4.1 Ottoman Empire and Turkey

Nine years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453, Sultan Mehmet II is said to have visited Troy and declared that he had avenged the Trojans (Rose Reference Rose2013: 282–3). In doing so he was claiming his role in an imagined conflict between East and West that went back to the Trojan War. He was not the first historical figure to have visited Troy for this reason: Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great were among his predecessors. Unlike them, it is not clear whether he visited the Greek and Roman city of Ilium at Hissarlik, where prehistoric Troy was subsequently excavated in the nineteenth century. But his visit does show how archaeological sites, history and politics can become entangled in the Aegean. Between 1463 and 1718 the Ottoman Empire expanded across the Aegean as a result of a series of wars with Venice, the former colonial power in the region. Only the Ionian islands remained under Venetian control. Once these wars had concluded, the places described by Homer, and the cities of Classical Greece, became more accessible to travellers.

The search for, and removal of, classical antiquities from the Ottoman Empire to western Europe goes back to at least the seventeenth century. Since the administration of the Empire was centred on the court of the Sultan, permission to remove antiquities came in the form of a personal decree, or firman, from the Sultan or one of his representatives. It is not accidental that a number of westerners who held the post of ambassador to the Sublime Porte, as the Sultan’s government was known, used their position to gain permission to export antiquities as part of their wider mission to enable trade. One of the first was Thomas Roe, who during his term as English ambassador to Constantinople from 1621 to 1628 helped to acquire antiquities for the Duke of Buckingham and Earl of Arundel. Arundel’s collection, which consisted largely of Greek and Roman inscriptions and sculpture, did not contain prehistoric material but was one of the first collections of antiquities in Britain (Vickers Reference Vickers2006).

Subsequent ambassadors to the Sublime Porte can be more closely associated with the development of Aegean Prehistory. Comte Choiseul-Gouffier served as French ambassador from 1784 to 1791. He was particularly interested in the antiquity of the region and employed a number of specialist cartographers and artists to record antiquities, as well as remove them when possible. His collection of antiquities is now in the Louvre. He also commissioned the first survey of the Troad, undertaken by Lechevalier and Kauffer. The second volume of his Voyage Pittoresque de la Grèce, published in 1809, included a map of the Troad with the two contending sites for Troy marked, Bournabashi (Ilium Vetus or Old Troy) and Hissarlik (Ilium Novum, or New Troy) (Choiseul-Gouffier Reference Choiseul-Gouffier1809: pl. 19). One of his agents conducted the first recorded excavation in the region, in the so-called Tomb of Achilles. Like other features of the Troad this mound had been given Homeric associations but turned out to be classical in date (Allen Reference Allen1999: 42).

Lord Elgin, British ambassador in Constantinople from 1798 to 1803, also used his position to acquire and export antiquities from across the Aegean. Like Choiseul-Gouffier before him he sent agents to remove sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis with the support of a now disputed firman. These, and sculptures from the Troad and mainland Greece, ended up in the British Museum as a result of the sale of his collection to the nation in 1816. Among the sculptures he exported with the support of another firman were several Mycenaean sculptural slabs collected from the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. An early guide to the Elgin collection at the British Museum describes them as Cyclopean, suggesting that they go back to ‘to the remotest period of which man has left distinct evidence of his existence’ (Ellis Reference Ellis1833: 117), while a later curator noted that ‘they may be authentic memorials of a dynasty only dimly remembered in the Homeric poems’ (Smith Reference Smith1892: 12). As a result of the diplomatic network which connected London and the Aegean, original prehistoric sculpture was the subject of learned speculation in London even before Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae.

Below the level of ambassador there was a network of consuls and vice-consuls who represented foreign governments in major cities and ports across the Empire. Their role was mainly to facilitate trade, and, particularly at the level of vice-consul, these roles were often filled by local businessmen. In return for representing foreign governments they received some level of diplomatic protection and could also profit from the connections they made with merchants. These figures also sometimes played a role in the acquisition of antiquities, particularly during the nineteenth century (Gunning Reference Gunning2009). Charles Newton was one example, whose career began at the British Museum before he became vice-consul in Mytilene and consul on Rhodes in the 1850s. The British ambassador at the time was Stratford Canning, who had lobbied Ottoman officials for permission to acquire sculptures for the British Museum from various parts of the Empire; his demands helped stimulate the foundation of an antiquities museum in Istanbul in 1846 (Özkaya Reference Özkaya2022). Canning enabled Newton to undertake excavations, particularly at Halicarnassus, and then to arrange transfer of objects to the British Museum using the British Navy. Newton returned to the Museum as the keeper of the Department of Greece and Rome in 1861 but maintained his contacts with this area and acquired objects from, among others, the excavations of John Turtle Wood at Ephesus and his protégé Alfred Biliotti on Rhodes. Biliotti spent his career in the consular service but supplemented his income by excavating and selling antiquities (Barchard Reference Barchard2006). In 1868 he began excavating Mycenaean chamber tombs at Ialysos, whose contents were purchased by the British Museum.

The first Ottoman antiquities bylaw was passed in 1869 partly as a result of a process of modernisation known at the Tanzimat reforms and partly as a response to the extraction of antiquities from sites such as Ephesus (Eldem Reference Eldem, Bahrani, Çelik and Eldem2011). This law established an Imperial Museum in Istanbul (re-establishing the earlier antiquities museum), created a system of permissions for excavators and also prohibited the export of antiquities. This did not entirely prevent the export of antiquities because the Sultan was still able to override the law, and antiquities remained in private ownership. In 1874 a new, more liberal, antiquities law further loosened the rules on export but following a number of high-profile cases, including the removal of the hellenistic altar from Pergamon and Priam’s Treasure from Troy, the law was changed again ten years later. The 1884 law brought antiquities into state ownership, with finds to go to the Imperial Museum, and made excavators define sites using maps when asking for permission to dig. Another law of 1906 expanded the definition of antiquities further to include Islamic archaeology for the first time. This law remained in force until 1973 (Shaw Reference Shaw2003; Bahrani et al. Reference Bahrani, Çelik, Eldem, Bahrani, Çelik and Eldem2011).

The Imperial Museum was moved to a new purpose-built location in 1891, which remains the home of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The Imperial Museum adopted an active acquisitions policy, particularly under the leadership of Hamdi Bey, who undertook his own excavations in the Levant. He was succeeded as director by Makridi Bey, who excavated two prehistoric mounds in Ottoman Macedonia. The Museum was intended to be the repository for antiquities from across the Ottoman Empire instead of overseas museums. Sherds from Troy, however, were seen as less important and so the Imperial Museum allowed the export of these to Berlin in 1885 (Shaw Reference Shaw2003: 117). The presence of the Museum was to have a chilling effect on the archaeology of Crete while it remained under Ottoman control. The excavations of Minos Kalokairinos at Knossos were rapidly shut down by the local authorities in 1879 because of a fear that major finds would be sent to Istanbul (MacGillivray Reference MacGillivray2000: 89).

Under the new regime of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the centre of government was moved to Ankara and an archaeological museum was founded there in 1921. Ankara soon became the capital of the Republic of Turkey with Atatürk as its first president. A Hittite Museum was subsequently opened on a different site in 1945. Both museums were related to a policy to cultivate a national identity based on the previous inhabitants of Turkey, particularly the Hittites (Savino Reference Savino, Poulot, Bodenstein and Guiral2012). The Hittite capital, Hattusa, had been recognised at Boğazköy in the nineteenth century and was subsequently excavated by French and then German archaeologists. Makridi Bey was also involved in this excavation, signalling the priorities of Ottoman archaeologists in this period. In 1929 the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) opened a department in Istanbul to co-ordinate its activities in Turkey. The following year saw the creation of l’Institut Français d’Archéologie, also in Istanbul. British and American research institutes were only established after the Second World War. This contrasts with a much longer tradition of Foreign Schools of archaeology in Greece.

4.2 Greece

The Greek War of Independence began in 1821, resulting in the foundation of the Kingdom of Greece in 1832. This initially encompassed the Peloponnese, Central Greece and a number of Aegean islands. Philhellenism, looking back to the glories of classical Greece, played an important role in the independence movement and also inspired its various foreign backers including Britain and France. For this reason Greek antiquities rapidly became significant totems for the revolutionaries and decrees on their protection were made as early as 1825. The focus was primarily on ancient Greek inscriptions and sculpture since prehistoric antiquities were little known at this point. At the Fourth National Assembly of 1829 a ban on the export of antiquities was passed and a national museum was founded at Aegina (Voudouri Reference Voudouri, Damaskos and Plantzos2008, Reference Voudouri, Voutsaki and Cartledge2017). As part of the 1832 Treaty of Constantinople, which brought Greece into being, a Bavarian Prince, Otto, was installed on the throne. One of Otto’s councillors, Georg Ludwig von Maurer, drafted the first Greek antiquities law which was passed in 1834 (Voudouri Reference Voudouri, Voutsaki and Cartledge2017: 78). This brought the Antiquities Service, which had been formed the previous year, under the leadership of the newly established Ephor General of Antiquities. The first Ephor was Ludwig Ross, a German classicist, who travelled around Greece and took an interest in a variety of prehistoric sites and objects (Petrakos Reference Petrakos2009).

The foundation of the Archaeological Society of Athens in 1837 was intended to complement the Antiquities Service. Independent of the state and funded through private subscriptions, many of its members were Greek, although foreign scholars were also admitted. Nevertheless it acted like a state body (Voudouri Reference Voudouri, Voutsaki and Cartledge2017: 81). The Archaeological Society began to conduct excavations in Athens before expanding to other parts of Greece over the course of the nineteenth century. Its primary concern was with classical sites and antiquities although its members did engage in prehistoric excavations too. It also established important fora for the publication of archaeological research, the Proceedings of the Archaeological Society (Πρακτικά της εν Αθήναις Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας) and its Archaeological Journal (Αρχαιολογική Εφημερίς), which have been published continuously since 1837 (Petrakos Reference Petrakos1987: 189–93).

The National Museum was moved from Aegina to the new Greek capital, Athens, in 1834. It continued to accumulate antiquities, many from the excavations of the Archaeological Society. Objects were displayed in various buildings around Athens, principally the Hephaisteion, until a new purpose-built neoclassical museum opened in 1889. A new law was passed in 1893 defining the purpose of the National Archaeological Museum as for the study and teaching of archaeology as well as the diffusion of archaeological knowledge rather than simply safeguarding objects. The law also defined departments including a prehistoric section (Avgouli Reference Avgouli and Kaplan1994: 247, 254; Gazi Reference Gazi, Voutsaki and Cartledge2017: 99). By this time prehistoric finds from Mycenae, Vapheio and the Cycladic islands were available for display. The Museum’s arrangement was overseen by the Ephor, Panagiotis Kavvadias, assisted by Christos Tsountas and Valerios Stais. Stais became curator of vases and then director, and also wrote the first catalogue of Mycenaean antiquities (Kokkou Reference Kokkou1977: 248–9; Petrochilos Reference Petrochilos1992: 20). All were archaeologists who had excavated prehistoric sites. As a result of the timing and personnel of the new National Archaeological Museum, Greek prehistory rapidly became a prominent part of the national collection. The first regional museum was opened at Sparta in 1874, with over thirty others founded in a burst at the start of the twentieth century (Gazi Reference Gazi, Damaskos and Plantzos2008, Reference Gazi, Voutsaki and Cartledge2017: 100). These were largely funded by the Archaeological Society.

The institutionalisation of archaeology in Greece continued in the nineteenth century with the establishment of five Foreign Schools, representing France (1846), Germany (1874), the United States (1881), Great Britain (1886) and Austria-Hungary (1898) (Korka Reference Korka2007). Although there were differences in organisation and funding, their main role was to facilitate the research of their members in Greece. The French School at Athens was founded by royal decree and was government-funded from the start. Similarly the German and Austrian schools were departments of state-funded central archaeological institutes. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens has always been a private body funded through donations from American universities and individuals. The British School at Athens began with private funding but soon came to receive supplementary funding from the British government (Macmillan Reference Macmillan1911). The Italian School at Athens was founded in 1909 and the Swedish Archaeological School in 1948. Archaeologists from these nations had been active before this time, although the Italians had mainly worked on Crete and Swedish archaeologist had relied on permits acquired through the German or French Schools. It was this role of the Schools in regulating the work of foreign archaeologists that became particularly important to the organisation of archaeology in Greece. There are now nineteen Foreign Schools in operation.

From their inception the Foreign Schools negotiated with the Greek authorities for the rights to excavate sites, and sometimes to export finds. Their activity, initially at least, has often been described as colonial (Morris Reference Morris and Morris1994: 25): although Greece was an independent state, it had been brought into being by some of the same powers, who continued to pursue an active foreign policy in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Foreign Schools also had considerable financial resources, compared to a poorly funded and overstretched Archaeological Service (Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2007: 102–3). As a result they could afford to invest significant sums in excavating prominent Greek sites on a large scale. The founding of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens was closely linked with the flagship excavation at Olympia. The French School initiated significant projects at Delos and Delphi. The American School developed an association with Corinth which continues to this day. The British School, despite early forays into classical Greek architecture at Kynosarges in Athens and Megalopolis, came to focus more on prehistoric sites (Macmillian Reference Macmillan1911: x–xi; Whitley Reference Whitley and Korka2007: 65). One of its first significant excavations was at Phylakopi on Melos, where a large Bronze Age settlement was uncovered. Initially at least there was competition between the Schools to excavate antiquities that could be exported to museums in their home countries. Excavations also brought prestige, particularly given the idea that all civilised countries shared in classical Greek heritage.

The Foreign Schools soon established their own series of journals and monographs. These allowed excavators to disseminate their finds in their own language. The first to appear in 1876 was the Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung, followed by the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique in 1887 and the Annual of the British School at Athens in 1886. The American School only started to publish Hesperia in 1932 but this was preceded by the American Journal of Archaeology. This was established in 1885 as the journal of the American Institute of Archaeology, founded six years before, and from the start included news from excavations in the Eastern Mediterranean and further afield. Similarly the Journal of Hellenic Studies started to publish an annual report, ‘Archaeology in Greece’, in 1887 which covered both excavations and museums. In 1889 the German Archaeological Institute took over the publication of Der Archäologische Anzeiger, which provided a digest of the work of its various departments including Athens, but this report started to include other excavations too. These publications helped to disseminate information about archaeological research, including those included in the Greek-language reports of the Archaeological Society. By comparing various excavations these publications also helped to formalise the practice of archaeology and create a structure within which archaeological research could take place. Conversely excavations which were not published in this way became less significant.

In 1899 a new law was passed which sought to stem the trade in antiquities by declaring them all state property. The previous law of 1834 had attempted to regulate excavations on private land but did little in practice to prevent people from buying and selling the resulting finds, allowing a flourishing antiquities market to develop (Galanakis Reference Galanakis2011: 186–92). One of the most significant and notorious Bronze Age finds to appear on the market was the ‘Aegina Treasure’, which was purchased by the British Museum in 1891 (Evans Reference Evans1893). Although it was said to come from Aegina, its origins remain unclear (Fitton et al. Reference Fitton, Meeks and Williams2009). Overseas museums could still acquire material after 1899 since there was a provision in the new law which allowed for the export of objects declared ‘useless’ or ‘redundant’. This left open the possibility for Foreign Schools to export material from their excavations, or other exchanges of objects, and sherd material was exported after this date (Frödin and Persson Reference Frödin and Persson1938: 12; Stefani and Shapland Reference Stefani, Shapland, Triantaphyllou, Efkleidou and Vokotopoulosforthcoming). This became more difficult as a result of a further law of 1932 which placed further restrictions on the export of excavated material (Voudouri Reference Voudouri, Damaskos and Plantzos2008: 127–9). Even though the legal framework restricted the activities of the archaeologists of the Foreign Schools, overseas museums continued to acquire objects from Greece after 1899. Cycladic material in particular has long been sought after by museums in Europe and America (Gill and Chippindale Reference Gill and Chippindale1993: 610; Galanakis Reference Galanakis2013). Objects acquired in this way provide some of the best evidence for the continuation of undocumented excavations and the activities of antiquities dealers.

The territory of Greece grew several times over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century (Beaton Reference Beaton2019). Thessaly moved from Ottoman to Greek control in 1881. The border shifted north again when Macedonia and Epirus became part of Greece following the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, which marked the start of a period of turmoil in Greece. The First World War, which followed on from events in Sarajevo in 1914, can be seen as a continuation of the Balkan Wars. Greece remained neutral until 1917, partly because the King was aligned with the Central Powers and Prime Minister Venizelos sided with the Allies. This developed into the National Schism, with rival governments in Athens and Thessaloniki. Foreign archaeologists became involved in espionage, with Alan Wace turning the British School at Athens into a centre for military intelligence. Other archaeologists in uniform took the opportunity to excavate in the Aegean (Gill Reference Gill2011a). Archaeologists serving in the Allied Army of the Orient in Macedonia were often involved in both activities (Shapland and Stefani Reference Shapland and Stefani2017). Archaeological finds made by soldiers were brought to Thessaloniki and stored in separate British and French collections. Following the end of the War many of these finds were removed to the British Museum and the Louvre with the permission of the Greek government. These generous donations came at a time when Venizelos needed the support of the Allies for his territorial aspirations in Anatolia (Clogg Reference Clogg, Shapland and Stefani2017; Stefani and Shapland Reference Stefani, Shapland, Triantaphyllou, Efkleidou and Vokotopoulosforthcoming). The Megali Idea sought to bring Constantinople and other areas of Asia Minor with Greek-speakers into a ‘Greater Greece’. This attempted expansion came to an end with the expulsion of Greek forces and burning of Smyrna in what became known in Greece as the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1922. The subsequent ‘exchange of populations’ resulted in a refugee crisis in both Athens and northern Greece which further challenged the state’s resources and institutions after a decade of war.

The Second World War resulted in the Axis occupation of Greece by Italian, German and Bulgarian troops. Members of the Greek Archaeological Service remained in post and tried to protect archaeological sites, although episodes of looting occurred. As in the First World War in Macedonia, the digging of military installations also disturbed archaeological sites. Crete was particularly affected because of its strategic importance (Driessen Reference Driessen and Crisà2024). Many museum collections were hidden or buried to prevent damage and theft. The German army operated a parallel ‘Kunstschutz’, or ‘art protection’ programme and the German Archaeological Institute in Athens was also given a formal role in managing archaeological research (Matz Reference Matz1951). The Civil War that immediately followed the Second World War in Greece continued until 1949, meaning that little archaeological activity happened again until the 1950s.

5.1 Troad

Western travellers had been visiting the Troad in search of Troy since at least the sixteenth century. Pierre Belon, like many after him, visited the impressive hellenistic remains at Alexandria Troas and thought they were Troy (Belon Reference Belon1555: 80–2; Cook Reference Cook1973: 16). Belon was a naturalist who travelled around the Eastern Mediterranean and recorded plants and animals as well as archaeological sites. Jacob Spon and Charles Wheler visited Ilium in 1675, also collecting plant specimens and antiquities (Spon and Wheler Reference Spon and Wheler1678: 197–201). Robert Wood, a member of the Society of Dilettanti, visited Bournabashi in 1750 and published a book about Homer which contained his observations (Wood Reference Wood1775). Hence even the research of Lechevalier instigated by Choiseul-Gouffier was in a long tradition of going in search of Homeric Troy (Lechevalier Reference Lechevalier1799; Choiseul-Gouffier Reference Choiseul-Gouffier1809). The maps produced by Kauffer for Choiseul-Gouffier and by Captain Spratt, for the British Navy in 1839, provided scholars with more detailed information about topography.

Although many scholars followed Lechevalier’s identification of Bournabashi, Charles Maclaren (Reference Maclaren1822, Reference Maclaren1863) was one of the first to suggest that Hissarlik was Homeric Troy. He finally visited Troy in 1847 and like many travellers at that time sought consular assistance at Çanakkale in the Dardanelles. The position of British vice-consul was held by members of the Calvert family, who had also established landholdings in the Troad. They took visitors on tours of the archaeological remains and also maintained a collection of antiquities found on their land, as the Ottoman law of this time allowed. Frank Calvert started excavating in 1853, perhaps stimulated by Maclaren’s visit, although he dug at various places around the Troad before starting at Hissarlik (Ilium) (Allen Reference Allen1999: 74). Another visitor who had encouraged his archaeological interests was Charles Newton, while he was consul at Rhodes (Newton Reference Newton1865: 125). In 1863 Calvert wrote to him asking the British Museum to fund the dig at Hissarlik in return for the finds, but was turned down. Although Calvert continued digging in 1865, he was unable to continue his excavations for financial reasons. He only seems to have uncovered Greek and Roman remains but was convinced that he had found Homeric Troy. By his own account he shared this theory with Heinrich Schliemann when he visited in 1868 and called in to see the Calvert collection.

There is now little doubt that Schliemann’s claim to have independently come to the conclusion that Hissarlik was Troy is false, as a forensic analysis of his diaries has shown (Traill Reference Traill1995: 55–7; Allen Reference Allen1999: 7). It is also doubtful that Schliemann’s childhood dream was to excavate Troy since there is no evidence for any interest in Troy before 1868. By this time Schliemann had amassed a fortune from business and moved to Paris. His publications of his travels, first around Asia, and then around the Aegean, seem to have been an attempt to gain literary and academic prestige (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1869). By this time there were already archaeological celebrities such as Paul-Émile Botta, whose finds from Assyria were displayed at the Louvre. Instead of acting as a wealthy backer to Frank Calvert, Schliemann decided to take over his excavations.

Schliemann excavated at Hissarlik between 1870 and 1873. The first season was cut short because he had started digging in the half of the mound that didn’t belong to Calvert and was forced by the proprietors to stop. He had also failed to gain the necessary permissions under the newly passed archaeological law. Even so, he announced his discovery of Priam’s Palace in a German newspaper, alerting Turkish officials to his excavation (Allen Reference Allen1999: 131). From then on they took a close interest in his activities, and an overseer was appointed for his 1871 excavation under the terms of the firman that was eventually granted. He employed around 80 workers at first, increasing to 180 in later seasons, who enabled him to dig a trench down to the bottom of the 14 m high mound (Figure 5). His reasoning was that Priam’s city was at the lowest level because it had only been founded two generations earlier by Priam’s grandfather, Ilus. He subsequently recognised a new candidate for Priam’s Palace at the bottom of the mound, and a nearby ramp which he named the ‘Scaean Gate’ after a toponym described in the Iliad. What distinguished Schliemann’s approach from earlier attempts to discover Homeric Troy was the resources at his disposal, which allowed him to conduct large-scale excavations. His method of trying to match physical remains with descriptions from the Iliad was no different from previous scholars. Nor was he the first to use excavation as a method to explore Homeric sites: Calvert had dug at Hissarlik before him, and there had been other published excavations around the Plain of Troy.

Figure 5 Photograph of the ‘Schliemann Trench’ through Hissarlik.

(Schliemann Reference Schliemann1874: pl. 111)

One of Schliemann’s contributions to Aegean Prehistory was his vigorous publication and promotion of his discoveries. This is exemplified by a find made in the 1873 season, which Schliemann dubbed ‘Priam’s Treasure’. This was a hoard of precious objects, including gold jewellery and silver vessels, as well as bronze tools and polished stone axes.Footnote ⁵ The finds were impressive in themselves but Schliemann’s actions made them famous across the world. He rapidly smuggled them out of the Ottoman Empire to Athens to avoid having to cede some of the objects to the local authorities. He then published an account of his find in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, which was taken up by newspapers around the world (Traill Reference Traill1995: 123). Photographs of the Treasure and other finds were published the next year in his Atlas trojanischer Alterthümer, which was an early attempt to publish photographs of archaeological discoveries (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1874). A popular account, Troy and Its Remains, appeared the next year and romanticised the story of their discovery, falsely claiming that his wife Sophia was there holding her shawl to gather the finds (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1875: 323–4; Fitton Reference Fitton1995: 69). In 1877 Schliemann brought his Trojan finds to exhibit them in London, alongside some of his photographs (Baker Reference Baker2019). The Illustrated London News covered his exhibition and a paper he gave at the Society of Antiquaries of London (Figure 6). Although many doubted whether these finds related directly to Priam, most agreed that they were prehistoric. Schliemann had used the mass media of the day to bring a selection of Bronze Age objects to the attention of a much wider audience than ever before.

Figure 6 ‘Dr Schliemann giving an account of his discoveries at Mycenae before the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House’. Illustrated London News 31 March 1877, p. 13.

For modern readers one of the most curious features of Schliemann’s first publications about Troy is the amount of space he devoted to illustrating clay spindle-whorls. He suggested that incised symbols on some of them, particularly swastikas, provided evidence that the Trojans were Aryan (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1875: 16). Some of the other marks he regarded as writing and published them in the hope that someone could decipher them. Archibald Sayce (Reference Sayce and Schliemann1880) offered a nonsensical translation using the Cypriot syllabary. Subsequent excavations at Troy have failed to reveal any clay tablets analogous to the ones at Hattusa, and only one inscribed sealstone has been found to date (Rose Reference Rose2013: 34–6). The other source of written evidence was Homer, and Schliemann attempted to link descriptions in the Iliad to his finds. Pots with faces on them were ingeniously linked with Athena as the patron deity of Troy by interpreting her epithet ‘glaukopis’ as meaning ‘owl-faced’ rather than the more usual ‘bright-eyed’. Similarly, tall two-handled cups were identified with Homer’s ‘depas amphikypellon’ (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1880: 299–302). Although Schliemann’s belief in the literal truth in Homer was extreme, and doubted at the time, it does reveal a wider sense that textual evidence should be given priority in interpreting archaeological remains.

One of the reasons that Schliemann returned to Troy in 1878 was to dispel doubts about his claim to have found Priam’s Troy. One journalist dismissively referred to ‘Priam’s Pigsty’ and was not the only one to comment on the small size of the settlement (Allen Reference Allen1999: 185). By then Schliemann had settled his dispute with the Ottoman Empire over Priam’s Treasure by paying a large fine. He had negotiated a new permit with the help of the British Ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Austen Henry Layard, who had become famous as the excavator of Nimrud and Nineveh (Traill Reference Traill1995: 182). The second phase of excavations at Troy was markedly different in character because Schliemann began to collaborate more extensively with the archaeologists and scientists of the day, including German prehistorian and pathologist Rudolf Virchow, Émile Burnouf, director of the French School at Athens and, from 1882, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, from the German Archaeological Institute. Schliemann’s Reference Schliemann1880 book Ilios includes Virchow’s measurements of a skull, an early use of craniometry in Aegean archaeology. The book has a more scientific tone in general, describing the different levels of Hissarlik in turn, including the Third City as the city burnt at the end of the Trojan War. It was only in 1890, the year of Schliemann’s death, that discoveries of Mycenaean pottery in higher levels showed that these were candidates for the Homeric levels (Schuchhardt Reference Schuchhardt1891: 323–49).

Dörpfeld’s experience at Olympia had given him a training in the methods of archaeology and he brought a clearer understanding of stratigraphy to the work at Troy. He continued Schliemann’s work after his death, publishing the first accurate section of Troy in his account of his work, establishing the sixth city with its Mycenaean pottery and newly discovered circuit walls as the Homeric city (Figure 7) (Dörpfeld Reference Dörpfeld1902). Schliemann had understood that there were different layers but had relied on recording the depths of objects to assign them to different cities. He assumed, wrongly, that each city occupied a uniform depth in the mound of Hissarlik. Rather than excavating each layer in turn, stratigraphically, he at times had his men quarry through the mound (using iron bars, not dynamite as is often claimed). Nevertheless Schliemann did both keep and record the position of pots and other small finds, which was not always the practice at the time. But claims that Schliemann was ‘the true founder of archaeological method’ (Casson Reference Casson1939: 225) are problematic because his methods only improved as he started to collaborate with more experienced excavators. Instead it was the mound of Hissarlik that helped foster better archaeological methods in the Aegean because of its complex stratigraphy. What Schliemann contributed was a huge labour force and a developing model of scientific collaboration, combined with impressively rapid publication.

Figure 7 Section drawing of the mound of Hissarlik.

(Dörpfeld Reference Dörpfeld1902: fig. 6)

What remained of Hissarlik was subsequently excavated by a team from the University of Cincinnati led by Carl Blegen in 1932–8. He declared: ‘From the start the excavations at Troy were planned as a work of sober, serious research, and there was no compulsion to recover objects of startling or sensational character with high publicity value’ (Blegen et al. Reference Blegen, Angel, Caskey, Rawson and Boulter1950: 6). He maintained Schliemann and Dörpfeld’s levels but refined them, particularly through the development of a clearer pottery typology. The previous typology had been worked out by Hubert Schmidt (Reference Schmidt1902b) on the basis of the finds which Schliemann had given to Berlin. Although Schliemann was innovative in inviting scientists to examine various finds such as human remains and metals, Blegen’s team introduced zooarchaeology to Troy, and the results from various specialists were published in a four-volume site report. The discovery of horse bones in Troy VII was explained in terms of Indo-European invaders, showing the coalescence of new archaeological methods with older styles of interpretation (Blegen et al. Reference Blegen, Caskey and Rawson1953: 10). Blegen’s aim had been to treat Troy as a prehistoric Anatolian site but he too was drawn into the Homeric Question. A burnt destruction level with a handful of arrows and weapons in it became associated with the Trojan War. This was Troy VIIa, contemporary with Late Helladic IIIB on the Greek mainland.

Apart from the finds at Troy, few Mycenaean objects were excavated on the Anatolian mainland until the 1960s. One exception was the cemetery of Pitane (Çandarli), excavated in the nineteenth century by the director of the Imperial Museum, Hamdi Bey. A stirrup jar from this excavation entered the collection (Perrot and Chipiez Reference Perrot and Chipiez1894b: 390; Horejs Reference Horejs, Çınardalı Karaaslan, Aykurt, Kolankaya-Bostancı and Erbil2014: 265). There was extensive exploration of Greek and Roman sites along the coast such as Ephesus, explored by British then Austrian archaeologists and Miletus, explored by French and German teams. It was only after the Second World War that significant Bronze Age remains were excavated at these sites. Since they appear to relate to cities mentioned in the Boğazköy archive, Apasa and Millawanda, they have become important parts of the Ahhiyawa Question.

5.2 Dodecanese

The Dodecanese were part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912, when they were annexed by Italy. Hence the first significant Mycenaean site excavated in the Ottoman Empire was on the island of Rhodes. Vice-consul Alfred Biliotti’s excavations at Ialysos were part of a long history of extraction of Greek antiquities from the Ottoman Empire. Biliotti had started excavating with Auguste Salzmann at ancient Kamiros in 1859, where they found mainly first millennium BC Greek material. The British Museum had helped obtain a firman and funded the excavation which largely took place in 1863–4 (Salmon Reference Salmon and Schierup2019). A handful of Bronze Age antiquities entered the collection at this time but were not recognised as such until later. In 1868 Charles Newton instructed Biliotti to locate the cemetery of Ialysos, which he did, on the hill of Moschou Vounara. Pleased with the contents of the four chamber tombs excavated by Biliotti there, Newton secured funding for further excavations from 1870 to 1872 from the art critic John Ruskin. The British Museum often relied on private donations to fund excavations.

In total Biliotti excavated forty-eight rock-cut chamber tombs on Moschou Vounara and nearby Makra Vounara for the British Museum (Mee Reference Mee1982). In general the tombs were not drawn but Biliotti did keep a record of tomb groups, most likely at the instigation of Newton. The material was mainly pottery although gold jewellery, glass beads, bronze weapons, sealstones and, importantly, three Egyptian scarabs were also found. The material was rapidly put on display at the British Museum, and Schliemann was shown the Ialysos material when he visited London to put his Trojan finds on display in 1877. It was at this time that Newton pointed out the similarities of the pottery with Mycenae, which he declared ‘almost identical’ (Newton Reference Newton and Newton1880: 284, 294). The Ialysos material was widely discussed in nineteenth-century publications on Mycenaean art. The octopus designs on several pots invited speculation about the evolution of art since they were more stylised than the naturalistic gold octopus plaques from Mycenae. The British Museum also acquired Mycenaean pottery from the islands of Kalymnos and Karpathos in the nineteenth century. They were obtained from local excavators by William Paton, who had travelled around the Aegean and married the daughter of the mayor of Kalymnos (Paton Reference Paton1887; Gill Reference Gill2011b: 211).

Following the Italian invasion of the Dodecanese in 1912 a permanent archaeological mission was established under the leadership of Amedeo Maiuri in order to undertake research on all periods. On Rhodes further Mycenaean tombs were excavated at Ialysos by Maiuri (Reference Maiuri1926) and Giulio Jacopi (Reference Jacopi1931). Other Mycenaean chamber tomb cemeteries on the island were mapped by Inglieri (Reference Inglieri1936). The Italian archaeological mission was closely linked to the Fascist regime and archaeologists were encouraged to publish their finds rapidly to demonstrate Italian control over the island (Salmon Reference Salmon2018: 158). Some of their finds are now in Florence, although the majority remained in Rhodes (Benzi Reference Benzi, Jasink and Bombardieri2009). A new archaeological museum was founded in the hospital of the Knights of Saint John, a medieval building which was restored as part of an effort to rediscover the island’s supposed Italian heritage (Orlandi Reference Orlandi, Falcucci, Giusti and Trentacoste2022). The islands remained under Italian administration until 1947, when they were relinquished as part of the peace treaty signed at the end of the Second World War.

5.3 Peloponnese and Central Greece

Antiquarian interest in the Peloponnese (also known as the Morea in the early modern period) and central Greece predates Greek Independence. Before and after this time, travellers frequently used Pausanias’ Description of Greece as a guidebook. The second-century geographer visited places including Mycenae, Tiryns and Orchomenos. His descriptions acted as a framework for interpreting these sites, such as use of the term ‘Treasury’ to describe tholos tombs. The first known traveller from western Europe to visit Mycenae was Cyriacus of Ancona in 1448 (Driessen and Kalantzopoulou Reference Driessen and Kalantzopoulou2024: 3). Cyriacus travelled across the Eastern Mediterranean in search of ancient remains and so can be regarded as one of the first antiquarians. The French scholar André de Monceaux visited Tiryns, and perhaps Mycenae, in 1669, while on a mission to collect coins and manuscripts for the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Moore et al. Reference Moore, Rowlands and Karadimas2014: 3). From 1700 onwards there are more frequent records of visits by travellers, starting with Francesco Vandeyk, an engineer taking part in a cadastral survey of the Morea during a brief period when it was held by the Venetians (Lavery and French Reference Lavery, French, Iakovidis and French2003: 1–2).

Mycenae became a focus of activity at the start of the nineteenth century. A number of artists drew the Lion Gate and Treasury of Atreus. Gell (Reference Gell1810) published a detailed and scholarly account of his visits with plans and drawings of both Tiryns and Mycenae. Colonel Leake also visited both sites in 1804 and noted the ‘extreme antiquity’ of the remains at Mycenae (Leake Reference Leake1830: 385; Moore et al. Reference Moore, Rowlands and Karadimas2014: 74–6). At around the same time Lord Elgin was able to obtain permission to take sculpture from the Treasury of Atreus. Its columns were then removed in 1810 by the governor of the Morea, Veli Pasha, who presented them to the visiting Marquis of Sligo. These adorned the side of Sligo’s country house in Ireland until they were presented to the British Museum in 1905, reuniting them with the sculptures acquired from Elgin a century earlier (Pryce Reference Pryce1928: 18–24).Footnote ⁶ Veli Pasha also uncovered the Tomb of Clytemnestra and so could be regarded as the first excavator at Mycenae (Neumeier Reference Neumeier, Anderson and Rojas2017). Mycenaean pottery, as well as sculpture, started to be collected at this time too. Thomas Burgon, who visited Mycenae in 1809, collected pottery sherds from the area and acquired a stirrup jar in Athens (Figure 8).Footnote ⁷ He later described the pottery of Mycenae and Cyclopean architecture as belonging to the ‘Heroic Age’ (Burgon Reference Burgon1847). Edward Clarke was given a stirrup jar by the British vice-consul in Argos, which he illustrated in his account of his travels and described as a ‘libatory vessel’ (Clarke Reference Clarke1814: 662).

Figure 8 Unpublished drawing by Thomas Burgon of a stirrup jar acquired in Athens, 1809. Burgon Archive drawing no. 241.

© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

The Morea Expedition, which began in 1828, marked the intervention of French forces in the Greek War of Independence. In a tradition going back to the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte, a scientific mission accompanied the army. The associated publications described the ancient remains of the Peloponnese, Attica and the Cyclades, as well as their natural history and geography. Detailed maps were also produced. As part of this effort, the remains of Mycenae and Tiryns were mapped in detail and various features drawn and described, but no excavations are recorded (Blouet Reference Blouet1833: 147–56). In other cases, such as Pylos, the remains associated with Homer were of a later date.

The first recorded excavation at Tiryns occurred in 1831, although it only lasted one day (Schiering Reference Schiering, Cancik, Chase, Gentry, Landfester and Schneider2010). It was undertaken by Friedrich Thiersch and Alexandros Rangavis, a founding member of the Archaeological Society of Athens. The Archaeological Society was also involved in early excavations at Mycenae, when Kyriakos Pittakis cleared the entrance at the Lion Gate in 1841 (Iakovidis and French Reference Iakovidis, French, Iakovidis and French2003: 11). The rights to excavate at Mycenae remained with the Archaeological Society, although Schliemann’s first excavation there with a few workmen in 1874 was undertaken without permission from them or the government. When he was forced to stop after a week, during which he made soundings across the site, he moved on to the nearby Argive Heraion for a day’s excavation (Traill Reference Traill1995: 128). He subsequently helped to fund the Society’s clearance of later buildings from the Athens Acropolis as a way to curry favour.

In 1876 Schliemann was granted permission from the Greek government to excavate at Mycenae, Tiryns and Orchomenos (Traill Reference Traill1995: 143). These were all places with mythical associations mentioned by Pausanias. After spending a week digging soundings in Tiryns, he moved on to Mycenae. The Archaeological Society had agreed to allow Schliemann to excavate there on its behalf, under the supervision of Panagiotis Stamatakis, who was also a member of the Ephoria and an experienced excavator. Sophia Schliemann also supervised the work and the steadily growing team of workmen, which came to number over 100. Excavations began in August at the Tomb of Clytemnestra and an area inside the citadel walls by the Lion Gate. Schliemann decided to dig here in search of the graves of Agamemnon and his followers since Pausanias said that they were buried within the city walls following their murder on their return from the Trojan War. The soundings in this area had also proved promising (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1878: 59–61). It is not clear if Pausanias was referring to this area but Schliemann’s literal approach soon paid dividends as he started to find a circular space, which he termed the Agora, and carved stele which looked like gravestones.

The Shaft Graves, which consisted of rock-cut chambers accessed by long vertical shafts, were not uncovered until November 1876. Schliemann was responsible for the excavation of five graves, each richer than the previous one. All contained multiple burials adorned with gold ornaments and accompanied by weapons and other precious grave goods. Shaft Grave IV was the first to contain gold masks covering the faces of the deceased. It was this grave which prompted Schliemann to send a telegram to the King of Greece to declare his success in finding the graves of Agamemnon and his followers (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1878: 365). A fifth was excavated in the following days and contained the mask which has become known as the ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ although was not identified as such by Schliemann (Figure 9).Footnote ⁸ Satisfied that he had found what he was looking for, Schliemann left. In just over two weeks he had cleared five graves containing nineteen individuals and thousands of grave goods (Karo Reference Karo1930). A sixth shaft grave was excavated in the following year by Stamatakis (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. Reference Papazoglou-Manioudaki, Nafplioti and Musgrave2009: 234–42).

Figure 9 Photograph of the Mask of Agamemnon.

Sir Arthur Evans Archive AJE/3/1/15/18/1. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

The discoveries at Mycenae caused an immediate sensation, both within Greece and internationally. Schliemann had been sending regular updates to The Times in London about his work at Mycenae (Meyer Reference Meyer1958: 53–66). In December 1876 a long article appeared in The Times headed ‘The Tomb of Agamemnon’ with a detailed account written by Schliemann of his discoveries of the first four graves. The following year the finds were put on display by the Archaeological Society, as arranged by Stamatakis (Konstantinidi-Syvridi and Paschalidis Reference Konstantinidi-Syvridi and Paschalidis2019: 116–8). Schliemann’s own account of his discoveries appeared in 1878, with a foreword by the prime minister of the United Kingdom, William Gladstone. They had met when Schliemann presented his discoveries at Mycenae to the Society of Antiquaries in London. Although a few scholars had doubted the antiquity of the remains, suggesting the masks were Byzantine or later, the discoveries at Mycenae convinced most people that there was some truth in the Homeric myths (Gardner Reference Gardner1880). Homer’s epithet for Mycenae, ‘rich in gold’, seemed to have been dramatically demonstrated, since over 15 kg of gold had been found in the graves. There was more doubt about the identities of those buried. Even Gladstone thought it unlikely that the murderers of Agamemnon would provide him with such a rich burial, and most scholars rejected the link altogether. Instead Schliemann’s results demonstrated that that there was a ‘heroic’ or ‘pre-hellenic’ stage in Greek history which could yield spectacular finds.

The effect of Schliemann’s excavation at Mycenae on prehistoric archaeology in Greece can be gauged by the number of tholos and chamber tombs excavated in the succeeding years. In many cases these would have been known locally but what Schliemann had demonstrated was that it was worth the expense of investigating such remains. Before this, for the Archaeological Society and others, the focus had been on classical Greek sites. In 1878, for instance, Stamatakis excavated a tholos tomb near the Argive Heraion whose entrance had been discovered by a local villager in 1872 (Stamatakis Reference Stamatakis1878). The previous year Stamatakis had excavated another large tomb at Spata in Attica, and a smaller tomb nearby, which had been revealed by a landslide. Its contents were not intact but some pottery and other finds were still in situ (Koumanoudis and Kastorchis Reference Koumanoudis and Kastorchis1877). Efthymios Kastorchis, a prominent member of the Archaeological Society, also explored chamber tombs at Nauplion with Ioannis Kondakis in 1878, noting their resemblance to those at Spata. Some had already been discovered by a local farmer (Kondakis and Kastorchis Reference Kondakis and Kastorchis1878). The first intact tholos tomb burial was excavated in 1879 by Habbo Lolling from the German Archaeological Institute at Menidi in Acharnes, Attica. As he noted in his report, the site had been known for some years but the other excavations of Mycenaean tombs had aroused interest in it (Lolling Reference Lolling1880: 1). Finds included glass jewellery, sealstones and a carved ivory box. Six skeletons were also found which proved that such tholoi were indeed tombs rather than treasuries (Tsountas and Manatt Reference Tsountas and Manatt1897: 6).

In 1880 Schliemann turned to the third site on his permit, the tholos tomb at Orchomenos. This had been described by Pausanias as the Treasury of Minyas and had long attracted attention. Colonel Leake visited and tried to resolve Pausanias’ description of a domed roof with a keystone with the remaining architecture, noting that ‘An excavation will some day determine this question’ (Leake Reference Leake1830: 379). Schliemann did not uncover burials but found an impressive carved slab and grey pottery which he named ‘Minyan Ware’ as well as Mycenaean sherds (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1881a, Reference Schliemann1881b). In the following decade several more Mycenaean tombs were excavated. Valerios Stais excavated the tholos at Thorikos and chamber tombs at Epidauros (Petrochilos Reference Petrochilos1992: 19–21). In 1889 Christos Tsountas excavated the tholos at Vapheio in Laconia and found an intact burial beneath the floor (Tsountas Reference Tsountas1889). With the skeleton were found around thirty sealstones, some from Crete, and two gold cups with repousse scenes of bull-catching which became known as the ‘Vapheio Cups’. They rapidly went on display in the newly opened National Archaeological Museum.Footnote ⁹

Tiryns and Mycenae continued to receive attention in the wake of these spectacular mortuary finds. Schliemann excavated at Tiryns for two seasons in 1884 and 1885, with Wilhelm Dörpfeld. They uncovered the plan of a building which they regarded as the palace on the citadel, using the Homeric term ‘megaron’ to describe the central rooms. This area, they decided, also following Homer, was the men’s quarters with the smaller women’s quarters nearby (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1885). In 1886 Christos Tsountas excavated the remains of the palace at Mycenae, which was less well preserved because part of the acropolis had eroded away (Tsountas Reference Tsountas1888). He continued to excavate in the surrounding area, revealing a large chamber tomb cemetery. Meanwhile in Athens, the excavations by Panagiotis Kavvadias on the Acropolis started to reveal Mycenaean remains (Tsountas and Manatt Reference Tsountas and Manatt1897: 8). This meant that the settlements of the Mycenaean period began to be better known too. Further Mycenaean settlement remains were discovered by an American team at the Argive Heraion in 1893 although the main focus was the later temple (Waldstein 1902–5). In the same year André de Ridder (Reference de Ridder1894) excavated the palace at Gla in the middle of the recently drained Copais basin. Although remains had been noted here as early as 1805, the excavation of other Mycenaean settlements allowed it to be identified as such (Lane Reference Lane2021).

By 1893, Christos Tsountas had enough evidence to paint a picture of the Mycenaean civilisation, with both mortuary and settlement sites, and a range of art objects. For the earlier stages of the civilisation, he looked across the Aegean to Troy and the Cyclades (Tsountas and Manatt Reference Tsountas and Manatt1897: 256–7). In the twentieth century, attention shifted to the origins of the Mycenaean civilisation on the mainland itself. Wilhelm Dörpfeld had returned to Tiryns in 1905, with Georg Karo and Kurt Müller, and the German Archaeological Institute excavations continued there until the outbreak of the First World War, resuming again in the 1920s (Schiering Reference Schiering, Cancik, Chase, Gentry, Landfester and Schneider2010). An important discovery was the Early Bronze Age Rundbau, a monumental circular building, in 1912 (Maran Reference Maran, Bartelheim, Horejs and Krauss2016). Orchomenos was excavated in 1903 and 1905 by Adolf Furtwängler and Heinrich Bulle for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, where early round buildings were also discovered (Bulle Reference Bulle1907). Furtwängler identified a type of lustrous pottery which he termed ‘Urfirnis’ in the early levels and Minyan Ware was recognised in the pre-Mycenaean levels. Rather than focussing on palaces and tombs, these excavations started to reveal the layers of occupation beneath Mycenaean sites.

Tumulus sites were to become increasingly important for the question of origins since they contained multiple phases of occupation going back to the Middle and Early Bronze Age, but without the disturbance by later architecture seen at palatial sites. One of the first tumuli to be excavated was Aphidna in Attica (Wide Reference Wide1896; Hielte Reference Hielte2023). This was also the first prehistoric Aegean site to be excavated by a Swedish archaeologist, Sam Wide. Within the tumulus, which Wide correctly identified as belonging to the start of the Middle Bronze Age, were thirteen later graves, including a number of shaft graves, although without the splendid finds of Mycenae. In the absence of a Swedish School of Archaeology, Wide worked closely with the German Archaeological Institute, receiving training from Wilhelm Dörpfeld. Another prehistoric tumulus, Magoula Balomenou at Chaeronea was excavated at the turn of the century by Georgios Sotiriadis (Reference Soteriadis1908).

These sites provided important comparative material for the tumulus at Korakou, excavated from 1915 by Carl Blegen, who was participating in the American School excavations at Corinth nearby. At Korakou, Blegen discovered a complete sequence of Bronze Age pottery, having excavated the mound stratigraphically under the guidance of Alan Wace (Blegen Reference Blegen1921; Tzonou-Herbst Reference Tzonou-Herbst, Vogeikoff-Brogan, Davis and Florou2015). It was this which enabled him, with Alan Wace, to propose a classification of Helladic pottery from mainland sites (Wace and Blegen Reference Wace and Blegen1918). Lustrous Urfirnis pottery was grouped with other wares as Early Helladic, while Minyan Ware was included with Matt-Painted pottery as Middle Helladic. These provided the precursors to Late Helladic Mycenaean pottery. Blegen went on to excavate another multi-period site, Zygouries in the Argolid, where an extensive Early Helladic settlement was found (Blegen Reference Blegen1928). Eutresis, near Thebes, was another tumulus site with a long history of occupation. This was excavated in the 1920s by the American Hetty Goldman, one of the few women to lead an excavation in this period (Goldman Reference Goldman1931). The importance of these pre-Mycenaean sites for their excavators was that they helped to confirm the Bronze Age sequence and shed light on the inhabitants of Greece before the Mycenaean civilisation. The change in pottery types seen between Early and Middle Helladic led to suggestions of some kind of invasion (Blegen Reference Blegen1928: 186; Goldman Reference Goldman1931: 233). As Wace and Blegen (Reference Wace and Blegen1918: 189) argued, ‘the period of Minyan Ware indicates the introduction of a new cultural strain, the origin of which is not yet clear’. This fitted into the culture-historical thinking which characterised European prehistory at this time. This was epitomised by Gordon Childe, who had worked with Wace and Blegen during the First World War and later wrote about these sites in The Dawn of European Civilisation (Childe Reference Childe1957: 66–83).

Mycenae too was subject to continuing debate about the origins of its inhabitants. Alan Wace, director of the British School at Athens, resumed excavations there in 1919, which continued until 1923 (Lamb and Wace Reference Lamb and Wace1921; Wace et al. Reference Wace, Heurtley, Lamb, Holland and Boethius1923). One of his contributions was to use the refined pottery chronology to establish a sequence of construction for citadel and surrounding tombs. He demonstrated that Grave Circle A predated the building of the citadel wall and was part of a larger cemetery. His dating of the tholoi resulted in a serious disagreement with Sir Arthur Evans about the relative chronology of the mainland and Crete. Wace argued that the Treasury of Atreus post-dated the destruction at Knossos, showing that the archaeology of mainland Greece was partly independent of Crete (Figure 10). As a result Evans’ ‘pan-Minoan’ theory of mainland conquest by Crete in the Shaft Grave period became less tenable. This disagreement continued for the next two decades and was only really settled in Wace’s favour with the decipherment of Linear B. Wace resumed excavations at Mycenae in 1939 and continued after the Second World War.

Figure 10 Section drawing of the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae.

Drawn by A. Silcock. Mycenae Archive MCNE-2-2-03-03. © Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

The Argolid continued to be a focus of Mycenaean archaeology in this period. Wilhelm Vollgraf, a Dutch archaeologist, excavated the prehistoric site of Aspis near Argos and the associated Deiras cemetery in 1902–4 (Vollgraf Reference Vollgraff1904; Papadimitriou et al. Reference Papadimitriou, Philippa-Touchais, Touchais and Murphy2020). Carl Blegen resumed excavations at the Argive Heraion in the 1920s, finding the Bronze Age settlement Prosymna (Blegen Reference Blegen1937). He also continued excavations in the chamber tomb cemetery started by Stamatakis. A number of sites were excavated in the 1920s by Swedish archaeologists led by Otto Frödin and Axel Persson. They began excavations in 1922 at Asine, a Mycenaean citadel which was mentioned in the Iliad (Frödin and Persson Reference Frödin and Persson1938: 15). The main backer of the dig was the Crown Prince of Sweden, who also took part. In 1926 Persson was invited by the Ephor Nikolaos Bertos to dig a tholos tomb at Dendra whose entrance had been uncovered by local villagers. Intact burials of three individuals accompanied by jewellery, sealstones, bronze weapons and two gold cups, one with an octopus design, were found in graves below the floor.Footnote ¹⁰ Persson regarded these as a king, queen and princess (Persson Reference Persson1931: 8–18). Further tombs were excavated by the Ephor and Swedish team in subsequent years. The 1939 season saw work in the nearby citadel of Midea where a Mycenaean palace was identified before the Second World War intervened (Persson Reference Persson1942).

Alongside the improvements in pottery typologies and excavation methods, the twentieth century saw a continuation of interest in Homeric sites. As well as the ongoing excavations at Tiryns, Mycenae and Orchomenos, new sites were discovered. In 1906 a Mycenaean palace, identified as the House of Kadmos or Kadmeia, was discovered under modern Thebes by Antonios Keramopoullos (Reference Keramopoullos1909; Aravantinos Reference Aravantinos, Darcque, Fotiadis and Polychronopoulou2006). Among the important finds were fragments of wall painting showing a procession of elaborately dressed female figures. The palace’s excavation had to take place piecemeal until 1929 because of the modern buildings above. In 1910 a Mycenaean building was uncovered near Sparta, beneath the later shrine to Menelaus and Helen, although it was not identified as a palace by the excavators (Dawkins and Woodward Reference Dawkins and Woodward1910). This was part of a broader project on this area started by the British School at Athens which focussed mainly on the later sanctuaries. The Mycenaean palace at nearby Ayios Vasileos was only discovered in 2009.

One Homeric site which had not been located despite various attempts to identify it was Pylos. The toponym was still associated with the Bay of Navarino in the southwest Peloponnese and various sites in the area had been identified with Nestor’s Palace. Schliemann made a number of trial excavations at one candidate in 1888 (Blegen Reference Blegen and Rawson1966: 3). In 1907–8 Wilhelm Dörpfeld excavated three tholos tombs further up the coast at Kakovatos which still contained rich grave goods. He identified an associated building as Nestor’s Palace. Attention began to shift back to Pylos with the excavation of two tholos tombs in the vicinity by Ephor Konstantinos Kourouniotis following reports of looting. This suggested that a Mycenaean settlement was yet to be found in this area. Kourouniotis initiated a survey in 1927–8 in collaboration with Carl Blegen in order to locate further sites. The prime candidate became the ridge of Ano Englianos where the local landowner had already informed the Ephorate about archaeological remains (Davis Reference Davis, Vogeikoff-Brogan, Davis and Florou2015: 209). After disagreements with the American School, Carl Blegen had turned to Troy, and only started excavations at Pylos in 1939. He immediately discovered substantial walls, painted plaster and a cache of Linear B tablets (Blegen and Rawson Reference Blegen and Rawson1966: 1–7). By the time the first season finished, over 600 Linear B tablets had been found in what was identified as the Archive Room. When the excavation resumed in 1952, the Linear B tablets had been published in preliminary form, which aided their decipherment. Excavations continued until 1964. Although methods of excavation and standards of publication had improved dramatically since 1876, the long tradition of excavating at sites associated with Greek mythology continued.

5.4 Cycladic Islands

The trajectory of prehistoric Aegean archaeology in the Cyclades was different from the mainland because of the character of the archaeological remains and associated objects. Even before the Kingdom of Greece was established, of which the Cyclades were a constituent part, Cycladic figurines and other objects were being dug up from graves and exported. The British Museum collection includes both Cycladic and Mycenaean figurines from the collection of Percy Smythe, Sixth Viscount Strangford, who was ambassador to the Sublime Porte in 1820–4. One of the Mycenaean figurines was acquired on Melos in 1821, and three Cycladic figurines were almost certainly acquired at the same time, probably from a dealer on Mykonos (Pryce Reference Pryce1928: 8–12; Galanakis Reference Galanakis2013: 199).Footnote ¹¹ Thomas Burgon, who operated as a merchant in the Aegean, excavated Cycladic pottery from Melos and a marble figurine from Syros, acquired 1809, which also entered the British Museum collection (Pryce Reference Pryce1928: 10).Footnote ¹² A contemporary drawing also survives but this was not published at the time (Figure 11). A French naval officer, Jules de Blosseville, acquired Cycladic vases on Melos around 1831, which he donated to the National Ceramics Museum at Sèvres (Brongniart and Riocreux Reference Brongniart and Riocreux1845: 52–3). These probably came from graves in the area of Phylakopi, discovered in 1830 (Atkinson et al. Reference Atkinson, Bosanquet and Edgar1904: 24). Around the same time Friedrich Thiersch acquired two marble figurines on Paros while part of an official Bavarian delegation to Greece. In his publication of them Thiersch (Reference Thiersch1835) followed classical tradition in identifying the figures as Carian, and later donated them to the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe.Footnote ¹³ Although these are early examples, the flow of Cycladic objects out of Greece into western European collections continued despite the 1834 antiquities law, with most lacking a provenance beyond an island of origin.

Figure 11 Unpublished drawing by Thomas Burgon of a Cycladic figurine acquired on Syros, 1809. Burgon Archive drawing no. 298.

© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

When the first General Ephor of Greece, Ludwig Ross, toured the islands in the 1830s, he witnessed islanders digging Early Bronze Age tombs and in some cases acquired their contents. On Ios in 1837 he and his travelling companions were shown the location where a hellenistic sarcophagus known as the ‘Tomb of Homer’ had been found in the eighteenth century. The Russian naval officer who removed the sarcophagus, Graf Pasch van Krienen, had noted marble bowls and obsidian blades in the same location (Ross Reference Ross1840: 161; Fotiadis Reference Fotiadis2016: 97). The landowner showed the contents of other graves, including obsidian blades and marble figurines, which had been opened more recently in the same location. George Finlay, who was accompanying Ross, purchased figurines from Ios, which he described as ‘rude’, and other objects. Ross too bought a figurine, which is now in Copenhagen (Arnott Reference Arnott1990).Footnote ¹⁴ Ross (Reference Ross1837: 408–9) compared the figurines he had seen on Ios and Thera with those published by Thiersch, describing them as ‘vorhellenisch’ (pre-Hellenic). He suggested that Thera in particular, where he had excavated later graves, clearly concealed many ancient remains under its layer of pumice.

There is circumstantial evidence that members of the Morea Expedition excavated Bronze Age levels on Thera in 1829 and found prehistoric pottery (Tzachili Reference Tzachili2005: 234). One of their number also donated a kernos from Melos to the Sèvres Museum (Bosanquet Reference Bosanquet1897: 60). Thera was of particular interest to scientists because of the volcanic activity there. It was also already being extensively excavated for its pumice, which was used to make concrete, most notably in the construction of the Suez Canal. These excavations had uncovered antiquities, and there were already collections of antiquities in private hands when Ross visited in the 1830s and 1840s (Tzachili Reference Tzachili2005: 242). The collectors were members of the island’s ruling classes who had developed an interest in its antiquities and history. When the Thera volcano erupted in 1866, a French scientific mission was despatched to study the island, in some ways a continuation of the Morea Expedition. When they arrived they became interested in a prehistoric building which had already been revealed by islanders quarrying pumice on the islet of Therasia. Two of the local collectors, Sigouras Alaphouzos and Nikolaos Nomikos, conducted an excavation on behalf of the French (Tzachili Reference Tzachili2005: 243–5; Fotiadis Reference Fotiadis2016: 101). The classical archaeologist on the mission François Lenormant (Reference Lenormant1866: 432) regarded the associated pottery as Phoenician, since Herodotus recorded that Thera was formerly a Phoenician colony. The geologist Fouqué (Reference Fouqué1879), who supervised further excavations in 1867, instead turned to the three-age system and classified the remains as belonging to the Stone Age, in the absence of bronze (Figure 12). He also established that the building predated the prehistoric eruption of the island and assigned it a date of 2000 BCE using geological methods. Subsequent excavations in 1870 by Emile Burnouf did recover bronze, leading to his recognition that the associated antiquities belonged to the Bronze Age. As Iris Tzachili (Reference Tzachili2005: 233) observes, this excavation was abandoned by the French because of funding restrictions caused by the Franco-Prussian war and did not resume because the finds were incidental to the Greek political narrative. The Thera excavations were more closely aligned with the study of prehistory in northern Europe at this time.

Figure 12 Vases from Thera.

(Fouqué Reference Fouqué1879: pl. XLI)

Some of the first documented excavations on other Cycladic islands took place in the 1880s, but in some ways they mark a continuation of the small-scale local excavations that go back to earlier in the century. Two figurines, a harpist and an aulete, were found in a grave in Keros in 1883 and acquired by the Archaeological Society before being transferred to the National Archaeological Museum (Köhler Reference Köhler1884).Footnote ¹⁵ James Theodore Bent travelled around the Cyclades with his wife Mabel in 1883–4 and decided to excavate at Antiparos, opening forty cist graves (Bent Reference Bent1885: 403–10). The cemeteries were pointed out to him by islanders, who also took part in the excavations. Finds were donated to the British Museum, including ceramics, obsidian tools and figurines. Bent suggested that they must predate the finds at Thera, and so belong to the ‘remotest antiquity’. In 1885 Georg Ferdinand Dümmler visited Amorgos and commissioned excavations, although his ostensible aim was to view collections (Dümmler Reference Dümmler1886; Galanakis Reference Galanakis2013). A prominent local collector and antiquarian was a priest, Dimitrios Prasinos, who showed the Bents round the island. Prasinos was also a landowner and excavator, who later worked with Christos Tsountas. Before the passing of the 1899 law, landowners such as Prasinos were entitled to dig for antiquities but the state should have issued a permit and had first refusal on their sale. Instead it was travellers and Athens-based antiquities dealers who tended to buy these objects.

By the time Tsountas conducted his own excavations in the Cyclades on behalf of the Greek state in the 1890s, the major cemeteries had all been extensively disturbed. Tsountas’ work at Amorgos, Syros, Paros and Sifnos differed from previous excavators in that he documented his discoveries extensively and his finds went to the National Archaeological Museum (Tsountas Reference Tsountas1898, Reference Tsountas1899). As a result he is credited with identifying the Cycladic civilisation. On Syros he also undertook the first documented excavation at the settlement site of Kastri in 1898. Digging had started at the nearby cemetery of Chalandriani by 1861, but Tsountas uncovered 540 graves here in 1898 (Marthari Reference Marthari1998: 17–18). The first settlement site to be excavated, from 1896 to 1899, was Phylakopi on Melos, by members of the British School at Athens. They had initially come to Melos in search of classical remains but turned their attention to Phylakopi because it was described by Dümmler and objects from the cemetery there were known from the Athens antiquities market (Atkinson et al. Reference Atkinson, Bosanquet and Edgar1904: 1–2). From the start it was of interest because it had both Cycladic and Mycenaean remains, so offered a stratified Bronze Age sequence. Duncan Mackenzie was placed in charge of the excavations. He had studied in Munich, Berlin and Vienna, so had a thorough grounding in Altertumwissenschaft, but no archaeological experience. Nevertheless he soon gained a reputation as a scientific excavator and kept detailed records of the work there. He also travelled round the Cyclades acquiring antiquities for Arthur Evans at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Momigliano Reference Momigliano1999: 16–35).

Cycladic sculpture enjoyed a surge of interest in the first half of the twentieth century in the art world but this was not matched by the pace of research in the islands themselves. The British returned for a further season at Phylakopi in 1909 to make further tests of the stratigraphy. French excavations on Delos, which had always focussed on the classical remains, revealed prehistoric levels on Mount Kynthos underneath the later sanctuaries. Another prolific excavator of Early Cycladic tombs was the Greek anthropologist Klon Stephanos, who worked on Syros and Naxos (Zervos Reference Zervos1957: 2–4; Papazoglou-Manioudaki Reference Papazoglou-Manioudaki, Marthari, Renfrew and Boyd2017). The primitivism movement resulted in a re-evaluation of Cycladic sculpture, which was increasingly praised for its simplicity rather than being regarded as ugly. Museums outside Greece continued to collect Cycladic sculpture in the interwar period although the scale of acquisition, and looting, increased in the 1950s and 1960s (Gill and Chippindale Reference Gill and Chippindale1993: 616). Typological studies lagged behind, with Colin Renfrew’s (Reference Renfrew1969) classification the first serious attempt to establish a systematic framework for the study of figurines.

5.5 Ionian Islands

The Ionian Islands have an entirely different political history from other Greek islands since they were never part of the Ottoman Empire. The conquest of Venice by Napoleon in 1797 saw them become French possessions but they were rapidly taken by the British during the Napoleonic Wars. From 1815 they were formally a British protectorate with their own government and legal system. As in the Aegean, however, the Homeric Question dominated research since Odysseus was king of Ithaca. In 1806 Leake had visited Alalkomenes, the fortified hellenistic site on Mount Aetos which was traditionally associated with Odysseus’ Palace: ‘I pitched my tent, and remained the whole day examining the ruins, or looking over the topographical passages of the Odyssey, while a party of labourers excavated some ancient sepulchres in the valley’ (Leake Reference Leake1835: 34). His labourers, he noted, did not find anything earlier than Roman coins. Another traveller, John Lee, had more success in 1812, when his hired labourers hit a hellenistic tomb elsewhere on the island. Lee (Reference Lee1849) was also interested in Homeric remains and had sought permission from the commandant of Ithaca to dig. Both recorded that the local inhabitants frequently found antiquities on their land, and so hiring them to look for ancient remains was not a leap of the imagination. The main difference was that the travellers recorded, albeit vaguely, where excavations took place.

On the neighbouring island of Cephallonia the Swiss engineer Philippe de Bosset initiated various road-building projects while acting as governor on behalf of the British. As a result Mycenaean tombs were discovered at Mazarakata in 1813, whose contents he donated to Neuchâtel Museum and probably the local library in Argostoli (Souyoudzoglou-Haywood Reference Souyoudzoglou-Haywood1999: 9, 149–50). De Bosset did not publish his finds, although he did describe them in his correspondence, allowing the Neuchâtel finds to be published retrospectively when their significance was finally realised (Brodbeck-Jucker Reference Brodbeck-Jucker1986). When the Ephor General Panagiotis Kavvadias excavated further chamber tombs in this location in 1899, he was unaware of the earlier finds. He later excavated two robbed tholoi in the same area (Kavvadias Reference Kavvadias1912) (Figure 13). A British army officer based on Corfu, James Woodhouse, amassed a large collection of objects, many of which were donated to the British Museum on his death in 1866. They include a Mycenaean dagger said to come from Ithaca (Sandars Reference Sandars1963: 152).Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 13 Plan and section drawing of tholos tomb at Mazarakata.

(Kavvadias Reference Kavvadias1912: figs. 1–3)

Homeric archaeology continued on the Ionian islands after they were ceded to Greece in 1864. The main difference between archaeology here and elsewhere in the Aegean is that a Mycenaean palace has not to date been found in this area. In 1868, on his first visit to Ithaca, Schliemann too visited Mount Aetos and hired workmen to dig where he thought the palace should be. He identified cremation burials found there with Odysseus and Penelope although these are now known to postdate the Bronze Age (Schliemann Reference Schliemann1869: 27–38). Without clear evidence on Ithaca, the search widened to include other islands. From 1900 a wealthy Dutch architect, Adriaan Goekoop, funded a number of excavation projects to answer this question: Panagiotis Kavvadias favoured Cephallonia, his native island; Wilhelm Vollgraf excavated at Polis on Ithaca, where he found Mycenaean sherds; Wilhelm Dörpfeld turned to the island of Leukada as the most likely candidate. There he excavated for a number of years from 1901, finding Early Helladic tumuli but almost no trace of Mycenaean occupation, which did not shake his belief that this was Odysseus’ island (Dörpfeld and Goessler Reference Dörpfeld and Goessler1927). In the 1930s, the British School at Athens, funded by Lord Rennell, continued to explore Ithaca (Rennell Rodd Reference Rennell Rodd1933). Sylvia Benton found a number of bronze tripods at the Cave of the Nymphs at Polis, which almost certainly indicated a later hero cult to Odysseus, but little evidence for Mycenaean remains (Benton Reference Benton1935). Mycenaean sherds also were discovered at Aetos for the first time (Heurtley and Lorimer Reference Heurtley and Lorimer1933). Benton and Hilda Lorimer went on to excavate at Zakynthos, where they did find Late Bronze Age remains (Souyoudzoglou-Haywood Reference Souyoudzoglou-Haywood1999: 126). The search for Odysseus’ Palace continues to the present day (Souyoudzoglou-Haywood Reference Souyoudzoglou-Haywood2018).

5.6 Thessaly

The focus of activity for prehistoric archaeology in Thessaly was initially the area around Volos, where the ancient city of Iolkos was located. Early in the nineteenth century Dodwell identified Homeric Iolkos at Ano Volos, where there are visible Byzantine remains (Dodwell Reference Dodwell1819: 30–31; Reference Dodwell1834: 30). In the decades after 1881, when Thessaly became part of Greece, Mycenaean remains were excavated at Dimini, to the west of Volos and Kastro Palaia, now an eastern suburb. Three tholos tombs were excavated in the vicinity of Dimini. First was Lamiospito in 1886, excavated by Habbo Lolling with a local schoolteacher, Eleutherios Kousis (Lolling and Wolters Reference Lolling and Wolters1886). Schoolteachers and other officials were co-opted by the Ephorate to work on its behalf as Thessaly was absorbed into Greece (Gallis Reference Gallis and Helly1979: 2). Valerios Stais excavated a further two tholoi in Dimini, in 1892 and 1901. Christos Tsountas excavated Mycenaean tombs at Kastro between 1900 and 1902. Mycenaean vessels from Pefkakia, on the harbour of Volos, were published by Wolters (Reference Wolters1889), who had been able to identify the site after seeing them in a local collection. The site was not excavated until the 1950s. An unlooted tholos containing gold ornaments was excavated at Kapakli in Volos in 1905 by the Ephor Konstantinos Kourouniotis (Reference Kourouniotis1906). These finds helped to show the importance of Mycenaean Iolkos, traditionally associated with the hero Jason, although its exact location, whether Volos or Dimini, remained unclear.

The work on Mycenaean tombs resulted in the identification of some of the mounds of Thessaly as Neolithic tell sites (other local terms include magoula and toumba). Christos Tsountas first excavated in Thessaly in 1899 to investigate the Mycenaean tombs at Marmariani near Larissa (Gallis Reference Gallis and Helly1979: 3). On the mound there he saw bone and stone tools as well as what looked like pre-Mycenaean pottery. In 1901 Stais had started to investigate the mound at Dimini which the tholos tomb had been dug into. This turned out to be a large Late Neolithic settlement consisting of several enclosures containing dwellings with distinctive burnished dark-on-white painted vessels (Tsountas Reference Tsountas1908: 27–68) (Figure 14). In the same year Tsountas started excavations at nearby Sesklo, where Leake had noted an ancient site when he passed through in 1809 (Leake Reference Leake1835: 399). Tsountas excavated on the Kastraki hill, finding a settlement with deep stratification which he divided into Earlier and Later Neolithic, with Bronze Age above. Here there were mudbrick buildings with stone footings, monochrome and painted pottery and a large number of figurines. He subsequently finished the excavations of Stais at Dimini in 1903 (Tsountas Reference Tsountas1908: 69–104). By the time he wrote up his findings in The Prehistoric Citadels of Dimini and Sesklo he had identified sixty-three Neolithic sites, laying the foundations for the study of the Neolithic in Greece (Tsountas Reference Tsountas1908: 1–14).

Figure 14 Phased plan of the settlement of Dimini.

(Tsountas Reference Tsountas1908: pl. 2)

Alan Wace, John Droop and Maurice Thompson from the British School at Athens continued the exploration of Thessaly by digging at a number of Neolithic and Bronze Age mounds: Theotokou in 1907, Zerelia in 1908, Lianokladi and Tsani in 1909, and Tsangli and Rakhmani in 1910 (Wace and Thompson Reference Wace and Thompson1912). Their principal aim was to isolate pottery sequences by digging them stratigraphically. They accepted Tsountas’ division of the Neolithic into two but defined a number of different types of pottery within each period. Dark-on-light ‘Dimini Ware’ became one of the characteristic wares of the later Neolithic. They identified a Chalcolithic phase before the Bronze Age which signalled that they regarded Thessaly as more similar to Central Europe than southern Greece. As they concluded: ‘Starting with the earliest remains and proceeding in chronological order up to the end of the prehistoric age we saw that North Greece throughout possessed a different culture from the south, and that Mycenaean influence never succeeded in permeating Thessaly, which always continued in a backward and barbarous state of civilisation’ (Wace and Thompson Reference Wace and Thompson1912: 255). In this way Thessaly came to occupy a role as a precursor of Mycenaean Greece but also a peripheral part of it. From the 1950s a new wave of archaeological research revisited many of these sites and put Thessaly back at the forefront of research on Neolithic Greece (Andreou et al. Reference Andreou, Fotiadis, Kotsakis and Cullen2001: 261–82)

5.7 Northern Greece and the Islands of the Northern Aegean

Mounds became emblematic of the prehistory of Macedonia. Although they had been observed by earlier travellers, their significance as prehistoric sites was not realised until they started to be excavated in the late nineteenth century. Even then, the existence of hellenistic burial mounds in the landscape alongside prehistoric tell sites meant that it took time to distinguish between them. Léon Heuzey, the French archaeologist, became the first to excavate one of these mounds, finding a built tomb (Heuzey Reference Heuzey1860: 171–7). One of the first to excavate a prehistoric mound was the Ottoman archaeologist Theodore Makridis, Makridi Bey, who went on to succeed Hamdi Bey as director of the Imperial Museum at Constantinople. In the late nineteenth century he dug at the mound at Kalamaria (Toumba Thessaloniki) in search of a tomb but rapidly realised its prehistoric character (Palli Reference Palli, Adam-Veleni and Koukouvou2012). He went on to excavate the prehistoric mound of Platanaki but did not publish his results (Wace Reference Wace1914: 128; Heurtley Reference Heurtley1939: 25).

The first publications about the prehistoric mounds of Macedonia relied on surface collections. In 1900 Paul Traeger collected sherds from various mounds and brought them back to Berlin to show Hubert Schmidt, who was also working on the pottery from Troy (Schmidt Reference Schmidt1902a; Traeger Reference Traeger1902). This helped to date them to the Bronze Age. Traeger made a distinction between the later Greek conical burial mounds and the flatter settlement sites which he regarded as prehistoric. Alan Wace and Maurice Thompson moved north from Thessaly from 1909 to survey the mounds of Macedonia, proposing a threefold classification which split the settlement toumbes into prehistoric and later Greek in date, and created a list of seventy mounds (Wace and Thompson Reference Wace and Thompson1909; Wace Reference Wace1914). The British had established a ‘Macedonian Exploration Fund’ in 1911 to support further research but war intervened (Gill Reference Gill2011b: 181–3).

Soon after Greece’s territorial gains in the Balkan Wars were ratified in the 1913 Treaty of Constantinople, an Ephor, Georgios Oikonomos, was despatched to take over the archaeological affairs of the area around Thessaloniki. Apostolos Arvanitopoulos, previously Ephor of Thessaly, became the Ephor of the newly conquered region of Central and Western Macedonia, having himself fought in an artillery regiment during the area’s capture (Gallis Reference Gallis and Helly1979: 8–9). It was the First World War, however, which resulted in the first large-scale excavation of the prehistoric mounds, and many other sites in Macedonia (Adam-Veleni and Koukouvou Reference Adam-Veleni and Koukouvou2012; Shapland and Stefani Reference Shapland and Stefani2017; Andreou and Efkleidou Reference Andreou and Efkleidou2018). When the Army of the Orient, initially comprising British and French forces, arrived in Thessaloniki in late 1915, its soldiers began to dig defensive trenches to defend the city (Figure 15). This resulted in, among other finds, the discovery of an Early Neolithic site at Aivatli (Lete) and the identification of a nearby prehistoric mound (Gardner and Casson Reference Gardner and Casson1919: 12–15; Dimoula Reference Dimoula, Shapland and Stefani2017). Both British and French archaeologists were serving in the army, and they made an agreement with the Ephorate that they should gather finds in Thessaloniki. The first curator of the British Salonika Force Museum was Ernest Gardner, who had been Director of the British School at Athens. When the frontline moved north in 1916, Gardner and others began to explore prehistoric sites in the area, including Toumba Thessaloniki, but they generally only collected sherds or dug small exploratory trenches (Cooksey et al. Reference Cooksey, Woodward and Casson1919; Gardner and Casson Reference Gardner and Casson1919). One important site discovered at this time was Dikili Tash, which was only fully excavated after the Second World War (Welch Reference Welch1919). By contrast the lead French archaeologist Léon Rey conducted systematic excavations at various sites, including the prehistoric mound of Gona. Immediately after the war he published a monograph which put the excavation results in a wider geographical context and also included stratified pottery for the first time (Rey Reference Rey1919). By the time the troops departed in 1919, the region of Macedonia had been thoroughly surveyed as a result of military activity and many more prehistoric sites reported.

Figure 15 Photograph of British soldiers digging at Aivatli (Lete).

© IWM (Q 13729).

British involvement in Macedonia continued after the War. Stanley Casson, one of the curators of the British Salonika Force Museum, returned to Macedonia in 1921 in order to explore the mound at Chauchitza, a former British Army camp where Iron Age graves had been discovered. Some of the workers he employed were refugees from the Caucasus (Casson Reference Casson1925a: 4). Casson was keen to establish the stratification of the mound, which went back to the Bronze Age. He went on to dig another mound at Kilindir with successive Bronze Age and Iron Age levels (Casson Reference Casson1926: 127–32). His intention was to produce scientific accounts of the different strata, which he felt that Rey’s work had lacked. At the same time he drew on nineteenth-century ideas to explain the strata, which at both sites were characterised by a burnt destruction layer at the end of the Bronze Age. This he attributed to the Dorian invasion, while he described the Bronze Age of Chauchitza as a terramare culture, invoking Herodotus and the Swiss lake dwellers (Casson Reference Casson1925b). His experiences of the First World War also informed his thinking since fear of a northern invasion was the reason for the Macedonian Front in the first place (Casson Reference Casson1921).

Another British archaeologist who first visited Macedonia as a soldier, Walter Heurtley, worked with Casson and went on to excavate a number of other sites using the same principles (Figure 16). As with excavations of tumuli elsewhere in the Aegean, this allowed him to refine the existing pottery chronology. He summarised these excavations in the important publication Prehistoric Macedonia, with an associated pottery typology divided into Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age (Heurtley Reference Heurtley1939). The Late Bronze Age ceramics included Mycenaean pottery, largely locally made, alongside the handmade burnished wares which characterised the Macedonian Bronze Age. Heurtley’s book was an explicit attempt to integrate the archaeology of Macedonia into the Aegean Bronze Age. Nevertheless its study remained largely distinct, its material culture and sites often regarded as less sophisticated than the Mycenaean Greece of the south (Fotiadis Reference Fotiadis2001; Kotsakis Reference Kotsakis, Shapland and Stefani2017).

Figure 16 Section drawing of the mound of Vardarophtsa.

(Heurtley Reference Heurtley1939: fig. 37)

Other parts of mainland northern Greece received less archaeological attention until much later. Nineteenth-century travellers, particularly Colonel Leake and Christopher Wordsworth, surveyed Epirus, with a particular interest in finding the classical site of Dodona. Wordsworth did identify the site and later excavations by Dimitrios Evangelidis from 1929 uncovered Bronze Age layers. Other Bronze Age sites were identified by Nicholas Hammond in the 1930s, but his publication and excavations only happened after the Second World War (Tartaron Reference Tartaron2004: 18–19). Hammond spent some of the War in the same area, as a British army liaison officer working with local resistance groups. Bronze Age Thrace was also neglected, although the Ephor of Macedonia Eustratios Pelekides did explore the site of Paradimi in the 1920s (Andreou et al. Reference Andreou, Fotiadis, Kotsakis and Cullen2001: 313–4).

Major excavations by the Foreign Schools did take place on the islands of the north Aegean. These were mainly in search of classical antiquities, as with French excavations at Thasos and Samothrace. Italian excavations on Lemnos turned to Poliochni in the 1930s, where a major Neolithic and Early Bronze Age site was excavated. The lead archaeologist, Alessandro Della Seta, was interested in the island’s traditional connections with the Tyrrhenians/Etruscans (Bernabò Brea Reference Bernabò Brea1964; Cultraro Reference Cultraro, Darcque, Fotiadis and Polychronopoulou2006). Important finds included an Early Bronze Age public building dubbed the ‘Boulouterion’ and a hoard of gold jewellery from the same period. Winifred Lamb, a British archaeologist who had worked with Wace and Heurtley, initiated excavations at Thermi on Lesbos in 1929, uncovering an Early Bronze Age settlement (Lamb Reference Lamb1936). Poliochni and Thermi both showed strong similarities with Troy, resulting in a better understanding of the north-east Aegean in the Early Bronze Age. This provided an alternative, regional, context for the ‘Priam’s Treasure’ and ‘Priam’s Palace’ of Troy II instead of the ill-fitting Homeric framework.

5.8 Crete

Crete joined the Greek War of Independence but remained part of the Ottoman Empire. During the nineteenth century, political unrest and violence between the island’s Christian and Muslim populations culminated in the Halepa Pact of 1878, which gave more autonomy to the Cretans. It allowed for the establishment of a Society for the Promotion of Education (Σύλλογος Φιλεκπαιδευτικός) in various places, with Minos Kalokairinos a founder member of the Heraklion Syllogos (Kopaka Reference Kopaka, Macdonald, Hatzaki and Andreou2015: 143). In 1883, under its new president, Iosif Hatzidakis, it was responsible for the establishment of a collection of antiquities which became the nucleus of Heraklion Archaeological Museum (Hatzidakis Reference Hatzidakis1931; Carabott Reference Carabott, Hamilakis and Momigliano2006: 46; Mandalaki Reference Mandalaki and Shapland2023). The Heraklion Syllogos sought to prevent new excavations while Crete was still under Ottoman control, and subject to its antiquities laws. In 1898 further rioting led to the ‘Great Powers’ taking control of the island and installing Prince George of Greece as the governor of an independent Cretan State, albeit still formally part of the Ottoman Empire. The Cretan State passed its own antiquities law in 1899, drafted by Hatzidakis, establishing a museum and two Ephors (Carabott Reference Carabott, Hamilakis and Momigliano2006: 47). Foreign excavations were permitted, following lobbying from excavators including Sir Arthur Evans (Brown Reference Brown2001: 269–304). A further law was passed in 1903 allowing the export of finds from excavations deemed surplus to Cretan museums (Panagiotaki Reference Panagiotaki, Cadogan, Hatzaki and Vasilakis2004). These measures largely aligned Crete with Greece. Following further unrest Crete eventually became part of Greece in 1913 under the terms of the Treaty of London, signed at the conclusion of the First Balkan War.

Although the political situation on Crete made excavations difficult until the twentieth century, the search for the location of the mythical Labyrinth goes back much further. Like Troy, the Greek and Roman city of Knossos celebrated its mythical past, but ancient authors including Pliny the Elder suggested that no remains of the Labyrinth survived there.Footnote ¹⁷ This meant that travellers to Crete from the fifteenth century looked elsewhere, and an underground quarry near the Roman city of Gortyn in the south became a prime candidate (Kotsonas Reference Kotsonas2018). The Florentine cleric Cristoforo Buondelmonti, who first visited Crete in 1415, identified the Palace of King Minos at Gortyn. His map of the island also showed the Labyrinth near Gortyn rather than at Knossos. The location of Knossos had not been forgotten and coins helped confirm this was the correct site. The debate continued into the nineteenth century. Robert Pashley visited Knossos in 1834, but like many travellers before him, he was disappointed by the ruins he saw. He illustrated coins of Knossos with the Labyrinth design but decided that they ‘represent not a material edifice, but a work of the imagination’ (Pashley Reference Pashley1837: 208–9). Soon after, Captain Thomas Spratt visited Crete as part of a British naval mission to map the Aegean (Spratt Reference Spratt1865). His map marked Knossos and many other ancient sites, some of which like Phaistos turned out to be Bronze Age in date, but showed the Labyrinth near Gortyn.

The search for the mythical Labyrinth is significant because it provides the context for the excavations at Knossos undertaken by Minos Kalokairinos in 1878. He was aware of Schliemann’s discoveries at other Homeric sites and, following the signing of the Halepa Pact, decided to exercise his freedom to dig at Knossos until fellow members of the Syllogos forced him to stop. He uncovered several areas of a building which he identified as the Palace of King Minos although he located the Labyrinth in a Roman quarry nearby, no doubt because of the tradition around the quarry at Gortyn. Kalokairinos did not publish his results at the time but did send several pithoi from the storage magazines at Knossos to museums including the Louvre and the British Museum (Kopaka Reference Kopaka, Macdonald, Hatzaki and Andreou2015). This aroused interest in the site and a stream of visitors came to see the excavations over the next few years, including Bernard Hassoullier, who published some of the Mycenaean sherds and William Stillman, who identified the building as the Labyrinth (Hassoullier Reference Haussoullier1880; Stillman Reference Stillman1881). Some of the visitors tried to establish the rights to excavate including Heinrich Schliemann, André Joubin for the French School at Athens and, in 1894, Arthur Evans (Brown Reference Brown1986; Driessen Reference Driessen and Lodewijckx2001). Whereas Joubin was mistrusted in Crete because he had tried to gain permission from Constantinople, Evans established good relations with Hatzidakis. Hatzidakis helped Evans to buy a share in the land which later enabled him to purchase the remainder of the site and start excavations. Both Schliemann and Evans were wealthy men who could afford to buy the site but Schliemann’s business experience meant that he had walked away from negotiations when he failed to secure what he thought was a fair price.

Although it was difficult to secure excavation permits on Crete until after the 1899 antiquities law was passed, archaeological exploration of the island had begun before Cretan Independence. Federico Halbherr, an Italian classical archaeologist travelled round Crete in search of inscriptions but also excavated at a number of sites including Gortyn and the Idaean Cave. In 1886 he and Hatzidakis undertook a small excavation in Psychro Cave on the Lasithi Plateau following the discovery of a bronze bull figurine there by a local shepherd a few years earlier. They found a few more bronze objects which entered the collection of the Syllogos, and in his report Halbherr compared the objects to recent Mycenaean finds (Halbherr and Orsi Reference Halbherr and Orsi1888). Halbherr also undertook work on behalf of the Archaeological Institute of America in 1894, including the excavation of postpalatial tombs (Halbherr Reference Halbherr1901). As part of the same expedition Antonio Taramelli dug at the prehistoric site of Miamou, explored the Kamares Cave, where early pottery had been discovered the year before, and dug a trench at Phaistos where he found more of the same Kamares pottery (Taramelli Reference Taramelli1897, Reference Taramelli1901a, Reference Taramelli1901b). One of the reasons for his interest in Phaistos was the Ayios Onouphrios deposit which had been discovered in 1887 and the contents removed to the Syllogos museum. This contained handmade pottery, stone vessels, seals and marble figurines resembling those already known from the Cyclades. It was first published by Arthur Evans (Reference Evans1895: 56, 105–36), who realised its significance as providing links with the Cycladic or ‘Amorgan’ period, as he called it.

Arthur Evans’ first trip to Crete was in 1894. His research was intertwined with his collection of antiquities for the Ashmolean Museum: he had gone to Crete in order to find inscribed prehistoric objects, having recognised an early writing system on Cretan sealstones he had bought in Athens in 1893 (Evans Reference Evans1895; Galanakis Reference Galanakis, Galanakis, Wilkinson and Bennet2014). Almost immediately he visited Knossos with Kalokairinos, where he was interested in the inscribed masons’ marks on the walls. Evans also visited the Syllogos collection in Heraklion to study objects there and started to purchase antiquities from collectors, including objects from Knossos and Psychro. He visited Psychro Cave in the following years to buy antiquities directly from the villagers, who continued to dig there (Brown Reference Brown2001: 356) (Figure 17). At Psychro Evans purchased part of a stone offering table inscribed with Linear A and initiated an excavation to find other fragments of it (Evans Reference Evans1897: 350–61). On his travels around the island he bought hundreds more antiquities, including further inscribed sealstones, and also recorded the locations of prehistoric remains. Like other archaeologists he would offer to buy antiquities in the villages he passed through and enquire where they came from, building up a detailed picture of the archaeological landscape. In these early publications Evans had already started to use the term ‘Minoan’ to describe Crete, following in the footsteps of earlier German scholars such as Karl Hoeck. He also acknowledged the contributions of figures such as Kalokairinos and Halbherr but his later writings tended to obscure the debt his work owed to other scholars (Karadimas Reference Karadimas, Cappel, Günkel-Maschek and Panagiotopoulos2015).

Figure 17 Photograph of local villagers at Psychro Cave with John Myres, 1895. Arthur Evans (not pictured) accompanied Myres. Myres Archive 2153.

© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

As a result of these archaeological surveys, promising sites had already been located by 1900, and so when Cretan Independence came the archaeologists of different nationalities agreed between themselves where they should dig and then sought permits from the Cretan authorities. An Italian team started excavations at Phaistos, where Taramelli had dug previously. The French gave up their claim to Knossos and focussed on Lato (Goulas), an apparently promising prehistoric site which Evans had wanted to dig himself, but which turned out to be hellenistic. Other British archaeologists headed for east Crete to explore sites where Evans had located remains and bought Bronze Age antiquities. These included Zakros, Petras and Palaikastro (Hogarth Reference Hogarth1901; Bosanquet Reference Bosanquet1902a, Reference Bosanquet1902b). The British excavators failed to find palaces at the first two sites, which were later discovered by Greek archaeologists after the Second World War. They instead focussed their attention on Palaikastro which is still being excavated by British teams, who have yet to find a palace. Evans also gave advice to an American archaeologist, Harriet Boyd Hawes, on promising sites in the area of the Bay of Mirabello. There she excavated several important Bronze Age sites from 1900 onwards, namely Vronda, Vasiliki and Gournia (Hawes Reference Hawes1908). At Gournia she uncovered a complete Bronze Age town with a central palatial building. These excavations set the pattern for the work of the Foreign Schools on Crete, both by establishing areas of influence and by focussing on major palatial settlements.

Evans’ excavation at Knossos achieved much greater international prominence than those at other sites. Some of the finds were spectacular: in the first season of excavation he and his team uncovered a room with a stone seat that they came to identify as the Throne Room of King Minos, helping to prove in his mind that this was indeed a palace (Figure 18). There were also colourful frescoes on the walls, including scenes of bulls and gatherings of people. He embraced the mythical connections of the site and tried to demonstrate that the building was both the Palace of Minos, as he came to call it, and the Labyrinth. Among the evidence he put forward was the double-axe sign carved in the walls, which he had first seen in the area Kalokairinos had exposed. Using a questionable etymology for ‘Labyrinth’ he connected this with the later Carian ‘labrys’ double-axe sign. As he noted in his 1900 report, ‘the appearance of this labrys symbol on the great prehistoric building of Knossos, coupled with many other points in the discoveries, such as the great bulls, the harem-scenes, the long corridors and blind-ending magazines, can hardly leave any remaining doubt that we have here the original of the traditional Labyrinth’ (Evans Reference Evans1900: 33). Like Schliemann he also publicised his discoveries through letters to The Times and two exhibitions in London. The rediscovery of the Labyrinth was a compelling story, and Kalokairinos’ role in it was downplayed. The discovery of Linear B tablets too offered the tantalising hope of new historical or literary texts.

Figure 18 Workers excavating the Throne Room at Knossos, 1900.

Sir Arthur Evans Archive AJE/3/1/12/22/1. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

The excavation of the palace at Knossos took place initially over six seasons, from 1900 to 1905, starting with the West Wing where Kalokairinos had dug before. Excavation of the surrounding area continued alongside further work in the palace until 1931 (Hood and Taylor Reference Hood and Taylor1981: 1–11). When the palace had been fully uncovered, Evans and Mackenzie started to explore underground cists, resulting in the discovery in 1903 of the Snake Goddesses and other faience finds in the ‘Temple Repositories’. Evocative names like this, which Evans gave to various spaces, helped to embed the idea that this was a palace and temple, with separate male and female spaces (the ‘King’s Megaron’ and ‘Queen’s Megaron’) and even connections to later Greek architecture (the ‘South Propylaeum’). Some of these were derived from names Schliemann and Dörpfeld had applied to the palace at Tiryns. They were also taken up by excavators at Phaistos, Halbherr and Luigi Pernier, who uncovered a very similar building from 1900 to 1909 (Pernier Reference Pernier1935; Pernier and Banti Reference Pernier and Banti1951; La Rosa Reference La Rosa and Cline2012b). They too identified men’s and women’s megara, resulting in a homogenised view of these buildings. As at Knossos, further seasons took place in the 1920s and 1930s in order to understand the pottery and stratigraphy better, alongside restorations. At both sites restorations were needed to consolidate the architectural remains and protect vulnerable areas but Evans took these one stage further by using reinforced concrete to bring his vision of the Palace of Minos to life, at the same time as supporting some of his theories about the site (Hitchcock and Koudounaris Reference Hitchcock, Koudounaris and Hamilakis2002; Papadopoulos Reference Papadopoulos2005; Gere Reference Gere2009).

The mortuary archaeology of prehistoric Crete developed alongside these palatial excavations. Although David Hogarth had prospected the area around the palace at Knossos for tombs in 1900, he did not find what he was looking for and moved on to excavate the Psychro Cave instead, blasting his way into the lower cave with dynamite (Hogarth Reference Hogarth1900a, Reference Hogarth1900b). Evans and Mackenzie began to look for tombs further up the Knossos valley from 1904, soon finding a Late Bronze Age cemetery at Zafer Papoura. They moved on to the ‘Royal Tomb’ at Isopata which had already been emptied and quarried for stone by the landowner (Evans Reference Evans1906b). Further tombs were found by a local vineyard owner soon after and excavated by Evans and Mackenzie from 1910. Evans’ final excavation at Knossos, in 1931, was the ‘Temple Tomb’, which he believed was a cenotaph for King Minos (Evans Reference Evans1935: 962–87). Tombs were also discovered at Ayia Triada, where Halbherr had started to excavate in 1902 in search of the necropolis of Phaistos (La Rosa Reference La Rosa and Cline2012b). The remains turned out to be a building they termed a ‘Villa’ because it had a different ground plan from the palaces. Finds included a number of carved stone vessels: the ‘Harvester Vase’, the ‘Chieftain Cup’ and the ‘Boxer Rhyton’ (Figure 19).Footnote ¹⁸ The following year they did find a Mycenaean tomb which contained a sarcophagus decorated with painted plaster scenes showing cult activity, most likely associated with the burial (Long Reference Long1974).Footnote ¹⁹

Figure 19 Photograph of plaster replicas of relief stone vessels from Ayia Triada.

Sir Arthur Evans Archive. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

The Early Minoan tombs of Crete started to be excavated at a similar time. Stephanos Xanthoudides, the director of Heraklion Museum and Ephor of Crete, began to excavate tombs in the Mesara in 1904 as a result of finds from Koumasa being handed in to the museum. There he found four stone tombs, three of which were circular. A similar circular tomb at Ayia Triada had been excavated by Federico Halbherr that year, and they came to be known as tholoi like the similar Mycenaean tombs. Xanthoudides carried on excavating at various sites, including Platanos and Marathokephalo until 1918, rapidly publishing his finds (Xanthoudides Reference Xanthoudides1924) (Figure 20). Although many were already known locally – the tomb at Kalathiana had first been dug in 1854 – he found intact deposits at many of them containing impressive finds, including jewellery and bronze weapons, as well as more Cycladic figurines, as at Ayios Onouphrios. In east Crete other Prepalatial burials had come to light at Palaikastro (Bosanquet Reference Bosanquet1902a), and also the Early Minoan cemeteries at Mochlos. These were excavated in 1907–8 by the American Richard Seager, who found rich tombs containing gold jewellery and stone vessels (Seager Reference Seager1912). Seager excavated a number of other sites in the area, including the Minoan town on the island of Pseira (Seager Reference Seager1910). Exploration of tombs continued into the Second World War. Among the Kunstschutz excavations on Crete was a tholos tomb at Apesokari, whose finds were deposited in Heraklion Museum (Flouda Reference Flouda2017).

Figure 20 Drawings of finds from Koumasa and Porti.

(Xanthoudides Reference Xanthoudides1924: pl. VII)

Iosif Hatzidakis also began excavating Minoan sites, including Tylissos, from 1909 until 1913 (Hatzidakis Reference Hatzidakis1921). He then turned his attention to Mallia, where he started to uncover a palace in 1915, allowing French excavators to continue work in the 1920s (Chapouthier Reference Chapouthier1928; Chapouthier and Joly Reference Chapouthier and Joly1936; Pelon et al. Reference Pelon, Andersen and Olivier1980). There they also started to explore the nearby tombs, including the Chryssolakkos necropolis, where the famous gold bee pendant was found (Demargne Reference Demargne1930).Footnote ²⁰ Xanthoudides’ successor as Ephor and director of Heraklion Museum, Spyridon Marinatos, also started work at various sites in the 1930s, including Arkalochori Cave, where a hoard of Bronze Age metalwork had been discovered. He also excavated the villa at Amnisos, finding wall paintings preserved in a destruction layer which he linked with the eruption of the Thera volcano (Marinatos Reference Marinatos1939: 433–4). This prompted his theory that Minoan civilisation collapsed following a tsunami, and also led him to renew the excavations at Thera after the Second World War.

Excavations at various sites revealed further examples of the Cretan scripts that Evans had first identified. Clay tablets bearing Cretan Hieroglyphic were found at Knossos and Mallia, while Linear A tablets were found at Ayia Triada, Palaikastro and Zakros. The most intriguing clay document, the Phaistos Disc, was discovered in 1908 in a building next to the palace. Unlike other clay documents the signs were stamped rather than incised, and it remains unique. Evans continued to be at the forefront of studying these Cretan scripts, publishing inscribed seals and documents, including the Phaistos Disc, in the first volume of Scripta Minoa (Evans Reference Evans1909). The second volume, focussing on the Linear B tablets, was only published after his death and was brought to press by John Myres (Evans Reference Evans1952). Evans had tried and failed to decipher Linear B, hampered by his conviction that it was not Greek, and his resulting failure to publish the Linear B tablets from Knossos in full obstructed the attempts of others. The decipherment showed that the final phase of palatial Crete was Mycenaean, which would have been anathema to Evans.