page_title: Morea expedition
section_title: First archaeological excavations of Olympia and the discovery of the temple of Olympian Zeus
hierarchical_section_title: Morea expedition / Scientific expedition / Architecture and Sculpture section / First archaeological excavations of Olympia and the discovery of the temple of Olympian Zeus
caption_attribution_description: English: Guillaume-Abel Blouet. Expédition scientifique de Morée, Ordonnée par le Gouvernement français: Architecture, I-VI, Paris, Firmin Didot, 1831-1838.
context_page_description: The Morea expedition is the name given to the land intervention of the French Army in the Peloponnese between 1828 and 1833, at the time of the Greek War of Independence, with the aim of expelling from the region the Ottoman-Egyptian occupation forces. It was also accompanied by a scientific expedition mandated by the French Academy.
  After the fall of Messolonghi in 1826, the Western European powers decided to intervene in favour of revolutionary Greece. Their primary objective was to force Ibrahim Pasha, the Ottoman Empire's Egyptian ally, to evacuate the occupied regions and the Peloponnese. The intervention began when a Franco-Russo-British fleet was sent to the region and won the Battle of Navarino in October 1827, destroying the entire Turkish-Egyptian fleet. In August 1828, a French expeditionary corps of 15,000 men led by General Nicolas-Joseph Maison landed in the southwestern Peloponnese. During October, soldiers took control of the principal strongholds still held by the Turkish troops. Although the bulk of the troops returned to France in early 1829 after an 8 month-deployment, the French kept a military presence in the area until 1833.
context_section_description: Then, the expedition spent six weeks, starting on May 10, 1829, in Olympia. Léon-Jean-Joseph Dubois (Archaeology section) and Abel Blouet (Architecture and Sculpture section) undertook the first excavations there. They were accompanied by the painters Frédéric de Gournay, Pierre Achille Poirot, Pierre Félix Trézel and Amaury-Duval, as well as a troop of more than a hundred workers. The site of Olympia had been rediscovered in 1766 by the English antiquarian Richard Chandler. Since then, it had been visited by many other travellers such as Fauvel, Pouqueville, Gell, Cokerell and Leake. Its general identification by the archaeologists of the Morea expedition was made possible thanks to the more precise descriptions of Edward Dodwell (for Dubois) and John Spencer Stanhope (for Blouet). Most of the buildings were invisible, because as Abel Blouet noted, they must have been covered with a thick layer of sediment due to the frequent overflows of rivers Alfeios and Kladeos.
  Only a single large fragment of a Doric column was visible. It had already been spotted by the previous travellers because the inhabitants of neighboring villages had dug trenches there to remove the stone, but none of them had attributed it with certainty to the temple of Zeus. Abel Blouet specified: "Therefore, there could have been no merit in discovering a monument there. But what could have been a discovery was to find evidence that this monument was the famous temple of Olympian Jupiter. And this is what our excavations have enabled us to demonstrate. When we arrived at Olympia, Mr. Dubois, director of the Archaeology section of our expedition, had already been there for a few days with Mr. Trézel and Mr. Amaury Duval, his collaborators. Following the instructions which had been given to him by the commission of the Institute, this antiquarian (Dubois) had begun the excavations of which the result had been the discovery of the first bases of the two columns of the pronaos and several fragments of sculpture." The archaeological advice of Jean-Nicolas Huyot was thus followed. Dubois installed his workers on the front side of the temple and Blouet installed his own on the back side in order to give these excavations all possible extension. The painter Amaury-Duval gave in his Souvenirs (1829-1830) a personal, direct and precise, testimony of the events which led to the exact identification of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which was thus determined for the first time.
  Here again, the precise descriptions of the sculptures, structural elements of the temple and metopes representing the Twelve Labours of Heracles made by Pausanias who visited the site during the second century AD, proved crucial to validate the identity of the temple of Zeus. These sculptures, which reflect the beginnings of classical art and of the severe style, strongly struck the archaeologists in Olympia and in Paris at the Academy by their novel type imbued with naturalism.
  As with the excavations led at Messene, the site was divided topographically into squares, trenches were dug, excavations were undertaken in straight lines, and models for restoration were proposed: archaeology was becoming rationalized. The simple treasure hunt was beginning to be abandoned. The fundamental contribution of the Morea scientific expedition was its total indifference towards looting, treasure hunting, and antiquities smuggling. Blouet refused to perform excavations that risked damaging the monuments, and banned the mutilation of statues with the intent of taking a piece separated from the rest without regard, as Elgin had done on the Parthenon some twenty-five years before. It is perhaps for this reason that the three metopes of the temple of Zeus discovered at Olympia were transferred in their entirety to the Louvre Museum (with the authorization of the Greek Government of Ioannis Kapodistrias). However, many precious works they excavated were re-buried in order to protect them, according to the direct testimony of Amaury-Duval. In any case, this willingness to protect the integrity of monuments repres
caption: Model for restoration of the Temple of Olympian Zeus (by Abel Blouet)
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