When he speaks of Laconia in the third book of his Description of Greece Pausanias comments that the inhabitants of Acreas boasted that they had the oldest temple of the Mother Goddess in the Peloponnese. But he immediately afterwards mentions that the oldest image of that goddess is in another place:
The magnetes to whom Pausanias refers were the citizens of Magnesia del Sipilo, a foundation of the homonymous city of Thessaly. As a curiosity, these magnets discovered that the stones found in the vicinity of one of their colonies mysteriously attracted or repelled each other, which may be the origin of the term magnetism .
The Magnesia site of Sipylus (modern Manisa) is located about 65 kilometers inland from the coast, northeast of Izmir (ancient Smyrna) in Turkey. And as its name indicates, it is at the foot of Mount Sipylus, about 6 kilometers to the east, just as Pausanias said.
There, carved into the rock face of the mountain 100 meters high, the colossal image is still there today. It is 8 meters high and 4 and a half meters wide and represents a seated figure, very worn by erosion and the passing of the centuries. It was already there when the Greeks arrived, since it is of Hittite origin.
We said that Pausanias considered it a representation of the Mother Goddess, that is, of Cibeles, and that was the most accepted theory until a few years ago. In that sense, her figure was described as wearing a pointed headdress on her head, and with her hands resting on her chest, while her feet rested on a kind of stool.
Certainly the relief is so damaged that it is difficult to barely distinguish the forms. However, the current consensus of researchers in this regard is that it is a bearded male figure, possibly representing the Hittite god of the mountain.
It is also generally accepted that the monument dates from the 14th-13th centuries BC. (Late Bronze Age), from the time of King Suppiluliuma I (king from 1375 to 1322 BC) or his youngest son Mursili II (between 1321 and 1295 BC), and has a Hittite-Luwian origin. This can be deduced from the two inscriptions on the relief, one to the left and the other to the right, written in hieroglyphs in the Luwian language.
Helmuth Bossert, the archaeologist and Anatolian hieroglyphics specialist who studied the image in the early 1950s, translated the inscription on the left as Prince Kuwalanamuwa , the same name that appears on other Hittite reliefs from the Anatolian peninsula, although it is unknown if they refer to the same person.
The inscription on the right is barely legible, as confirmed by hititologist Hans Gustav Güterbock, who examined it in 1978. According to specialist John David Hawkins, the first part could be read as Zu(wa)-wa/i-ni (Eunuch).
The relief must have already been badly damaged by the time of the Lydians, around the 6th century BC. (that is, about eight centuries after its creation), since they took it for a representation of the goddess Cibeles and carried out ceremonies and offerings in the monument.
On the same hill there is an ancient structure that may be an altar carved into the rock, perhaps to accommodate a stone or wooden statue. Pausanias called it the throne of Pelops (who would later give its name to the Peloponnese):
These lines also seem to indicate that Pausanias was born in the area, in Magnesia del Sipilo itself.