The sight of the Periclean Parthenon that now towers above modern Athens is well known to everyone, but it stands upon the ruins of another Archaic Parthenon destroyed in the Persian wars. The rubble of this first Parthenon was used to pack the retaining walls that leveled the Classical Acropolis and the foundations of the first building form the base of the Classical Parthenon, allowing historians of architecture and art history to gain a fairly accurate idea of what this first Parthenon may have looked like. Dinsmoor, a scholar of architecture and one of the minds behind the first Acropolis reconstruction, applies his mind to the date of this first building's construction, using physical and epigraphical remains to solve this difficult question. This piece is of interest to those interested not only in classical buildings, but the ways in which knowledge of these structures can be used to give dates to structures and illuminate the literary evidence that mentions them.