Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: What is type of stone is used in the Parthenon?
The Parthenon Marbles (Greek: Γλυπτά του Παρθενώνα), also known as the Elgin Marbles (/ˈɛlɡɪn/), are a collection of Classical Greek marble sculptures made under the supervision of the architect and sculptor Phidias and his assistants. They were originally part of the temple of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens.[1][2]
Stonemasons use all types of natural stone: igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary; while some also use artificial stone as well.
Many of the world's most famous buildings have been built of sedimentary stone, from Durham Cathedral to St Peter's in Rome. There are two main types of sedimentary stone used in masonry work, limestones and sandstones. Examples of limestones include Bath and Portland stone. Yorkstone and Sydney sandstone are most commonly used sandstone.
Today the Parthenon, which functions as an art museum, stands as the centerpiece of Centennial Park, a large public park just west of downtown Nashville. Alan LeQuire's 1990 re-creation of the Athena Parthenos statue is the focus of the Parthenon just as it was in ancient Greece. The statue of Athena Parthenos within is a reconstruction, to careful scholarly standards, of the long-lost original: she is cuirassed and helmeted, carries a shield on her left arm and a small statue of Nike (Victory) in her right palm, and stands high, gilt with more than of gold leaf; an equally colossal serpent rears its head between her and her shield. Since the building is complete and its decorations were polychromed (painted in colors) as close to the presumed original as possible, this replica of the original Parthenon in Athens serves as a monument to what is considered the pinnacle of classical architecture. The plaster replicas of the Parthenon Marbles found in the naos (the east room of the main hall) are direct casts of the original sculptures which adorned the pediments of the Athenian Parthenon, dating back to 438 BC. The surviving originals are housed in the British Museum in London and at the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
The geometry of the stone structure was "based on studies of the Parthenon". According to the Australian Government Department of Veterans' Affairs each stone is 3.5 metres long and 1.5 metres high. It was designed using the principle of entasis. This involved incorporating subtle curves into the design, so that the stone does not have straight sides, but has circular lines that if extended would form a sphere 1,801 feet and 8 inches in diameter. The effect of the stone monument has been attributed to its geometry: "...its curious power and symbolic strength derive from its careful proportions and the application of a subtle entasis to all its surfaces."
Bead setting is a generic term for setting a stone directly into metal using gravers, also called burins, which are essentially tiny chisels. A hole is drilled directly into the metal surface, and then a ball burr is used to make a concave depression just the size of the stone. Some setters will set the stone into that concave depression, and some will use a hart burr to cut a bearing around the edge. Then the stone is inserted into that space, and the gravers or burins are used to lift and push a tiny bit of the metal into and over the edge of the stone. Then a beading tool, which is simply a steel shaft with a concave dimple cut into the tip, is pushed onto the bit of metal, rounding and smoothing it, pushing it firmly onto the stone, and creating a "bead". That is the essential method, but there are many types of setting that use the technique. When many stones are set in this fashion very closely together, about 1 millimeter apart, covering a surface, that is called "pavé"—from the French for paved or cobblestoned. When a long line is engraved into the metal going up to each of the beads, that is "star set", because of the look. The other common usage is called "bead and bright", "grain setting" or "threading" in Europe, and other names at times. This is when, after the stone is set as described above, the background metal around the stone is cut away, usually in geometric shapes. In the end what is left is the stone with four beads in a lowered box shape with an edge around it. Often it is a row of stones, so it will be in a long shape with a raised edge and a row of stones and beads down the center. This type of setting is still used often, but it was very common in the early to middle 20th century.
The Parthenon itself replaced an older temple of Athena, which historians call the Pre-Parthenon or Older Parthenon, that was destroyed in the Persian invasion of 480BC. The temple is archaeoastronomically aligned to the Hyades.[9] Like most Greek temples, the Parthenon served a practical purpose as the city treasury.[10][11] For a time, it served as the treasury of the Delian League, which later became the Athenian Empire. In the final decade of the sixth century AD, the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
The Parthenon served as the location for the political rally in the climactic scene of Robert Altman's 1975 film "Nashville". It was also used as a backdrop for the battle against the Hydra in the 2010 film "". It features in the title and lyrics of the song "Nashville Parthenon" from the album "Etiquette", by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. It was used in the 2000 PBS series "Greeks: Crucible of Civilization". A poem titled "Ganymede" in Heather Ross Miller's "Celestial Navigator: Writing Poems with Randall Jarrell" features the Parthenon. The structure also figures in the climax of the Hector Lassiter novel, "Three Chords and The Truth", by Craig McDonald.
Ground stones were created and used for a wide variety of reasons. Each use resulted in a different development and process by which a person created their ground stone. For example, the process for creating the head of a hammer is different from the process used to create a detailed decoration piece for one’s home. That being said, there are some processes that are basic to most ground stone making.
When choosing what type of stone to use for a ground stone tool, toughness is the most important factor. If the stone is not tough enough to withstand hard hits and instead just flakes and cracks easily, the work done to create the tool has gone to waste. A stone that will not shear, flake, or crack when tested against large impacts is the most important aspect when choosing what kind of stone to use. Examples of this kind of stone include limestone, sandstone, granite, basalt, rhyolite and other igneous and cryptocrystalline rocks.
In March 2011, archaeologists announced that they had discovered five metopes of the Parthenon in the south wall of the Acropolis, which had been extended when the Acropolis was used as a fortress. According to Eleftherotypia daily, the archaeologists claimed the metopes had been placed there in the 18th century when the Acropolis wall was being repaired. The experts discovered the metopes while processing 2,250 photos with modern photographic methods, as the white Pentelic marble they are made of differed from the other stone of the wall. It was previously presumed that the missing metopes were destroyed during the Morosini explosion of the Parthenon in 1687.[67]
The following year, the Venetians abandoned Athens to avoid a confrontation with a large force the Turks had assembled at Chalcis; at that time, the Venetians had considered blowing up what remained of the Parthenon along with the rest of the Acropolis to deny its further use as a fortification to the Turks, but that idea was not pursued.[103]
The origin of the Parthenon's name is from the Greek word παρθενών (parthenon), which referred to the "unmarried women's apartments" in a house and in the Parthenon's case seems to have been used at first only for a particular room of the temple;[14] it is debated which room this is and how the room acquired its name. The Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon states that this room was the western cella of the Parthenon, as does J.B. Bury.[7] Jamauri D. Green holds that the parthenon was the room in which the peplos presented to Athena at the Panathenaic Festival was woven by the arrephoroi, a group of four young girls chosen to serve Athena each year.[15] Christopher Pelling asserts that Athena Parthenos may have constituted a discrete cult of Athena, intimately connected with, but not identical to, that of Athena Polias.[16] According to this theory, the name of the Parthenon means the "temple of the virgin goddess" and refers to the cult of Athena Parthenos that was associated with the temple.[17] The epithet parthénos (παρθένος) meant "maiden, girl", but also "virgin, unmarried woman"[18] and was especially used for Artemis, the goddess of wild animals, the hunt, and vegetation, and for Athena, the goddess of strategy and tactics, handicraft, and practical reason.[19] It has also been suggested that the name of the temple alludes to the maidens (parthenoi), whose supreme sacrifice guaranteed the safety of the city.[20] Parthénos has also been applied to the Virgin Mary, Parthénos Maria, and the Parthenon had been converted to a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the final decade of the sixth century.[21]
Around 500 BC the "Hekatompedon" was dismantled to make place for a new grander building, the "Older Parthenon" (often referred to as the "Pre-Parthenon", "early Parthenon"). For this reason, Athenians decided to stop the construction of the Olympieion temple which was connoted with the tyrant Peisistratos and his sons and, instead, used the Piraeus limestone destined for the Olympieion to build the Older Parthenon. In order to accommodate the new temple, the south part of the summit was cleared, made level by adding some 8,000 two-ton blocks of limestone, a foundation deep at some points, and the rest was filled with soil kept in place by the retaining wall. However, after the victorious Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, the plan was revised and marble was used instead. The limestone phase of the building is referred to as "Pre-Parthenon I" and the marble phase as "Pre-Parthenon II". In 485 BC, construction stalled to save resources as Xerxes became king of Persia and war seemed imminent.
The Older Parthenon was still under construction when the Persians indeed invaded and sacked the city in 480 BC. The building was burned and looted, along with the "Ancient Temple" and practically everything else on the rock. After the Persian crisis had subsided, the Athenians incorporated many architectural parts of the unfinished temple (unfluted column drums, triglyphs, metopes, etc.) into the newly built northern curtain wall of the Acropolis, where they served as a prominent "war memorial" and can still be seen today. The devastated site was cleared of debris. Statuary, cult objects, religious offerings and unsalvageable architectural members were buried ceremoniously in several deeply dug pits on the hill, serving conveniently as a fill for the artificial plateau created around the classic Parthenon. This "Persian debris" is the richest archaeological deposit excavated on the Acropolis by 1890.
One difficulty in dating the proto-Parthenon is that at the time of the 1885 excavation the archaeological method of seriation was not fully developed; the careless digging and refilling of the site led to a loss of much valuable information. An attempt to discuss and make sense of the potsherds found on the Acropolis came with the two-volume study by Graef and Langlotz published in 1925–33.[50] This inspired American archaeologist William Bell Dinsmoor to attempt to supply limiting dates for the temple platform and the five walls hidden under the re-terracing of the Acropolis. Dinsmoor concluded that the latest possible date for Parthenon I was no earlier than 495BC, contradicting the early date given by Dörpfeld.[51] Further, Dinsmoor denied that there were two proto-Parthenons, and held that the only pre-Periclean temple was what Dörpfeld referred to as Parthenon II. Dinsmoor and Dörpfeld exchanged views in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1935.[52]
In archaeology, a tool stone is a type of stone that is used to manufacture stone tools. Alternatively, the term can be used to refer to stones used as the raw material for tools.
Cemeteries with more than 1000 burials typically have a Stone of Remembrance, designed by Edwin Lutyens with the inscription ""Their name liveth for evermore"". The concept of the Stone of Remembrance stone was developed by Rudyard Kipling to commemorate those of all faiths and none respectively. In contrast to the Cross of Sacrifice, the design for the stone deliberately avoided "shapes associated with particular religions". The geometry of the structure was based on studies of the Parthenon. Each stone is long and high. The shape of the stone has been compared both to that of a sarcophagus and an altar. The feature was designed using the principle of entasis. The subtle curves in the design, if extended, would form a sphere in diameter.
(official site with a schedule of its opening hours, tickets and contact information) (in Greek) (Takes the heterodox view of the date of the proto-Parthenon, but a useful summary of the scholarship.) – Dr. Janice Siegel, Department of Classics, Hampden–Sydney College, Virginia View a digital reconstruction of the Parthenon
The metopes of the Parthenon are the surviving set of what were originally 92 square carved plaques of Pentelic marble originally located above the columns of the Parthenon peristyle on the Acropolis of Athens. If they were made by several artists, the master builder was certainly Phidias. They were carved between 447 or 446 BC. or at the latest 438 BC, with 442 BC as the probable date of completion. Most of them are very damaged. Typically, they represent two characters per metope either in action or repose.
Parthenon is an unincorporated community in Newton County, Arkansas, United States. Parthenon is located on Arkansas Highway 327, southwest of Jasper. Parthenon has a post office with ZIP code 72666.
The Parthenon Marbles acquired by Elgin include some 21 figures from the statuary from the east and west pediments, 15 of an original 92 metope panels depicting battles between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, as well as 75 meters of the Parthenon Frieze which decorated the horizontal course set above the interior architrave of the temple. As such, they represent more than half of what now remains of the surviving sculptural decoration of the Parthenon.
One difficulty in dating the proto‐Parthenon is that at the time of the 1885 excavation the archaeological method of seriation was not fully developed: the careless digging and refilling of the site led to a loss of much valuable information. An attempt to make sense of the potsherds found on the acropolis came with the two-volume study by Graef and Langlotz published 1925–33. This inspired American archaeologist William Bell Dinsmoor to attempt to supply limiting dates for the temple platform and the five walls hidden under the re‐terracing of the acropolis. Dinsmoor concluded that the latest possible date for Parthenon I was no earlier 495 BC, contradicting the early date given by Dörpfeld. Further Dinsmoor denied that there were two proto‐Parthenons, and that the only pre‐Periclean temple was what Dörpfeld referred to as Parthenon II. Dinsmoor and Dörpfeld exchanged views in the "American Journal of Archaeology "in 1935.
A wall's style and method of construction will vary, depending on the type of stone available, its intended use and local tradition. Most older walls are constructed from stones and boulders cleared from the fields during preparation for agriculture ("field stones") but many also from stone quarried nearby. For modern walls, quarried stone is almost always used. The type of wall built will depend on the nature of the stones available.
On Doric marble buildings, the metopes decorated the entablature above the architrave alternating with the triglyphs . These were a reminiscence of the wooden beams that supported the roof. The part between the triglyphs, at first a simple unadorned stone space, was quickly used to receive a carved decoration.
The second response offered by Hippias is: "This that you ask about, the beautiful, is nothing else but gold... For we all know, I fancy, that wherever this is added, even what before appears ugly will appear beautiful when adorned with gold."No doubt, replies Socrates, but what to make then of the great statue of Athena at the Parthenon? This masterpiece of Phidias is mostly made of ivory and precious stones, and not of gold. Yet the statue is magnificent. Besides, gold or any other precious metal only gives rise to beauty if it is properly used. In the case of the pot, for instance, who is to say whether a wooden spoon or a golden spoon would be better to stir with, or which would be more beautiful?
Stone artefact scatters are among the most common site types and provide evidence of tool use and manufacture. These are often extensive surface scatters and deep stratified deposits of flaked finegrained stone, of lithic flakes. Much of this material is waste flakes, discarded during the manufacture process. Specific types of artefacts such as blades, scrapers or burins may indicate what the area was used for, for example processing animal skins. Stone artefact material is usually rine grained silcrete, chert, and quartz. Hornfels is an unusual and rare material, but is highly distinctive.
The top level of the Museum sits askew on the lower levels to achieve the same cardinal orientation of the ancient temple on the Acropolis. The spacing of the columns of the Parthenon hall is the same as that of the ancient temple, and the use of glass walls on all four exterior walls allows the natural light to illumine the Parthenon marbles as they do on the ancient temple. The 48 columns in the Parthenon hall mark the outline of the ancient temple and form a colonnade for the display of the Parthenon marbles. For ease of viewing, the pediment marbles are displayed at eye level in front of the end columns; the metopes are displayed on the columns, two per column, but not as high as in the ancient temple; and the frieze are displayed behind the metopes, forming a continuous band around the walls of a rectangular space set inside the columns, as in the ancient temple but not as high, again for ease of viewing. From the north side of the Parthenon hall, one can see the ancient temple above on the Acropolis.