page_title: Ancient Greek temple
section_title: Wooden architecture: Early Archaic
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Greek temple / Development / Wooden architecture: Early Archaic
caption_attribution_description: Greece, Ancient Corinth, Temple of Apollo
context_page_description: Greek temples were structures built to house deity statues within Greek sanctuaries in ancient Greek religion. The temple interiors did not serve as meeting places, since the sacrifices and rituals dedicated to the respective deity took place outside them, within the wider precinct of the sanctuary, which might be large. Temples were frequently used to store votive offerings. They are the most important and most widespread building type in Greek architecture. In the Hellenistic kingdoms of Southwest Asia and of North Africa, buildings erected to fulfil the functions of a temple often continued to follow the local traditions. Even where a Greek influence is visible, such structures are not normally considered as Greek temples. This applies, for example, to the Graeco-Parthian and Bactrian temples, or to the Ptolemaic examples, which follow Egyptian tradition. Most Greek temples were oriented astronomically.
  Between the 9th century BCE and the 6th century BCE, the ancient Greek temples developed from the small mud brick structures into double-porched monumental "peripteral" buildings with colonnade on all sides, often reaching more than 20 metres in height.
context_section_description: The first temples were mostly mud, brick, and marble structures on stone foundations. The columns and superstructure (entablature) were wooden, door openings and antae were protected with wooden planks. The mud brick walls were often reinforced by wooden posts, in a type of half-timbered technique. The elements of this simple and clearly structured wooden architecture produced all the important design principles that were to determine the development of Greek temples for centuries.
  Near the end of the 7th century BCE, the dimensions of these simple structures were increased considerably. Temple C at Thermos is the first of the hekatompedoi, temples with a length of 100 feet (30 m). Since it was not technically possible to roof broad spaces at that time, these temples remained very narrow, at 6 to 10 metres in width.
  To stress the importance of the cult statue and the building holding it, the naos was equipped with a canopy, supported by columns. The resulting set of colonnade surrounding the temple on all sides (the peristasis) was exclusively used for temples in Greek architecture.
  The combination of the temple with colonnades (ptera) on all sides posed a new aesthetic challenge for the architects and patrons: the structures had to be built to be viewed from all directions. This led to the development of the peripteros, with a frontal pronaos (porch), mirrored by a similar arrangement at the back of the building, the opisthodomos, which became necessary for entirely aesthetic reasons.
caption: The Temple of Apollo at Corinth, one of the earliest stone-built Doric temples. Note the monolithic columns
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