The Lindos stele and the lost treasures of Athena: Catalogs, collections, and local history

In 99 BC, the citizens of Lindos erected a stele to commemorate the ancient possessions of their temple of Athena, gifts of great antiquity and illustrious provenance---a drinking cup from Minos, bracelets from Helen, weapons from Alexander the Great, and many more. My project examines the circumstances in which this inscription was created, used, and experienced. I place the stele and the collection it recorded in their art historical, historical, and epigraphic contexts to reveal the Greek temple as a kind of "museum"---that is, a sacred-historical space laden (in imagination and fact) with material traces of a venerable local history.; Methodologically, this study brings present-day scholarly reflections on museums and collecting to bear on the analysis of the stele and Greek temple treasures. I begin by adopting a broadly comparative approach, examining modern scholarship on the inscription, the stele in the National Museum of Denmark, and the archaeological site of Lindos. I then offer a cross-disciplinary study of the Lindos stele and the culture of Hellenistic Rhodes. I present a translation of the inscription and a commentary that explores how its authors imagined the offerings. I examine inscribed local histories, Greek temple inventories, miracle texts, and literary works as parallels to the stele. I show that while the authors drew on the form of the temple inventory, they created a systematic catalog of objects that embodied the history of the temple and expressed the temporal and spatial power of Athena. The inscription contained the very sort of material from which writers like Pausanias constructed their works. Although the Lindian catalog itself is unusual, other temples contained historical relics similar to the ones that the inscription recorded. I argue that the Lindians decided to set the stele up nearly 300 years after the destruction of the old temple at Lindos and its treasures in an attempt to make a claim for the cultural authority of Lindos in the face of encroaching Roman hegemony. I conclude with a comparison to Byzantine and modern descriptions of two lost treasures of Athena Lindia once kept in Constantinople.