Just inside the ancient walls of the Athens, along the clay-lined banks of the tiny Eridinos River, potters set up their work shops several centuries before the Golden Age to service the container needs of the growing city-state. Much of what we know about the early life of ancient Athens has been gleaned from the art work on these pottery specimens. They started with geometric designs to decorate the original function of the pottery as containers of liquid, whether water, wine, oil, and, in some larger vessels, barley and other grains.
The designs slowly gave way to increasingly exquisite artwork depicting battles, ordinary daily life, religious feasts and ceremonies, and various Greek myths. And, unlike written documents, fired clay does now decompose. Archeologists have been digging up Greek pottery and pieces, most of it more or less perfectly preserved, for centuries.
Just outside the walls from the pottery district, Keramikos (we get the word “ceramic” from it), the citizens of Athens buried its dead. The cemetery was known as the Outer Keramikos, being outside the walls. It is in this cemetery, the western anchor of the recently built Grand Promenade stretching from Hadrian’s arch some four kilometers to the east, making it the longest pedestrian historical walkway in Europe, that Pericles delivered one of the most memorable speeches in Western literature, his funeral oration, after the first year of the Peloponnesian War.
The Funeral Oration of Pericles was sort of the Classical Athenian Gettysburg address of its day, both memorializing the dead, and extolling the virtues of Athenian civilization, just as Lincoln did both in reference to the American experiment in 1863. He delivered the oration just outside the Dipylon (Double) Gate, the chief entrance to Athens. Next to another gate providing egress from Athens, the Sacred Gate, are the ruins of the Pompeion, a building used as a jumping off place for Panatheniac Festival, held every spring in honor of the patroness of Athens, Athena. The city’s nobility would eat a ceremonial meal of the meat sacrificed to Athena at the Pompeion. It was here, also, that a hectacomb (a sacrifice of 100 cows) was held, and the meat was fed to the general populace in the area of the Dipylon Gate. Piles of bones have been excavated in the area of the gate.
Outside the city walls at the Dipylon Gate, a chief road, the Dromos, ran north a few kilometers to the wooded site of Plato’s Academy.
Today Keramikos is a vast open area with funeral monuments here and there, remnants of the ancient city walls, and, during the winter and spring, the meandering of the Eridanos River slicing through it at a diagonal. The best monuments and steles are housed in the museum.
It had been in use as a cemetery since at least 2,000 BC, the Early Bronze Age. The oldest steles (sculpted grave markers) date from this time. The cemetery became more regulated around 1200 BC. The Iera Odos, or Sacred Way, went through Keramikos, paralleling the course of the Eridanos, on its way to Eleusina, where the Eleusinian Mysteries were held.
The Street of The Tombs was lined with large, elaborate monuments of wealthy Athenians before such imposing monuments were made illegal in 317 BC.
Various barbarian invasion during the Early Christian Era left the Pompeian razed to the ground, and the cemetery slowly fell into disuse and was forgotten as the centuries passed. Then in 1863 an Athenian workman dug up a stele, and the location became a place of interest for archeologists. The first systematic excavations were by German archeologists beginning in 1870. The German Archeological Institute, based in Athens, has been excavating the area since 1913.
During excavations for the Athens Metro’s Keramikos Station in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, a large number of 4th century graves were discovered, as well as a pit which contained thousands of bones and is thought to have been the hastily dug burial place of some of the thousands of Athenians who died during the Peloponnesian War. The plague took place during the siege of Athens by Spartan forces in 430 BC, when some 150,000 Athenians were crammed inside the city walls, leading to unsanitary conditions and the plague, thought by some to have been typhoid fever, which is an extreme form of salmonella usually coming from unclean water or food. This epidemic lasted for two years and killed about a third of the population.
The small museum dates from 1937 and houses many examples of pottery dating from as long ago as the 8th century, BC. It also has an open courtyard exhibiting many of the better preserved monuments from the cemetery.
Other monuments of Keramikos include a grave circle with a number of grave steles, including the Grave Stele of Hegeso, 410 BC, believed to have been sculpted by Callimachus, inventor of the ornate Corinthian column capital and sculptor of the friezes on the Temple to Athena Nike on the Acropolis. The stele, of Pentelic marble, depicts a seated woman, Hegeso, holding a vessel in one hand and a now missing jewel in the other, with a maid servant standing opposite her. Both women are shown in profile. The grave circle also includes the famous marble bull marking the grave of Kionysios of Kollytos, 345 BC. The Fountain House, a hypostyle (small columned building) next to the Dipylon Gate captured water from the Eridanos and provided drinking water for people passing through the gate on their way into or out of the city.
