Sardis dig yields enigmatic trove: ritual egg in a pot
March 3, 2014
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 ruins of Sardis, in what is now Turkey, have been a rich source of knowledge about classical antiquity from the 7th century B.C., when the city was the capital of Lydia, through later Greek and Roman occupations.
Now, however, Sardis has given up another treasure in the form of two enigmatic ritual deposits, which are proving more difficult to fathom than the coins for which the city was famous.
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A ritual deposit, found intact beneath a first century Roman house in Sardis.
The deposit, found inside two bowls, includes a number of small implements,
a unique coin and an egg. The hole in the egg was made in antiquity.
Photos: Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/Harvard University
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“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.
