March
17
/ 2022
Excavations at the Iron Age Phoenician settlement of Motya have been ongoing for many decades. Located on a Mediterranean island just off the western coast of Sicily, this long-deserted ancient city has yielded an array of impressive artifacts and ruins, including a rectangular inland lake or basin that was previously identified as a man-made harbor. This inland harbor, or ‘kothon,’ was supposedly built to facilitate Motya’s growth into one of the most important seaports in the western Mediterranean in the first millennium BC. But a well-respected expert on Motya and its ruins has now come forward to dispute this notion. In the latest edition of the journal Antiquity, archaeologist Lorenzo Nigro, who is affiliated with the Italian Institute for Oriental
