In fact, on its northern slope, a shelter under the rock has yielded abundant evidence of stone age material which shows all the characteristics of the Upper Palaeolithic and is to this day the oldest securely identified habitation in all Sicily.

Thucydides reports that Akrai was founded in 665/4 BC by the Syracusans on a plateau bounded by steep cliffs and by four streams, from which all routes of access could be dominated.

During the fourth and fifth centuries AD, Akrai is mentioned as the most important Christian centre of eastern Sicily after Syracuse itself, as affirmed by the vast catacombs found there.

[4] The large sanctuary complex is located along the south side of Orbo Hill, on a rocky outcrop overlooking a path with two flat semi-circular areas at each end.

There is another element worthy of note in this relief: two individuals riding on large horses - probably the Dioscuri, who are also associated with the Magna Mater and her mysteries in epigraphic and artistic sources.

[1] The Santoni were mentioned for the first time by Ignazio Paternò Castello, Prince of Biscari, in his 1781 book, Viaggio per tutte le antichità della Sicilia[6] and again a few years later by the French artist Jean-Pierre Houël who provided a description and classicising reconstructions.

Proper archaeological investigation began in the nineteenth century, with the work of Baron Gabriele Iudica, royal custodian of antiquities in the Valle di Noto, who went looking for the tombs that Houel had published and found the other groups of sculptures, a paved path, and objects like lamps and small paterae.

In 1840, Domenico Lo Faso, Duke of Serradifalco published a description of the site with illustrations by Francesco Saverio Cavallari and, following the interpretation of the Santoni as funerary monuments, identified the main figure as Isis-Persephone.

The authority of the last two scholars long overwhelmed the alternative opinion of Alexander Conze who, using Cavallari's illustrations, first made the connection between the Santoni and Anatolian and Greek depictions of Cybele.

[9] In excavations by the Superintendency of Antiquities in 1953, Rosario Carta produced precise illustrations of the sculptures and Prof. Luigi Bernabò Brea took photographs which were published in a volume which allowed the sanctuary to be seen in the wider context of the diffusion of the cult of Cybele through the Greco-Roman world.