, is a rebuilding of an earlier Heraion on the site.
• The House of Dionysus is a luxurious 2nd century private house named for the floor mosaic of Dionysus riding a panther.
• The House of the Dolphins is similarly named from its atrium mosaic, where erotes ride dolphins; its Phoenician owner commissioned a floor mosaic of Tanit in his vestibule.

Current population

See also

• Delian League
• French Archaeological School at Athens

References

External links

• Hellenic Ministry of Culture site: Delos
• Perseus site: Delos
• EfA website with history of the Delos Archaelogical site
• Delos Island on WikiMapia
• Official website of Municipality of Mýkonos

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DELOS

The main objectives of DELOS are research, whose results are in the public domain, and technology transfer, through cooperation with interested parties.

Introduction

Vision

That all citizens, anywhere, anytime, should have access to Internet-connected digital devices to search all of human knowledge, regardless of barriers of time, place, culture or language has been a vision of DELOS since its inception.

DELOS believes that, in the near future, networked virtual libraries will enable anyone from their home, school or office to access the knowledge contained in the digital collections created by traditional libraries, museums, archives, universities, governmental agencies, specialised organizations, and individuals around the world.

These new libraries not only will offer digital versions of traditional library, museum and archive holdings including text, documents, video, sound and images, but they will also provide powerful new technological capabilities that will enable users to work collaboratively through annotations and sharing of resources, to refine their requests, analyse the results and access collections in other languages.

Mission

DELOS conducts a joint program of activities aimed at integrating and coordinating the ongoing research efforts of several major European teams working in digital library-related areas.

Its main objective and goal is to develop the next generation of digital library technologies by:

• defining unifying and comprehensive theories and frameworks over the life-cycle of digital library information;
• building interoperable multimodal/multilingual services and integrated content management ranging from the personal to the global for the specialist and the general population;
• developing generic Digital Library technology to be incorporated into industrial-strength Digital Library Management Systems (DLMSs), offering advanced functionality through reliable and extensible services;
• networking and structuring European research on digital libraries to consolidate an emerging community;
• supporting an exchange program of researchers;
• providing a forum where researchers, practitioners, and representatives of the application communities can exchange ideas and experiences;
• promoting cooperation between European and national digital library initiatives;
• improving international cooperation in digital library research areas.

Organization

Research activities

• user-centred system design methodology;
• pro-active systems with functionality that facilitates collaboration, communication, and information creation;
• generic Digital Library Management Systems that provide basic system infrastructures that can be used to implement application specific digital libraries incorporating context-specific services.

Towards this end, DELOS coordinates a Joint Programme of Activities (JPA) of several major European teams working in digital libraries related areas. The objective is to develop dynamic ubiquitous knowledge environments, which will transform research and education at all levels by collecting, organizing and making publicly accessible on-line vast quantities of information.

The ultimate goal is to provide access to human knowledge from anywhere and any time and in an efficient and user-friendly fashion. DELOS also aims at disseminating knowledge of digital library technologies to many diverse application domains, by providing access to technological know-how, services, test-beds, and the necessary expertise to facilitate their take-up.

The Joint Programme of Activities (JPA) is organized into the following seven clusters of integration and research activities:

• Digital Library Architecture. The main objective of this research cluster is the conceptual and experimental evaluation of the impact of peer-to-peer data management, grid computing middleware and service-oriented architectures on a digital library architecture in order to reveal the advantages and disadvantages of either approach.
• Information Access and Personalization. It aims at developing a uniform understanding among researchers concerning available practices in the fields of information access and personalization in digital libraries, by building and promoting a common and comprehensive framework to serve as a reference point and to stimulate research.
• Audio/Visual and Non-traditional Objects. The objectives of this research cluster are to establish a common ground of knowledge for European researchers about the state of the art, the research directions and important new applications for digital libraries with audio-visual and non-traditional objects, as well as to advance the state of the art in these areas.
• User Interfaces and Visualization. It aims at developing methodologies, techniques and tools to enable future digital libraries designers and developers to meet not only the technological, but also the user-oriented requirements in a balanced way.
• Knowledge Extraction and Semantic Interoperability. It aims at exploring the potential of new models, algorithms, methodologies and processes in a variety of technical applications, institutional frameworks and cross-sectoral environments, which will lead to the creation of guidelines and recommendations of best practice concerning knowledge extraction and semantic interoperability.
• Preservation. It aims at providing the methodological framework and theory for ensuring that digital libraries research addresses preservation issues and digital libraries incorporate preservation elements in their designs.
• Evaluation. It aims at developing a comprehensive theoretical framework for digital libraries evaluation, by researching on new methodologies and corresponding toolkits and test-beds in order to enable new evaluations and to ease the application of standard evaluation methods.

Among its cross-cluster activities, DELOS is working on the development of a Digital Library Reference Model aimimg at providing a conceptual framework for the new research field laying at the intersection of the many diverse disciplines involved in digital libraries (data management, information retrieval, document management system, information systems, the web, image processing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, mass-storage systems, etc.), and on a globally integrated prototype implementation of a Digital Library Management System (DelosDLMS), which will serve as a concrete partial implementation of the reference model and will encompass many software components developed by DELOS partners.

Dissemination activities

References