How was Artemis worshipped at Ephesus?

Through a great temple, a professional priesthood and an enormous pilgrim trade. Worshippers came from across the Mediterranean to the Artemision, bought silver and terracotta shrines as votives and souvenirs — the trade Demetrius defends in Acts 19 — and celebrated an annual month-long festival, the Artemisia, with processions, games and sacrifices. The temple also worked as a bank, holding deposits under the goddess's protection.

Is the Artemis of Ephesus the same as the Greek goddess?

She shares the name and little else. The Greek Artemis is the virgin huntress of the forests; the Ephesian Artemis is an older Anatolian mother-goddess absorbed into Greek naming, shown standing rigid and covered in rows of oval objects, flanked by animals. Whether those objects are breasts, eggs, dates or bull testicles is still argued. She is a goddess of fertility and civic protection, not of the hunt.

What is left of the Temple of Artemis?

One reassembled column standing in a marshy field, often with a stork nesting on top, plus scattered foundations and column drums. It is a genuinely startling contrast: one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, four times the size of the Parthenon, reduced to a single shaft. Most of its stone went into the Basilica of Saint John and later buildings.

Is the temple mentioned in the Bible?

Yes, in the riot chapter. Demetrius warns that "the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth" (Acts 19:27), and the town clerk calls Ephesus "a worshipper of the great goddess Diana" (Acts 19:35). Diana is the Latin name the King James translators used for Artemis.

Temple of Artemis, Ephesus — the Wonder Behind Acts 19

Antipater of Sidon, who compiled the ancient list of Seven Wonders, wrote that when he saw the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, every other wonder "lost its brilliancy." It was the largest marble temple the Greek world ever raised: around 127 columns, a platform four times the Parthenon's, and a sanctuary so holy and so rich that kings banked their fortunes there.

The goddess of the Ephesians

Ephesian Artemis was no ordinary Greek huntress. Her strange, many-breasted cult image — "the image which fell down from Jupiter," as the town clerk calls it in Acts 19:35 — belonged to an older Anatolian mother-goddess tradition, and her spring festival drew pilgrims from three continents. The silver miniature shrines that pilgrims carried home were an entire industry; when Paul preached that "they be no gods, which are made with hands" (Acts 19:26), he was not making a theological point only — he was threatening the city's biggest business. The riot in the theater was, quite literally, a defense of this temple's economy.

Statue of the goddess Artemis of Ephesus — The great Artemis of Ephesus — her famous statues are today in the Ephesus Museum in Selcuk.

Burned, rebuilt, and lost

The temple's story is operatic. In 356 BC a man named Herostratus burned it purely to make his name immortal — on, tradition insists, the very night Alexander the Great was born. Rebuilt even grander, it stood until the Gothic raids of the third century AD; as the city Christianized, the ruin became a marble quarry, and its stones traveled as far as the great churches of Constantinople. The river finished the work, burying the platform under meters of silt until even its location was forgotten.

One column in a marsh

In 1869, after six stubborn years of digging, the British engineer John Turtle Wood struck the marble pavement seven meters down — one of archaeology's great detective stories. Today a single re-erected column marks the spot, standing in a marshy field where frogs sing and storks nest on the capital in season. Visitors sometimes call it the most eloquent ruin in Turkey: nowhere else does the contrast between "was" and "is" preach so plainly — which is exactly why our guides love to bring the Book of Acts here.

Sources & further reading

Britannica: Temple of Artemis — the Wonder in detail
Acts 19:23–41 (KJV) — Bible Gateway — the cult and the riot
Wikipedia: Temple of Artemis — construction history and rediscovery

Temple of Artemis