What was the Omphalos at Delphi?

The Omphalos

The Omphalos is the stone at Delphi that the Delphians called the navel of the earth. It stood in the temple of Apollo, beside the statue of the god. Pausanias describes it as white marble, and says the Delphians, with the poet Pindar, held it to be the centre of all the earth. Delphi also kept a second sacred stone, oiled every day, which Pausanias was told was the one Cronus swallowed in place of Zeus.

In short

_Omphalos_ is the Greek word for navel. It is what the Delphians called the stone they held to be the centre of all the earth.
Pausanias describes the Omphalos as made of white marble and reports that the poet Pindar supported the Delphians in their claim (10.16.3).
Strabo records the story that two eagles released by Zeus met over Delphi, one from the west and one from the east, and he treats it as a fabrication (9.3.6).
Strabo also describes a navel in the temple, draped with fillets, or ribbons, and carrying images of the two birds.
Pausanias saw a second, small stone above the grave of Neoptolemus. It was oiled every day and given unworked wool at each feast, and he was told it was the stone Cronus swallowed (10.24.6).
The statue of the god and the omphalos stood in the cella, the inner room, of the temple.

The navel of the earth

The Omphalos is a stone at Delphi, where the god Apollo had a sanctuary. A sanctuary is a holy place set apart for a god. Omphalos is the ordinary Greek word for a navel. The people of Delphi said their stone marked the navel, or centre, of the earth.

The ancient writer Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, describes the stone as white marble. He says the Delphians held it to be the centre of the whole earth, and that the poet Pindar agreed with them.

A myth explains why the navel belongs at Delphi. The god Zeus releases two birds from opposite ends of the world, and they meet above Delphi. The meeting birds explain the place. The stone gives the claim an object people could see.

Two birds and a doubter

The geographer Strabo tells the story of the birds. In the main version they are eagles, and in another they are crows. Strabo calls the explanation a fabrication. Even so, inside the temple of Apollo he sees the claim made visible. There is an object shaped like a navel, draped with ribbons called fillets and carrying images of the two birds.

Strabo also gives a reason from the map. Delphi lies near the middle of Greece, if you count the land inside the Isthmus, a narrow neck of land, together with the land beyond it. From that position came the larger claim that the sanctuary marked the centre of the inhabited world.

Strabo can reject the story of Zeus measuring the earth and still report the object in the temple. His text keeps three things apart: a local claim, a myth that explains it, and a monument visitors could see.

The stone Cronus swallowed

Delphi had a second sacred stone, and the two are easy to confuse. Its story begins with Cronus, the father of Zeus, and with Rhea. The early Greek poet Hesiod tells it. Rhea gives Cronus a great stone wrapped in baby clothes in place of the infant Zeus, and Cronus swallows it. Later he brings it up again. Zeus sets it fast in the wide-pathed earth at Pytho, under the glens of Mount Parnassus, “to be a sign thenceforth and a marvel to mortal men” (Theogony 497 to 500).

Pausanias found something that fitted that description, and it was not the Omphalos. Above the grave of the hero Neoptolemus, he writes, is a stone of no large size. The Delphians pour olive oil over it every day and place unworked wool on it at each feast. There is an opinion that it is the stone given to Cronus (10.24.6).

Where the Omphalos stood

The Omphalos stood in the cella, the inner room, of the temple of Apollo, beside the statue of the god. Below the cella was an underground space that only priests might enter. There the Pythia, the woman who spoke for the oracle, gave her responses.

That temple was the third on the spot in the historical record. The earlier temple, raised under the Alcmaeonids of Athens in 510 BC, was brought down by an earthquake in 373 BC. The building whose columns stand at Delphi now was finished in 334 to 333 BC by the architects Spintharus, Xenodorus and Agathon.

Two stones, two claims

The marble object on display today is evidence for the form of the Delphic navel and the pattern of its fillets. It does not mean every sacred stone at the site was the same Omphalos. The daily oiled stone that Pausanias saw stood elsewhere. The navel itself stood beside the image of Apollo, above the closed room of the Pythia.

This changes how the centre of Delphi should be understood. Delphi did not have one nameless stone that gathered every story. It was a sanctuary where separate objects carried separate claims. One stone received oil and wool as the stone Cronus swallowed. Another stood inside the temple of Apollo as the navel of the world. Keeping them apart keeps both rituals in view. The Omphalos was the navel because of where it stood, and not only because of how it looked.

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The Omphalos was the stone Delphi held to be the navel of the earth, and it stood in the inner room, or cella, of the temple of Apollo beside the statue of the god. Pausanias describes it as white marble, and Strabo, who treats the story as a fabrication, reports that two eagles released by Zeus from opposite ends of the world met above the spot.
Delphi