During the excavations at the dump of the Sacred Way, opposite to the Halos, which was accidentally discovered in 1939, there were found several objects which had been buried because they were sacred and thus it was forbidden to sell or transform them. It seems that all these ex-votos in Delphi had been probably destroyed by fire around the mid 5th century B.C. Some of those probably constituted a gold-and-ivory group depicting the Apollonian triad, namely Apollo, Artemis and Leto. The scholars have related these finds to the sumptuous ex-votos of Croesus, king of Lydia, which Herodotus so eloquently describes. This identification is however uncertain; the only certain fact is that the works are magnificent creations of the mid-6th century B.C., coming from workshops in Ionia, or, to a certain extent, Corinth.
