Motya

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The island is small and almost flat — a little under a kilometer across, ringed by the shallow water of a lagoon that the long sandbar of Marsala holds back from the open sea. A causeway runs out to it, sunk now a few hand-breadths below the surface, so that a visitor crossing on foot seems to walk on the water. Under the vineyards and the salt-grass lie the streets of a town that stopped, in one season of one year, and was not built over again. That arrested quality — a Punic city fixed in time by a catastrophe and left where it fell — is what makes the place on San Pantaleo, the island the Phoenicians called Motya, one of the clearest things the western Phoenician world has left behind.

The island and its people

Motya sits in the Stagnone, the still lagoon on the western coast of Sicily between the modern towns of Marsala and Trapani, sheltered behind the low barrier island that breaks the swell. The island the moderns call San Pantaleo — the name given it by Basilian monks in the eleventh century of our era — measures roughly 850 by 750 meters, dry and low, with a single freshwater spring. The Phoenicians settled it in the first half of the eighth century before our era, in the same generations that carried the cities of the Levantine coast out across the central and western Mediterranean. The colonists came west along the sea-road that ran from Tyre and Sidon toward the strait, and as that traffic gathered around the rising power of Carthage, Motya became one of its forward stations — a harbor on the Sicilian west where ships could lie in still water, take on the island’s spring-fed supply, and watch the channel between Africa and Italy.

The choice of an island was deliberate. A flat rock in a lagoon is hard to surprise and easy to wall, and the shallow water that surrounds it keeps a fleet at arm’s length. By the sixth century the settlers had drawn a circuit of stone around the whole shore — a wall some 2.5 kilometers in compass, with towers and gates set at the cardinal points and a fortified bastion guarding the landward face. A causeway, broad enough for carts with heavy wheels, ran north from the island to the mainland necropolis at Birgi, so that the dead could be carried across to be buried on solid ground while the living kept the island. The town inside the wall was dense: houses and courtyards, a quarter of potters and dyers, kilns and workshops, and the cisterns and channels a waterless rock requires. This was a working colony of a trading people — purple-dyers, potters, metalworkers, merchants — and the ground preserves the apparatus of that work as fully as it preserves the temples.

The history of the island below the surface is recovered by the spade, and the spade came late. Through the medieval and modern centuries San Pantaleo was a vineyard, its ancient name half-forgotten, until in 1888 it was identified with the lost Motya by Joseph Whitaker, an Englishman of the Anglo-Sicilian family whose fortune came from the Marsala wine trade. Whitaker bought the island, lived part of the year on it, and from 1906 dug the walls, the gates, the basin, and the sanctuaries, publishing the results in a book — Motya — that remains a foundation of the subject. The house he built holds the museum that bears his name, and the Whitaker Foundation still administers the island. In the later twentieth century and on into the twenty-first the digging passed to Italian institutions, above all the long expedition of the Sapienza University of Rome, which has rewritten parts of the plan that Whitaker first laid bare.

What the island preserves

What Motya offers, and almost nowhere else does, is the plan of a western Punic city held intact. Most of the great Phoenician and Punic centers — Carthage itself, Tyre, Cadiz — were built over, again and again, by the Romans and by every age after, so that the Punic levels survive only in fragments dug from beneath later towns. Motya was abandoned. After 397 it was never again a city, and so the circuit of the walls, the line of the streets, the harbor works, and the sacred precincts lie close beneath the surface, in the relation they held when the town was alive. It is the difference between reading a single page torn from a book and finding the book open at the page.

The defenses can still be walked. The wall runs around the shore in courses of squared stone, thickened at the gates, where the road from the causeway entered through the northern gate and another opening pierced the wall on the south. Where the rampart was hastily strengthened in the city’s last years, against the coming of Syracuse, the builders robbed older monuments for stone — and into that emergency masonry, as will be seen, one of the masterworks of the central Mediterranean had been laid.

Near the southern tip lies the feature the moderns named the kothon, borrowing a Greek word used of the small enclosed harbor-basin of Carthage. It is a rectangular tank of carved limestone, some 52.5 by 35.7 meters and a little over two meters deep, with a channel cut toward the sea. For a long time it was read exactly as its name implies — a small inner dock where ships could be drawn up and worked, a Punic harbor-basin in miniature. That reading has now been overturned, and the overturning is the most interesting thing recent archaeology has done at Motya. The Sapienza expedition under Lorenzo Nigro, draining and excavating the basin between 2010 and the early 2020s, established that it was never connected to the open sea and could not have floated a ship: it was fed by the island’s freshwater spring, set within a walled sacred enclosure — a temenos of semicircular plan — and flanked by temples, with a pedestal at its center that once carried a statue. On this account the basin is not a harbor at all but a great sacred pool, the largest known in the ancient Mediterranean, the still water-mirror of a sanctuary of Baal at the heart of the holy quarter, aligned (the excavators argue) with the rising and setting of stars. Whether the basin is read as harbor or as sacred pool is now genuinely contested — the older identification has not vanished, and the case for the pool rests on a single expedition’s reading of the stratigraphy — but the temples that ring it are not in doubt, and they place the basin in the middle of sacred, not commercial, ground.

Among those temples is the building the local dialect calls Cappiddazzu — the “big hat,” from the shape of its ruins — a substantial sanctuary in the north of the island, often connected with the worship of the city-god Melqart whom the Phoenicians carried west from Tyre. The sanctuaries of Motya thus carry the Punic pantheon to the Sicilian frontier: the elder lord Baal Hammon, the heavenly mother Tanit, the goddess Astarte, the Tyrian king of the city — the powers of Carthage and the homeland set up on an island at the edge of the Greek world.

The ground that has drawn the most attention, and carries the most weight, is the tophet — a word borrowed by modern scholars from the Hebrew Bible and applied to a class of Punic open-air precinct found across the western settlements, at Carthage and at the Sardinian and Sicilian sites alike. Motya’s tophet lies in the north of the island, near Cappiddazzu, and it is what such precincts always are: an open enclosure in which urns holding the burned remains of the very young, sometimes mixed with the bones of small animals, were set in the ground and marked above by carved stone stelae. Many of those stelae carry the disc-and-crescent emblem and the upraised-arms figure — the sign of Tanit — and dedicatory formulae naming Tanit and Baal Hammon. In the worshippers’ own understanding the act was a molk, a vow-offering rendered to the lord and the lady: a thing given, under a formula of dedication, and laid in the sacred ground. What that vow meant in practice — whether the burials are the urns of children offered in sacrifice, as the hostile Greek and Roman authors charged of the Carthaginians, or the cremated remains of infants who died young in a society of high infant mortality and were committed to the gods’ precinct — is the question that hangs over every tophet, Motya’s among them, and it is treated where it belongs, in the reception below. The precinct, the urns, the stelae, and the dedications are the secure, excavated facts; the meaning of the rite is read at a distance.

The houses, finally, return the reader to a working town. The most striking, the so-called House of Mosaics in the south, set against the abandoned wall by the third century, carries a pebble mosaic of confronted animals in a hunting scene — the only floor of its kind in Sicily. Around it lie the courtyards and cisterns of an ordinary quarter, and beyond the wall, at Birgi across the lagoon, the cemeteries of the colony, with their cremation urns and grave-goods, imported Greek pottery and local wares mixed as the everyday traffic of a Punic port would mix them.

The Charioteer, and the year the city ended

Two things have carried Motya’s name beyond the company of archaeologists: a statue and a siege, and they belong to the same decades.

In October 1979, between a potters’ workshop and a sanctuary in the northeast of the island, the excavators lifted from the late, hastily built rampart a marble statue of a young man — life-size and a little more, about 1.8 meters as preserved — standing in a long, thin, pleated robe drawn tight by a broad flat band across the chest, one hip thrown out, one hand once raised. The arms, the lower legs, and the base are gone; the head, broken off, was found and rejoined. The carving is Greek in every line — the soft cling of the wet-looking cloth over the body, the early-Classical poise of the stance — and the marble is Greek too. Scholars date it to the 470s or 460s before our era, on the threshold between the Archaic and the Classical. This is the Motya Charioteer, now the chief treasure of the Whitaker museum, and lent in 2012 to the British Museum for an exhibition on the ancient games.

Almost everything about its meaning is disputed, and the dispute is exactly the interesting kind. The robe is the long belted garment that a charioteer wore in the Panhellenic games, and on the reading most associated with R. R. R. Smith the youth is an aristocratic owner-charioteer, shown in the swagger of victory — a Greek statue, of a Greek subject, set up to a Greek excellence. A rival reading sees not a charioteer but an initiate or priest at rest after a sacred dance, an attendant of Apollo under the title Karneios, and has even proposed a particular young man — Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse — as the figure. And there is the further question of how a Greek masterwork came to be on a Punic island at all: long taken as plunder, booty carried back from one of the Sicilian Greek cities that Carthage stormed in its invasions of 409 to 405, the statue may equally have been made for, or acquired by, the substantial Greek community that lived and worked at Motya alongside its Punic citizens, in a town where Greek art and Punic patronage met daily. The subject, the occasion, and the manner of its coming to Motya are all open — what is not open is that the statue stood, in the city’s last years, in the body of the wall the Motyans raised against the storm that was coming.

That storm was Syracuse. In 398 the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius the First, in his long war against Carthaginian power in Sicily, turned west against the Punic strongholds, and Motya — the chief of them — was his first great object. The siege, fought out across 397, is described by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who reports the engines and the assault in detail: Dionysius led an army and fleet down the coast, the Motyans cut their own causeway to deny him the land bridge, and his men built a mole across the shallow lagoon to bring the towers up to the wall. He raised siege-towers higher than the rampart, cleared the defenders with archers and with the new artillery — the torsion catapult, which Greek tradition counted Syracuse’s own invention in just these years — and drove battering rams against the gates. When the wall was breached the fighting went street by street and house by house, the defenders falling back along the roofs, until the town was taken and given over to the sack. A Carthaginian relief under the general Himilco came too late to save it.

Motya did not rise again. Within a few years the survivors, with Himilco, were resettled a short way down the coast on the cape at the southern end of the lagoon, where they founded Lilybaeum — the modern Marsala — which became Carthage’s chief stronghold in Sicily and held out, generations later, through the longest siege of the First Punic War. The island in the lagoon was left. A reduced occupation lingered here and there, and the House of Mosaics shows building going on against the dead wall in the third century, but the city as a city was over. That is why the plan survives: 397 sealed the page.

Reception and afterlife

Motya passed out of the world’s memory with the city that withdrew to Lilybaeum, and it returned to it twice — once in a book of the ancient historians, and once under the spade.

In the written record the island survives chiefly through the Greek account of its fall. Diodorus Siculus, drawing on earlier Sicilian historians, gives the siege of 397 as a set-piece of the wars of Dionysius — the mole across the lagoon, the towers, the artillery, the storming of the streets — and it is from him, read critically, that the date and the shape of the catastrophe come. Like all the Greek and Roman writing on the Punic west, it is the record of the other side: the Carthaginians and their colonies appear in it as the enemy, and the historian’s interest is in the tyrant of Syracuse and his engines, not in the life of the town he broke. The hostile distance of those sources is felt most sharply at the tophet, where the same tradition — Diodorus above all, in his notorious passage on the Carthaginians and the burning of children at the crisis of 310 — supplies the lurid charge of child-sacrifice that has hung over the Punic precincts ever since. Against the ancient slander stands the modern debate, unresolved: one school, weighing the urns and the burned infant bone, reads the tophet as a place of sacrificial offering in fulfillment of vows; another, weighing the demography of an ancient population, reads it as a sanctuary-cemetery for infants who died of the ordinary causes and were given to the gods. Motya’s tophet is one of the precincts that debate is conducted over, and the honest report is that the evidence has not decided it — the interested testimony of the city’s enemies on one side, the quieter witness of the bones and the dedicatory stones on the other, and no proof that compels assent either way.

The fuller recovery is archaeological, and it begins with Joseph Whitaker, who identified the lost city in 1888, dug its walls and basin and sanctuaries from 1906, and whose name the island’s museum still carries. After him the Italian state and the universities took up the work, and the long Sapienza expedition under Lorenzo Nigro has, in the present century, both extended the plan and overturned a part of it — the reinterpretation of the kothon from harbor to sacred pool being the most consequential single result, and one whose own contested status is part of the site’s living scholarship. Motya is, in consequence, the best-preserved plan of a western Punic town anywhere: walls, gates, causeway, harbor or holy basin, houses, workshops, sanctuaries, and tophet, all in their ancient relation. To set it beside its kindred — the uniquely preserved Punic town of Kerkouane on the Cape Bon of Tunisia, the headland sanctuaries and cemeteries of Tharros in Sardinia — is to read the western world of Carthage and the Phoenicians in three complementary places, of which Motya is the one a single year of war fixed forever.

And there is the Charioteer, drawn from the island’s soil in 1979 to stand among the masterworks of the central Mediterranean — a Greek figure raised by a Punic city’s hands into its own wall, found there by chance, its subject still argued over in the journals. The statue carries in one object the thing the whole island carries: the meeting, on a contested frontier, of Greek art and Punic patronage, and the accident of a catastrophe that buried both together and kept them. The visitor who walks the sunken causeway out across the lagoon crosses, in a few minutes’ wading, the line that 397 drew.

The Motya Charioteer, a marble statue of a youth in a clinging belted robe in the early-Classical Greek manner, found in 1979 built into the island’s late rampart; now in the Whitaker Museum, Mozia. Photograph by Ismoon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The kothon at Motya — the rectangular spring-fed basin in the south of the island, long read as a harbor and now reinterpreted by the Sapienza expedition as a great sacred pool at the center of a sanctuary of Baal. Photograph by Mboesch, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

→ Related: The Carthaginians · Tanit · Baal Hammon · Melqart · Eshmun · Reshef · Kerkouane · Tharros · The Temple Of Eshmun · The Numidians · The Mauretanians · Phoenicia · Phoenician Religion · Carthage · Astarte · Tyre · Sidon · Byblos · The Phoenicians · Tophet · Hercules