We packed up and left our hotel this morning for the island of Motya, which is between other islands and the coast, and so is effectively in a lagoon. It was a Phoenician settlement.
The Phoenicians spread from the Lebanon area all over the Mediterranean, and because they were traders who wanted friendly harbours, they founded towns. Their name comes from a Greek word that means 'purple people' because they made purple dye with murex shells. They were also good at shipbuilding and sailing and navigation and invented a 22 letter alphabet. However, they brought with them an ancient culture, very different from the Greek culture - they may have practiced human sacrifice.
The Phoenicians also founded Carthage, so the Greeks always referred to the ones in Sicily as the Carthaginians. Some time in the 8th century BC the Carthaginians settled in three places in the west of Sicily - Motya, Palermo amd Solunto. They soon controlled the west of Sicily, and being quite a militaristic society, they constantly fought the Greeks who controlled the rest of Sicily.
The Carthaginian town of Motya was razed to the ground in 397 BC by the Syracusans under Dionysus, and was never subsequently built over. (The survivors of Motya founded Lilybaeum, which I mentioned when we visited it yesterday).
The Carthaginian settlement on Motya was discovered by Joseph Whittaker, a British businessman who was in the area trading in Marsala wine. Schliemann, who had been asked by the Italian Government to dig there, said that it was the wrong place, so Joseph Whittaker bought the island and started digging himself. By1900 had proved that it was the correct place after all.
We set off first in the bus, and drove towards the sea. We passed a huge area of salt pans, and there were still some old windmills, which were traditionally used to refine the salt.
You can see a huge pile of salt just to tne right of the photograph. There were big piles of salt all over the place, some of them covered over with tiles, presumably as a protection against the threatening rain.
We caught a small ferry out to the island, and arrived just in time for a light rain to start.
The island is not large. It was originally surrounded totally by walls, with towers and gates. We went first to the Museum, which used to be the house of Joseph Whittaker.
The main treasure of the museum, a statue of a young man, was lent to the British Museum during the Olympics, and is now in New York, so we couldn't see that. Nevertheless, there were some interesting things; there were a lot of ceramics, and some glass. There was a display of some finds from the industrial area, where the murex was made.
And there were quite a lot of stele from the sacred area.
Our guide told us that it was thought that these stele might have belonged to the human sacrifices, since ordinarily, the dead were buried in the cemeteries. They are the stele of children.
There was also this interesting mask, though I have no idea what it was for, and there are no helpful labels.
When we went outside, it was raining very heavily indeed, so we all got very wet. Some of our party, who had not brought raincoats, were obliged to wear black bin bags! The wind was also very strong, and broke my umbrella.
We crossed the island to look at the sacred area, and one of the cemeteries. Then we walked to the north gate, which was still paved and showed the marks from the cart tracks.
You may just be able to see thevfigure wearing the bin bag at the top of the slope. Just behind where I was standing to take the picture, the gate led directly to a causeway to the mainland which is slightly under water, but can still just be seen through the waves. It doesn't photograph very well though.
By this time we were all wet through and returned to the cafe for warming coffee, before catching the small ferry back to the mainland, where our bus was waiting to take us to Erice.
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