These shrines and temples prove that inclusion and accessibility are ideas from ancient Greece
Steps have always been an insurmountable obstacle for people with walking difficulties. The solution was already over 2000 years ago: ramps.
Given the state of medicine in the 4th century BC It is quite obvious that people with walking difficulties were not an uncommon sight in ancient Greece: Poorly healed fractures, war injuries or gangrene could cause those affected to limp or even lose limbs – to name just a few examples. In the writings of the most famous doctor of antiquity, Hippocrates, who lived in the 5th and 4th centuries BC There is talk of congenital club feet, amputations and numerous other reasons why people had to use crutches. Others who could not walk were carried in litters or rode donkeys. There were no wheelchairs. But there was something that is still important today: accessibility.«Antiquity» explains.
Sneed found that ramps are more common in some sanctuaries than others. This was most noticeable in the sanctuary of Asclepius in Epidaurus, in the northwest of the Peloponnese. Asclepius was regarded by the Greeks as the god of healing, represented with a staff around which a snake winds: the Aesculapian snake, named after the Latin form of the god’s name. The so-called Aesculapian staff can still be seen today in the shop signs of pharmacies in Germany and in the flag of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Epidauros, ancient health resort with barrier-free access
Asclepius brought healing to the Greeks in their sleep in the form of trauma oracles. In addition to his temple, there were therefore multi-storey hall buildings in Epidaurus, in which the sick lay down for a healing sleep – for days or even weeks. Epidaurus in the 4th and 3rd centuries should be thought of as a flourishing health resort rather than a quiet place of worship. Public bathing establishments were used for hygiene, and the patients and their companions were also entertained: there was a stadium for sporting competitions and a stage theater with a semicircular grandstands for 14,000 spectators built into the slope, which, thanks to its perfect symmetry and acoustics, was one the architectural highlights of antiquity applies.
It stands to reason that many people with ailments went to the sanctuary of a healing god – and according to Sneed that explains the noticeably large number of ramps. These made the buildings accessible to everyone who had difficulty climbing stairs: people with disabilities, the elderly, pregnant women or small children. The archaeologist admits that this may not have been the only function of these ramps, but it was a major factor in their construction.
The ramps in Greek sanctuaries have received little attention so far. If anything, the assumption was that they were used to drive sacrificial animals into the building – a rather questionable interpretation, because the sacrifice took place at the altar, which in all Greek temples was in front of the eastern front of the building and never in it.
Specialization in certain ailments?
Now ramps are not as common in all Asclepius sanctuaries as in Epidaurus. Like other archaeologists, Sneed thinks it is conceivable that individual sanctuaries were specialized in certain types of diseases or ailments. In Epidaurus and another shrine with a noticeably large number of ramps in Corinth, this could have been mobility restrictions according to Sneed. In their opinion, the numerous votives, i.e. gifts to the deity, which have an anatomical shape, human leg and foot models made of ceramic, for example, speak for this.
This derivation is very speculative, however, because leg votives are also found in numerous other contexts, for example in a so-called summit sanctuary of the Minoans on Crete, which was used around a millennium earlier. It is located on a 230-meter-high hill – hardly ideal for people with walking difficulties.
However, according to Sneed, the existence of the ramps does not mean that the ancient Greeks were particularly progressive: They knew neither civil rights movements nor organized groups that campaigned for the rights of minorities. But the motivation behind the decisions of the Greek architects and builders can be clearly seen, as well as the effect these decisions had on individuals in society.
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No division into “healthy” and “disabled”
In fact, there are numerous indications that the Greeks did not see physical impairment as a characteristic that divided people into two groups, as is common today: healthy people and people with disabilities, whose inclusion is hotly debated in school classes, for example. In ancient Greece they were normal; the decisive factor was rather whether they could fulfill the role that was intended for them in society.
With women, for example, a physical handicap may not be considered nice, but it was much more important whether the woman could have children. So people with mobility problems could be kings and military men like Agesilaus of Sparta. They were able to give birth to powerful men like Labda with the “lame leg”, whose son Kypselus became ruler of the city of Corinth. They could be tragic heroes of legends, like Oedipus, the king’s son, whose ankles had been pierced as a baby and whose name means “swelling foot”. And even gods could have a handicap like Hephaestus, the god of blacksmithing: he limped.
Source: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung – Esther Widmann
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