Info logo
Encyclopedia

  

Kerameikon

Home :: Up
Google
www.fastload.org

Kerameikon

The Kerameikos is the name of the deme or part of Athens to the northwest of the Acropolis and includes an extensive area both within and outside of the city walls.

The "inner Kerameikos" was the former "potter's quarter" of the city and the "outer Kerameikos" covers the cemetery and the also the "demosion sema" (a public burial monument) where Pericles delivered his funeral oration in 431 B.C.

A plague pit and approximately 1000 tombs from the 4th and 5th century BC were discovered during excavations for a subway station just outside the cemetery. Thucydides describes the panic caused by the plague, which struck Athens and Sparta in 430, lasting for two years, killing a third of the population. He wrote that bodies were abandoned in temples and streets, to be subsequently collected and hastily buried. The disease reappeared in the winter of 427 B.C. The Greek archaeologist Efi Baziotopoulou-Valavani[?], who excavated the site, has dated the grave to between 430 and 426 B.C.


Mark us

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
You may copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
To view or edit this article at Wikipedia, follow this link.