The Asklepieion of Kos

A sanctuary built on a hillside

The Asklepieion of Kos was a sanctuary, a sacred precinct, of the healing god Asklepios. It rises on a hill outside the ancient city of Kos. It is laid out on three terraces joined by stairs, instead of around one level courtyard. From the terraces the ground looks north across the city and the sea. The design turned a sloping site into a series of approaches, buildings and open spaces given to Asklepios.

That order took centuries to build. The sanctuary lies about three to four kilometres from the ancient city. Its buildings fall into four main phases: the third century BC, the second century BC, the first century AD and the second to third centuries AD. An altar on the middle terrace, dated to the middle or later fourth century BC, is the earliest sign of activity found so far at the site.

How the terraces took shape

The building work began after the city of Kos was founded again in 366 BC. The lower terrace sits off the central line of the plan. Modern scholars explain this by the shape of the hill. By the middle of the third century BC, the three terraces were in place. The lower level had a Pi-shaped Doric stoa, a long roofed hall with columns, around a large court. Later buildings filled the middle and upper levels.

What gathered there

The ancient geographer Strabo saw the Asklepieion on the outskirts of the city. He calls it very famous and full of dedications, the offerings people gave to the god. His short note matters because it describes the sanctuary’s fame and the objects that built up there, not a treatment. Objects reached the precinct as thanks, as memorials and as public displays by the city.

The surviving inscriptions give a sharper picture. Most come from stones found at the Asklepieion itself. They include sacred laws, decrees honouring doctors from Kos and lists of winners at the Great Asklepieia, a festival held at the sanctuary. Religion, medicine, civic honours and festival records stood side by side on the same ground. Their closeness shows a relationship between them. It does not prove that they were one practice.

Where Hippocrates fits

Kos was also the island of the physician Hippocrates. Tradition dates his life to about 460 to 370 BC. That has encouraged a tidy story in which he founded the terraced sanctuary, taught there or changed it. The dates from archaeology do not support that picture. The city was founded again in 366 BC. The earliest known altar belongs to about the same time. The three main terraces took shape in the following century.

These dates do not cut Hippocratic medicine off from Kos. Nor do they set the worship of Asklepios against medical practice. They do stop anyone treating the surviving complex as Hippocrates’s classroom without evidence. The great sanctuary belongs mainly to the Hellenistic period, from the third century BC, and to later times. The inscriptions show doctors from Kos honoured there. But honouring doctors at the Asklepieion does not show that the physician of the fifth century BC worked in its buildings.

What the site can tell us

The dates also make clear what the site can show. Its terraces record a religious institution that grew, received offerings, issued sacred rules and hosted the Great Asklepieia. Medical traditions grew up on the same island and later appear in the sanctuary’s public record. A shared place and later honours explain the link between the two. They do not turn the cult, the organised worship of the god, into a medical school founded by one famous man.

The firmest link with Hippocrates is also the most modest one. Kos had both a medical tradition attached to his name and a major centre for the worship of Asklepios. Later generations placed doctors, festivals and sacred rules in the sanctuary’s record. The stones show that the traditions met. They do not show Hippocrates teaching on the terraces.

Several periods in one view

The remains do not preserve a single moment. The lower stoa, the middle altar and the later temples come from different building campaigns. Lamps from the middle terrace continued into the fourth century AD. Earthquakes damaged the site again and again. What looks like one terraced design is the result of building, repair and reuse.

This also sets the Asklepieion of Kos apart from the cures at Epidaurus. The Epidaurus entry follows single cure inscriptions and incubation, the practice of sleeping in the sanctuary in hope of a cure. The Kos entry rests on other evidence: a hillside plan, a long series of building phases and inscriptions about sacred rules, doctors and festival winners. It is the history of a sanctuary that gathered several kinds of healing authority without erasing the differences between them.