Understanding the meaning of Greek temples' orientations. Akragas Valley of the Temples as a case study

TL;DR

This study provides a detailed high-precision survey of Akragas temples, revealing diverse orientation reasons including symbolic, practical, and astronomical factors, challenging the idea of a uniform religious orientation.

Contribution

It offers new precise measurements and interpretations of temple orientations, highlighting multiple influences beyond the common solar alignment assumption.

Findings

Temples oriented according to town grid and cardinal points.

Presence of temples with orientations linked to stellar and lunar events.

Identification of previously unpublished temple with unique orientation.

Abstract

The issue of the orientation of Greek Temples has been the subject of several debates since the end of the 19 century. In fact, although a general tendency to orientation within the arc of the rising sun is undeniable, specific patterns and true meaning remain obscure. With the aim of shedding light on this problem we present here a new complete, high precision survey of the temples of Akragas, the so called Valley of the Temples UNESCO site. Our results include a important temple which was essentially yet unpublished, and most of all show that very different reasons influenced the orientation choices, some symbolical, but others by far more practical, besides the general rule of orienting to the rising sun. In particular, the existence of temples orientated in accordance with the towns grid, as well as to the cardinal points irrespectively from the sun's declination associated to true east at the uneven horizon, is evidenced. Finally, for two temples having anomalous orientations a stellar and a lunar proposal are made respectively