Definition:
Derivation of temenos: From a Greek verb meaning to cut (t?µ??).
Plural of Temenos: Temene.
Temenos (t?µe???) is a separated out sacred space or precinct. A Greek temenos was a sanctuary with an altar and possibly temples, treasuries and houses for the priests. Walls could mark out the area. By the temenos, there might be roofed colonnades for visitors to walk under. The treasuries at the temene would fund the cults.
A king might also have a special area referred to as a temenos.
Other cultures besides Greece had sacred precincts we designate as temene. In Rome, a temenos would refer to the temple precinct. The Nile's sacred valley acquired the label, according to Liddell and Scott (Perseus).
Examples:
Pindar calls the race course for the Pythian games a temenos and Syracuse is called the temenos of Ares. [Perseus: Liddell and Scott]
"[The theater of Dionysus started, toward the middle of the VI century B. C., when the cult of Dionysus was introduced in Athens and a wooden statue (xoanon) of the god was brought from Eleutheræ and placed in a temple built on the sacred ground (temenos) consecrated to the god, as a simple round square near that temple that was used during the festival in honor of the god for the ritual dithyrambic dance performed in circle by masked men disguised in he-goats while the crowd was watching from the slopes of the hill."
Source: Bernard Suzanne's Plato-Dialogues
K. R. Dark speculates with Barry Cunliffe that the Roman walled area of the bath and temple complex of Aquae Sulis (Bath, UK) wasn't so much a town as the temenos enclosure of a Romano-British temple.
Temenos References:
- Irad Malkin "temenos" The Oxford Classical Dictionary . Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth. © Oxford University Press.
- The architecture of Greece & Rome: a sketch of its historic development, by William James Anderson, Richard Phené Spiers; 1902.
- "Town or 'Temenos'? A Reinterpretation of the Walled Area of 'Aquae Sulis,'" by K. R. Dark; Britannia Vol. 24, (1993), pp. 254-255.