The largest sacred pool in the Mediterranean?

On a small island off the west coast of Sicily, a vast pool long ago displayed the star-studded reflections of the gods. Scientists have long thought that an ancient rectangular basin, on the island of Motya, served as an artificial inland harbor for Phoenician sailors roughly 2,550 years ago.

The water-filled structure is the largest known sacred pool of the ancient Mediterranean world. The pool and three nearby temples were aligned to the positions of specific stars and constellations on key days of the year, such as the summer and winter solstices, and each of those celestial bodies was associated with a particular Phoenician god.

At night, the reflective surface of the pool, which was slightly longer and wider than an Olympic swimming pool, was used to make astronomical observations by marking the positions of the stars with the poles. Discoveries of the pointer of a navigational instrument in a temple and the weathered statue of an Egyptian god associated with astronomy found in a corner of the pool support this theory. The great pool has been shown to be fed by natural springs and to have been built between 550 B.C. C. and 520 B.C. and includes a pedestal in the center that originally supported a statue of the Phoenician god Ba’al.

Interesting, don’t you think?