walls, but featured, instead of a cult image, three chapels for worship. The podium on the acropolis was oriented towards the east, provoking suggestions that it was used as a sacrificial platform for worship of the rising sun, as similar platforms have been found in the region. As the acropolis was primarily military, with only a few small residences, scholars have suggested that it was used as a ghetto quarter for native Bactrian soldiers; the validity of this segregationary hypothesis continues to be debated. Heroön of Kineas One of the most-studied monuments in the city is a small heroön, located just north of the palace in the lower town. This shrine, which was constructed on a three-stepped platform, consisted of a distyle in antis pronaos, and a narrow cella. Four coffins—two wooden and two stone—were found underneath the platform. Burials were generally not allowed within the walls of Greek cities—hence Ai-Khanoum's necropolis being located outside the northern ramparts—but special exemptions were made for prominent citizens, especially city founders. Since the shrine predated every other structure in the lower city, it reasonably may be supposed that the person the heroön was built to honour was either the city's founder or an extremely notable early citizen. The most prominent of the coffins, which was also the earliest, was linked to the upper temple by an opening and conduit down which offerings could be poured. As the builders had not endowed any of the other sarcophagi with such a feature, this coffin would likely have housed the remains of that eminent citizen, while the others were reserved for family members. The general scholarly consensus is thus that this man, known from an inscription to have been named Kineas, was the Seleucid epistates or oikistes who governed the first settlers of Ai-Khanoum. The archaeologists unearthed the base of a stele placed in a prominent position in the pronaos. Engraved upon it were the last five lines of a series of maxims, originally displayed at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi—only small and barely legible fragments of the upright portion of the stele, which would have been inscribed with the first 145 maxims, survive. An epigram was inscribed adjacent to the maxims, commemorating a man named Klearchos, who had copied the maxims from the Delphic sanctuary: In 1968, Louis Robert, a French historian, proposed that the Klearchos named in the inscription was the philosopher Clearchus