Images that fell from heaven

Sacred statues and stones said to have dropped from the sky.

Key facts

People and tradition

Ancient Greece, Rome and Asia Minor

Region

Europe and the Mediterranean

When

First millennium BC to the Roman Empire

The story

Several of the most sacred objects of the ancient Mediterranean were said to have fallen from heaven. Greek writers used a special word, diopetes, meaning 'fallen from Zeus', for such things. The Palladium, a wooden image of the goddess Athena that guarded Troy, was said to have come down from the sky. The great image of Artemis at Ephesus was also described in this way: in the Bible, the town clerk of Ephesus reminds the crowd that the city guards 'the image which fell down from Jupiter'.

Some cults worshipped a stone rather than a statue. The goddess Cybele was worshipped at Pessinus in Asia Minor in the form of a black stone, and in 204 BC, during the war with Hannibal, the Romans brought it to Rome on the advice of a prophecy. Later the Emperor Elagabalus brought the black stone of the sun god of Emesa to Rome.

What science says

None of these objects survives to be tested, so it is impossible to say which, if any, was a meteorite. The descriptions of black, conical stones fit iron or stony meteorites with dark fusion crust, and it would make sense for a stone seen to fall in a blaze of light to be treated as a gift of the gods. The idea that sacred images fell from the sky may also have grown from the wish to give a cult an origin beyond human hands.

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