The Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea: Revisiting Design-Unit Derivation from Building Measurements

Abstract

Deriving the length of a possibly used design-unit from architectural measurements is a complex statistical problem. The method used in the paper is based on cosine quantogram analysis, and the relevance of the obtained results is calculated by computer simulations: it can be used to criticise previous attempts of defining the foot-unit of the late classical temple of Athena Alea at Tegea and to show how a statistically valid result can be obtained. The Parthenon is used as an example to demonstrate that it is feasible to use small building detail dimensions as the analysed data set, even though this does not produce a significant result at Tegea. One alternative is to use full block dimensions, and the statistical analysis strongly supports that a design-unit of ca. 99 mm (corresponding to one third of a foot of 297-8 mm) was used at Tegea.