Download PDF | (BAR British Archaeological Reports International Series 1062) G. R. Tsetskhladze, A. M. Snodgrass - Greek Settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea-BAR Publishing (2002).

Download PDF | (BAR British Archaeological Reports International Series 1062) G. R. Tsetskhladze, A. M. Snodgrass - Greek Settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea-BAR Publishing (2002).

139 Pages 

Preface

This volume publishes revised versions of papers originally given at a joint seminar of the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge and the Department of Classics, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, held in Cambridge in the autumn of 1996. The main aim of the seminar was to give as clear a picture as possible of the Greeks settled in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Pontus. It is a matter of regret that the paper given by A.J. Graham on the colonisation of Samothrace is not included here. The author felt that his conclusions were too provisional to warrant it, and that the preparation of a definitive version would require a long gestation period. We have included a paper by Yasemin Tuna-Norling which was not delivered during the seminar. It suits our theme very well and extends the picture of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The papers presented here focus on Greek colonisation and on the manifold aspects of Graeco-native relations - cultural, political, economic, etc. - not simply from a Hellenic point of view but also from that of the locals. Some authors concentrate on literary or archaeological evidence; others seek to combine them in various ways. It would be redundant to summarise the papers. Their titles indicate clearly what they are about, and all are written by well-known specialists, who ‘need no introduction’.

Since the seminar took place, the subject of the Greek presence in the areas under discussion has witnessed a considerable burgeoning of scholarly interest. Several important and interesting volumes have appeared (AWE; Antonetti 1997; Archibald et al. 2001, 245-70; Boardman 1999, 267-82; Boardman, Solovyov and Tsetskhladze 2001; Bouzek 1997; Brock and Hodkinson 2000, 365-402; Brunet 1999, 245-356; Gorman 2001; Graham 2001, 365-402; Greek Archaeology 2002; Karageorghis and Stampolidis 1998; Krinzinger 2000; Lordkipanidzé and Lévéque 1999a; 1999b; Nawotka 1997; Oliver et al. 2000, 25-74, 133-50; Podossinov 1999; Tsetskhladze 1998; 1999; 2001; Tsetskhladze and de Boer 2000-01; etc.), as have many articles. One fact should be emphasised, that whereas these two regions, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, had in the past been studied largely in isolation from each other, now there is increased dialogue between scholars. This has been demonstrated by the large attendance of Black Sea specialists at the international conference ‘Early Ionia: the State of Research’ (Gitizelcamli, Turkey, Sept.-Oct. 1999), and by experts on the Eastern Mediterranean at the Taman Conference ‘Greeks and Natives in the Cimmerian Bosporus, 7th-1st Centuries BC’ (Oct. 2000).

We would like to thank, first of all, the authors for their contributions and patience. Without the generous financial and practical assistance of the Faculty of Classics of the University of Cambridge, the seminar would never have taken place. We are most grateful to those who attended and questioned and discussed the papers. Especial thanks go to Dr David Davison and his staff at Archaeopress.

G.R. Tsetskhladze and A.M. Snodgrass

Greeks and Syria: Pots and People

John Boardman

My initial subject is the relationship between Greeks and Syria from the reign of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser IV to that of Sennacherib, in what we believe to be the years between the early 8th and early 7th centuries BC. The evidence is partly textual - Assyrian documents and Greek historians - neither of them wholly reliable because they are so incomplete or remote, but at least the eastern texts are mainly contemporary. Other evidence is archaeological, and I do not mean simply what has been found in Syria since there are far broader archaeological and_ cultural considerations which are most relevant. It will lead into speculation about the interpretation of pottery of these years and later, about comparisons between Greek and eastern pottery use, about attitudes to Phoenicians, and eventually into reflections on the attitudes and motivation of those of us who deal with such subjects, since I believe that scholars are today no less subject to prejudice, even those properly inveighing against it, than at any time in the past.

Greeks and Syria

This is a subject that is too easily dealt with piecemeal and has suffered no little pro- and anti-Greek prejudice. The physical evidence from excavation in Syria needs attention at the start. In the 1930s American archaeologists dug several sites in the Amq plain behind the lower Orontes valley. At what seems to have become later a provincial Assyrian capital, Tell Tainat, and at Catal Hiiytik and Judeideh, they found Greek pottery. Unfortunately it has never been published and it was only a few years ago that it became clear that the Greek pottery was found in quantity, hundreds of sherds, all mainly 8th-century.” We still do not know how these finds relate to the whole assemblages but they are impressive in such a concentration of important sites on or near the route inland. 

In 1936-7 Sir Leonard Woolley dug at the mouth of the Orontes, at Al Mina, which must be judged an entry port or stop-off for traffic up the Orontes. He too found much Greek pottery although again it has only become clear recently that it is also to be measured in hundreds.” It was prominent enough when first found for the orientalists to talk of Al Mina as a Greek colony. No classical archaeologist who has thought about it has been so incautious. Dunbabin, writing in the 1950s,” went no further than to say that in the alleged presence of Greek pottery on its own in the earliest levels “there is nothing to differentiate the place from one of the many Greek colonies in” the west. Study of the finds shows that he was doing no more than follow the report of the excavator, with whom he had corresponded, and the observation is not meaningless since it is not possible to identify any pre-Greek history at Al Mina, and the diagnostic pottery from the earliest levels can now be seen to include virtually nothing but Greek-related material. Calling Al Mina a typical Greek colony, in the same terms as the colonies in the west, along with its mis-identification, also first proposed by the excavators, with Posideion, which is at Bassit to the south, are by now long out of all serious discussion, though requiring closer inspection.” It should be easy to be objective. Although a classicist, I have long been convinced by the proposition that much of what is important in Greece from the 9th to the 6th century was the gift of the east. The question is whether it was a solicited gift or one thrust upon Greeks by easterners, and if either, by whom, when and why. Part of the problem comes from regarding the Aegean as a different cultural sphere from the Levant, as indeed it became in the 5th century, and as in some way a cultural district of Europe; better to regard Greece as the western extremity of the Levant in the years that concern us.

I start in the Bronze Age and at the other end of the Mediterranean, since we have to lay the ghost of the socalled Dark Ages, at least as a period of alleged noncommunication. I have elsewhere commented on the way the pattern of eastern and Greek interest in the west in the Late Bronze Age seems closely mirrored by that of the 8th century.” In the Bronze Age there is a strong Cypriot interest in Sardinia, and a yet earlier strong Greek interest in south Italy and Sicily, also overlapping into Sardinia. In the 8th century comparable people are occupied in the same areas, but now it is Phoenicians in Sardinia, and mainly Euboean and Corinthian Greeks in south Italy and Sicily. Communications east-west were surely not interrupted in the ntervening years; it is just that they were at a low level and did not affect the cultural record. Nor is it credible that the Greeks needed to be led by Phoenicians into waters that they had been exploring long before any easterners, and which were in their own backyard, across from the Corinthian Gulf or around the Peloponnese, via Greek islands, yet this has been argued by some.

If we now look east, at the end of the Bronze Age there were strong Greek associations, whether or not settlement, on the Levant coast. There is much at Atchana, which is the Bronze Age equivalent to Tell Tainat in Syria, and there is Ugarit down the coast, as well as whatever one chooses to make of any Greek role with the Sea Peoples.’ Add speculation about Danaos and the Danunim of Cilicia, or Mopsos and Muksas, and Greek post-Trojan War settlements or myths associated with the Cilicia/Syria area, let alone Cyprus, and we may suspect something of importance happening at a time when Greece as such had nothing much to offer the east, while many Greeks had good reason to want to go east. Much depends on which philologist you believe, and no answers are offered here, but I simply observe the phenomena west and east, and conclude that there were continuing even if intermittent associations between the Greek world and the north Levant coast over many centuries, just as there had been between both Greeks and easterners and discrete areas in the west Mediterranean.

In Syria we deal with an area where a neo-Hittite culture of a very distinctive type archaeologically was flourishing, though probably already under the domination of Assyria. Aramaeans had also arrived from middle Mesopotamia around 1000 BC, and became dominant in various cities, but culturally, it seems, absorbed in Syria. But it was for their language that Phoenician script was adapted and was to provide the, as it were, scripta franca of the east. Cilicia constitutes a rich plain approached readily from the Anatolian hinterland and, by sea, via the Gulf of Alexandretta. It has neo-Hittite sites like Kara Tepe and Tarsus, and there are some Phoenician traits - the language and script were already being used in places as an official alternative to Luvian and hieroglyphs, without adjustment of the script, as in Syria.” Then there is Syria proper which is the Orontes valley and the plain beyond, to the Euphrates and the dominant Assyrians, with sea access west via the Orontes. It is divided from Cilicia by the Amanus mountains which are not negligible. Alexander’s and Darius’ armies managed to miss each other completely by marching up and down either side of the range years later. The Syrian territory, including Aramaean cities such as Hama and Damascus, runs on south with the Orontes to border the lands of Israel and Judah, but the coastal strip, behind and to the west of the mountains, is the home of the great Phoenician city-ports. So far as traffic is concerned the route between Syria and the Aegean via the Orontes, Cyprus and Rhodes was a relatively easy one, though subject to seasonal weather problems. It need not have been an important one for Phoenician shipping west, since this could travel more directly via Cyprus and south Crete or the Greek islands; not much, I think, along the north African coast. There were good direct routes from Egypt, not coastwise, to Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete.”

Finally, Cyprus itself. Connections are similar to those with the coast to the east, with the difference that the evidence for Greek settlement at and after the end of the Bronze Age is stronger. More important for us perhaps is the discovery, still barely digested by scholars, that the so-called Classical Cypriot syllabary had been devised by around 1000 BC, apparently to write a Greek dialect (Arcado-Cypriot), for which it continued to be used for centuries.'’ The Greeks may have become absorbed by the dominant local physical culture but their language and identity as Greek-speakers were not, and suddenly Cyprus emerges as a far more Greek island at a far earlier date than had been imagined, provided one does not regard pottery as the only signifier of a culture. A prism of Esarhaddon of 673/2 BC lists ten kings of Cyprus, and eight seem to have Greek names.’ All this may be relevant to Greek associations with Syria. Al Mina is but 80 miles from the coast of Cyprus and there is an abundant presence of Cypriot and Cypriot-type pottery, and very probably Cypriots, in Syria. So long as the identity and activity of the Eteocypriots remains shadowy, we are entitled to surmise that much Cypriot that travelled outside Cyprus could have been in the hands of Greek-speakers. One notes the Cypriot trademark appearing on Greek pottery of about 700 BC in two Greek areas, in Chalcidice and south Italy.

We come to texts, which I summarize. Eastern texts can be taken seriously where they are contemporary or seem to derive from contemporary records. There is always the danger of propaganda, but propaganda does not need to tell lies, merely to exaggerate, and even where a defeat or unresolved contest can be made to look like a victory, at least we can be sure that something had happened. Omission is a more serious matter. Greek texts have to be judged in terms of the motivation of the writer and the motivation of his sources. We usually need some external criteria for important matters but unbiased trivia are often revealing. Both east and west suffer from self-advertisement and bragadoccio, in the east from king-emperors, in Greece mainly from late writers and modern commentators.

We sadly lack helpful texts from the most crucial areas Syria, Cilicia and Phoenicia. Assyrian interest was very distant and references are too sparse to give anything like a coherent account rather than allusion to isolated episodes. The Assyrians knew the Greeks as Ionians, whom they accordingly called Yawan, pronounced and sometimes written, Yamana.'* In our period Ionians include Euboeans and some islanders, who seem to have been the principal seagoers east and west, as well as the Ionians of western Anatolia who seem somewhat less prominent internationally until the 7th century. Cyprus is partly Greek-speaking but not Ionian, and it is Yatnana, not Yamana. The mere fact that the Assyrians had a name for Jonians suggests close contact. Later the term might have been applied loosely to all westerners, rather like the later term Franks, and thus in the 6th century the Babylonians may have used it of other Anatolians, ” but we should remember that the Persians could distinguish Ionians from Carians from Lydians. There were many bearing Anatolian names, themselves probably of mixed parentage, totally Hellenized and speaking/writing Greek (e.g. Carian authors Panyassis, Skylax).

Around 725 BC we have from Assyrian sources record under Tiglath-Pileser HI of Ionian raids: “The Ionians have come. They have fought in the cities of Sams[imuruna], Harisu and...” (the towns are not located). Then there is Sargon’s success over Ionians “caught in the midst of the sea as a fowler does fish”, and in one text “‘and [dep ]orted (?) them”. For some reason or other an Ionian is mentioned in an account of silver payments as a member of the household of the Assyrian Queen Mother;’° and for the earlier 7th century record in the work of a far later Babylonian priest, who may have had a good source, about Sennacherib winning a battle after the Greeks had entered Cilicia to make war, and defeating Ionian warships off the Cilician coast. The overall picture is of an Ionian sea presence, which would have little point if it was not involved with the land, and indeed seems to have attacked it, in our period. The record is of Ionian failures but we would not expect any successes they may have had to be recorded by easterners, and they fall in a period for which Greeks themselves had no serious recorded or remembered history. But the Ionians seem to have been persistent. Recall the Late Bronze Age and subsequent Greek associations with this general area, especially the north, and with Cyprus, and there can be no good reason to doubt that there was renewed activity along old routes which had never quite been abandoned; we know that between Greece and Cyprus they were active through much or all of the alleged Dark Ages, and that there were Greek-speakers living in

Cyprus.

Down to towards the end of the 8th century virtually all the Greek pottery found in the east comes from the island of Euboea; this is clear on grounds of style and clay analysis; some may be from Cycladic islands under Euboean control, there is a very little Attic (as also in Euboea itself) and only a little more Corinthian and East Greek, mainly from North Ionia (especially Samos). The Euboean starts to arrive as early as the 10th century and is scattered all along the Levant coast, and a little inland, from Cilicia to Askalon, with an isolated find as far away as Nineveh.'’ The main period of arrival is the 8th century, but everywhere except in Syria it comprises an extremely small proportion of the pottery found, and how it arrived is a matter for pure speculation. Since proportions are more important than sheer numbers in these matters I tried to work this out, but there was little to go on except to see that at Al Mina it was proportionately up to 50 times more in evidence than elsewhere. Another attempt to measure it was by frequency per square metre excavated, producing virtually the same result, which is reassuring for the method.'* In terms of absolute numbers there now seem to be some 2000 Greek pieces of 8th-century date from Syria which is around five times as much as all the other Greek finds in the east put together. At Al Mina the concentration is from about the second quarter of the 8th century to its end or just after. Both common sense and the distribution pattern suggest that this concentration indicates the main region of interest, not any region(s) farther off. At this point it is necessary to reflect upon the interpretation of such pottery finds, in general and with specific reference to the Greek finds in Syria.

Pottery and History

There is no reason to believe that a pot found on a site other than that in which it was made must indicate that it arrived in the hands of, or in the ship of, a fellow-countryman of its maker. This refrain is a common one in many recent articles, and Jim Muhly"” has elevated David Harvey’s remark (no doubt to his surprise), made a propos of Sostratos’ dedication of an anchor at Graviscae, to the status of Harvey’s Thesis: “‘the presence of any pottery of any given state at any given site is no evidence for the activity of traders (or indeed settlers) from that state at that site”. The words “not necessarily evidence on its own for’ would have been more just, and a distinction needs to be drawn between treatment of single or sparse finds and the plentiful. No one imagines that a 7th-century Ionian vase found near Kiev got there in Greek hands or ship, but equally no one doubts that plentiful Corinthian vases in the early years of a Corinthian colony attest and confirm the presence there of Corinthians, and at least lend colour to the idea that Corinthians sent them there, whether on their own ships or on the ships of others. On the other hand the hundreds of Athenian vases in Etruria did not require the presence of an Athenian. Different sites and different circumstances call for different explanations, and we cannot assume that what was probably true of some trade in the time of Sostratos (around 500 BC) was equally or at all true two or three hundred years before.

It is time to pay more attention again to the pots themselves. When Robert Benchley was asked to report on the ‘Cod War’ on the Great Banks studied from the point of view of (a) the USA, and (b) Canada, he replied - “I have no knowledge of either (a) or (b). Accordingly I propose to approach this question from the point of view of the cod.”

There seems in some recent work to be a readiness to discount all prejudicial pottery evidence in the interests of other prejudices, to the point even of denying any credit for trade and enterprise to those producing the objects of trade. What applies to Greek pottery must apply to non-Greek pottery, and to other objects. We need evidence beyond simply identity of finds to demonstrate origins or presence of people, but plentiful pottery is an important indicator. Pots are for use, generally by the people most accustomed to using them; finer objects more readily pass from hand to hand, soon leaving the possession of those who made them, or are acquired for their status value. Real trade in manufactured luxuries, as opposed to gift-exchange of varying degrees of regulation, is not a phenomenon to be much expected at an early date. Pots may be less spectacular but more eloquent, especially in the early period before they acquire some degree of status as ‘art’, although, I suppose, a few Greek vases may have travelled before the 7th century BC for their percetved quality or novelty. Although the presence of a state’s pottery is not always an indication of the presence of its people or direct commercial interests, good reasons need to be apparent for it not to be. There is, indeed, in any dismissive attitude to pottery, a certain danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, or of getting close to arguing that because there are some black swans there are no white swans.

Much of course depends on how pots moved around the Mediterranean, about which distribution maps tell little. The matter has been much explored but most evidence is late. In Homer Phoenicians bring their goods and then loiter for a year to pick up a return cargo (Od. 15. 455-456). We assume but cannot be sure that the ship-owner/captain is the prime mover, like the alleged Taphian king looking for copper and carrying iron in Od. 1. 180-184. There seem to be several traders on the ship conjured in Od. 8. 161-164. Hesiod’s ship-owner peddles his own wares (Op. 678-694). Of the cast of merchants presented to us by Herodotos Korobios is simply described as porphyrios, a purple man, presumably a dealer in purple dye, probably a Levantine emporos and perhaps not a shipowner, since although he knows what to find on the African coast he is carried to Thera and then to Libya on the ships of others (4. 151-153). Kolaios (4. 152) is called a naukleros, which can only mean shipowner who managed his own cargo. Sostratos of Aegina is not described (ibid.), except as a most successful trader, but since he dedicated an anchor at Graviscae on the coast of Etruria he is more likely to have been a shipowner than an emporos, and he may have done his own buying in Athens for shipment to Italy. And there is Charaxos, Sappho’s brother, who traded Lesbian wine to Naukratis. Herodotus (2. 135) does not describe his trade but Strabo (17. 1. 33) said he ‘brought down’ (katagein) wine to Egypt kat’emporian, and he was surely an emporos. Sostratos demonstrates that in a state like Aegina, which has no notable products for export but a strong reputation for sea-faring and trade (which is why the Aeginetans are the only homeland Greeks with a formal stake in Naukratis), there is no necessary identity between producer and trader. I doubt whether this was altogether normal, and trade (in varied commodities like pottery, rather than raw materials and bulk foodstuffs, if any at this date), was as readily conducted by emporoi (essentially ‘passengers’ ) who negotiated a place for themselves and their cargo on a ship. That ship is on the whole more likely to be owned by a fellow-citizen with whom a regular schedule could be arranged than with another Greek or a foreigner, although it need not be, and could not be if home did not breed seafarers. The idea of a merchant standing on the quayside at Piraeus beside his crates waiting for the next ship to Italy, whatever its flag, does not appeal. But even if the ship was not Athenian it would be foolish to dissociate the producer altogether from responsibility or credit for the trade. It was he, after all, who produced the surplus for trade and often (as with Athens’ potters) carefully observed market preferences. For all we know, potters and their families did not work all year at the wheel or brush but were their own emporoi, and thus in a good position to observe and meet market demands and even manipulate them. This cannot be pressed, and from the merchant marks it seems that many of the marketing agents may not have been Athenian; but then, neither, probably, were all the potters, the metic class being prominent in such activities as is also indicated by their names.”

If an Aeginetan or Phoenician ship carries Athenian pottery to Italy or Morocco, is this more Aeginetan/Phoenician trade than Athenian? It could not have happened without Athenian production of what was to be traded, and undoubtedly to the profit of the producer as well as the agents or carriers; and especially to the profit of the producer if he or his agent were the emporos. The pottery remains no absolute indicator of presence, only of an interest of varying degrees of directness, especially where we can see that the preferences of the customer seem to be observed by the producers, and this can be observed to some extent from the 8th century on.

The distinction between gift-exchange and trade is a fine one for the early period. Where a pattern of giving develops with clear expectations of the nature and value of the return gifts we are dealing with no more than elegant barter. And if precious metals become one side of the equation it is already virtually buying and selling. Many gifts must have carried an implicit price-tag with expectations of a return; they still do vide the ‘free lunch’. When, in the //iad, Glaukos foolishly exchanged gold for brass, the unequal gift-exchange is explained by Zeus taking away his wits (6. 234); only the modern commentator tries to make of it gift-value graduated according to rank. When I, if not others, speak of Greek, Phoenician or Cypriot shipping and trade in the early period, I assume that it was principally a matter of folk carrying their own products/materials, in search of products/materials which they needed or valued. They might also, clearly, acquire products/materials from other sources to trade, en route or through lack of their own resources, but I doubt whether this was very common for major cargoes before the 7th century. They might well accept on board an emporos with his goods, and in this case again, the source of the emporos’ stock is more significant than the nationality of the ship or its owner or even the emporos. A city with a merchant fleet would stand to profit also from such activity, which would certainly be true of the Phoenician cities and Aegina, but the former were also producers of note (mainly textiles and timber to judge from texts). It is easy and probably wrong to read back into the early period many of the normal procedures of later, organized trade, and its financing, by state or individual.

Merchant marks, well explored by Alan Johnston (1979), should be a valuable source for the pottery trade from the mid-6th century on, and they seem to indicate that in Athens emporoi were involved, whether or not all of Athenian birth (see above); the earlier Corinthian merchant marks suggest Corinthians only." The Athenian emporoi were not necessarily the potters, but there is still considerable correspondence between potter-workshops and merchant marks for export, as though the potter was more intimately involved in the trade than many would admit. Elsewhere there may be evidence for the emporoi in ‘foreign inscriptions’. But the Athenian pottery trade, to which I shall revert, belongs to a more sophisticated and later period than that with which we are immediately concerned, down to the 7th century.

If the point is taken that the presence of pots is not altogether to be ignored as evidence for some sort of involvement with those who made them, then absence of a particular class from any otherwise prolific site might also be significant. It would be difficult to argue for any role for a trading and potproducing state on a site which yielded little or none of that state’s pottery; provided, of course, that it produced any of significance and whether or not it was a major item of trade. This needs to be observed in terms of proportion rather than quantity.” It is why we have no reason to suspect any real Greek presence at Tyre because the Greek pottery there, from the 10th to 8th century, represents a minute proportion of all found,” however interesting it may be as evidence for early and possibly indirect involvement with its source (mainly Euboea) but via intermediaries who might or might not be Greek. It is why the extreme paucity of any Levantine pottery at Lefkandi argues against any substantial eastern presence there, the few fine eastern objects falling into the category of gifts that might as readily be carried by recipients as donors. And the possible practice there of eastern jewellery techniques requiring some degree of personal contact, might have been effected by no more than one craftsman, whose skills might even have been observed in the east rather than the west.” It is why the proportionately little Phoenician pottery at Kommos in Crete should make us hesitant about arguing for any sustained presence there rather than regular visits, which were more probably east-to-west than west-to-east (where Cretan pottery is conspicuously absent). At Kommos the argument for presence has to depend on an explanation for the strange shrine which can find some but mainly later Phoenician/Punic parallels. These probably mean something, but just possibly not that much in an island where tri-columnar shrines were old news, and when the bronze disc/shield behind the pillars remains a distinct oddity in a shrine that ought to have some fertility function if the eastern parallels are real.°° Kommos surely.

though, indicates early Phoenician moves west along an alternative route to that through central Greek islands. There are, of course, wider implications. If people are to be identified by objects at all, surely common pottery (‘for people’) is more reliable than luxury goods (gifts or souvenirs), especially if the former is plentiful, the latter scattered and diverse in character. Yet it is the latter that prompt the image of “overwhelming archaeological evidence for a Phoenician presence in Geometric and even ProtoGeometric Greece”, while Greek pottery at foreign sites is ‘intrusion’.””

Another aspect of the same problem is the interpretation of unitations of pottery styles made away from their homes. This is far more complex and yields no simple pattern. In Greek colonies there is no question that the imitations are the products of immigrant craftsmen or their pupils, and they match closely the wares at home, but of course it need not always be so, and where there is no evidence about identity other criteria have to be applied. Pots are for people, so imitations are made for people who are used to or who value the models, and who might buy them or even trade them competitively against ‘originals’. Here an appeal to style, not altogether subjectively interpreted, might be made. It is not difficult to identify Etruscan hands imitating Attic black- or red-figure, but South Italian red-figure is no less surely from the hands of Greeks (at first Athenians, no doubt) imitating Attic. In the Greek colonial world where identities are not controversial examples can easily be multiplied. Mycenaeanstyle pottery in the Levant is mainly identified now from analysis, since stylistically it is indistinguishable from the home Mycenaean tradition. It is, therefore, hard to see it as initiated by non-Mycenaeans. Local taste might, however, change, and local craftsmen might become trained in the new styles and not be too readily identified, and the products come to admit many local features. The same is true of Greek pottery made in Greek western colonies, although the ‘local’ is not generally non-Greek. On the other hand the Mycenaean Greeks’ own imitation of Minoan pottery is relatively easy to make out.

A question has to be asked whether, where imitations of a ware are produced in a foreign context, they should be regarded as the work of others. When imitations of Greek Geometric skyphoi are made on west Phoenician sites, and the cup type (as we shall see below) is not one natural to the behaviour of an eastern population, we are bound to wonder by and for whom they could have been made; and why, if not either for visiting or even resident Greeks, rather than for easterners who had uncharacteristically picked up Greek, or at least western, drinking-cup habits. Their quality is good if not of the highest. Yet the assumption is that they are Phoenician products.~® In the east there are what I would call Euboeo-Levantine cups, plentiful at Al Mina, surely the products of, and mainly for, Greeks heavily influenced by the eastern environment in which they lived, probably in Cyprus or beside Cypriots or in Syria.” On Ischia there are poor unitations of eastern Red Slip bowls, and the shape is also employed for purely Greek Geometric decoration which was certainly applied by Greeks.” The imitation Red Slip was presumably for people who were used to it and made after models which were not necessarily Phoenician since the ware is a Levantine koine. The Greek-decorated versions of these shapes were surely for Greeks.”' The assumption seems to be that the former were made by immigrant Phoenicians which sits oddly with the common view about the producers of Greek-style cups in west Phoenician sites!

We should distinguish pottery types and functions; some pots are produced for commercial purposes. Obvious examples are the KW flasks made on Rhodes in imitation of Cypriot flasks in the later 8th and 7th centuries.” These soon entered the flow of trade west and could better be regarded as a case of local commercial opportunism than evidence for the presence of eastern perfumiers. And at the Phoenician site of Kition on Cyprus the deposit below the floor of Temple 2, so of around 800 BC, contains many Cypriot Black-on-Red flasks and a small group of plain grey burnished pots of Phoenician character (several conical-topped oinochoai), and one in the shape of a Greek skyphos.”” So the type of vase and its function and likely market must also influence our judgement about the information it might offer about the involvement of its maker in its presence away from home.

These are generalities, with select examples, to demonstrate the need for caution in either using or ignoring pottery sources to identify makers or users or traders. In what follows I investigate the case of the Greek pottery in Syria.

Pots and People

There is a great deal of Greek, mainly Euboean 8th-century pottery in Syria, as we have seen. The material is somewhat better known than, and the proportion of Greek is very considerably in excess of, that in any other eastern area including Cyprus. Moreover, at Al Mina, the earliest levels have virtually nothing but Greek pottery. I, with others, had thought it enough to argue a Greek presence, presumably for commercial purposes since the products of the hinterland were responsible for the whole Orientalizing Revolution in the Greek homeland, and the distribution of Syrian goods corresponded closely with the Greek sphere of influence (and not with the far wider Phoenician one).** We can hardly tell whether the presence was regular or seasonal, nor how numerous it was, though the evidence of the earliest levels tells for dominant Greek interest. There is, however, a strong view now that it was not Greeks who brought the pots there, but ‘Phoenicians’ who had brought them back with them. No satisfactory explanation is offered for why the Phoenicians were so. selective, since they were ranging most Mediterranean shores, nor why they left them in Syria and took so few back home, but a Greek presence in the east is no longer considered desirable or Correct, and the evidence of the distribution of Syrian goods and of texts recording a Greek presence, and plentiful finds coming from a Cyprus where Greek was spoken by established inhabitants, is ignored.

This is a question that cannot be judged from too narrow a viewpoint. Thus, it is generally agreed that relations between Cyprus, Syria and Phoenicia on the one hand, and Crete on the other, were maintained throughout much of the ‘Dark Ages’, and there is more of eastern (mainly Syrian and Cypriot, except for the Phoenician at Kommos) origin and inspiration in Crete than in any other part of Greece in the 9th to 7th centuries. Yet not one Cretan pot or other artefact has been certainly identified in the east to match the hundreds (originally thousands) of Euboean. That the latter were brought home by easterners who had an inexplicable but deep-seated aversion to all Cretan pottery is inconceivable, but it is easy to understand Cretans playing a relatively passive role, except perhaps with Cyprus, and not themselves going farther east.

If, however, it is still held that the pots could not be brought to Syria by Greeks, then they came, and in numbers, for a purpose. The old view that the easterners of this period were not much interested in Greek painted pottery for its own sake - which is certainly the impression one gets from early finds in the rest of the east - has then to be revised in favour of a great interest in it on the part of Syrians who went to some trouble, or put others to some trouble, to acquire it.

Here we need to recall that pots are for people, and usually particular classes of pottery are for people who are accustomed to them. Most of the pots are cups, with some larger vases and some flattish dishes (with pendent semicircles) which seem to be an early example of an export model made in Euboea for Cyprus, where the shape is at home.” In Al Mina the pots seem not to have been found in clusters, as if for onward trade, which was later true of classical Athenian export wares found there. Indeed their presence beside Cypriot and eastern pottery on a single floor has been used to identify a Greek dwelling.*° If the obvious explanation, that they were there primarily for Greeks, is for whatever reason inadmissible, we have to think of them as being attractive, almost luxury goods that the (As)syrians (though not others in the east) wished to acquire in quantity. The concentration of finds is on or near the coast, not farther off.

At this point some simple archaeological observation is called for in support of the ‘pots are for people’ principle. Since the Bronze Age the Greek world preferred to drink out of cups that had two handles and a base, sometimes even a high stem. The preference remained strong for centuries to come and it was largely shared by Cyprus where there had been a Greek-speaking and Greek-writing population of unknown size but persistent presence and presumably growth since at least the 12th/11th century. Moving east from Cyprus the preference stops dead. From the Bronze Age on, for centuries, indeed millennia, the preferred drinking cup in the east was relatively small, often roughly hemispherical, without handles and usually without any flat base. These are the rule in early Iron Age Syria. Some Assyrian are deeper but with a pointed base, or with a modelled lion head, the latter being smaller versions of the lion-head situlae.°’ Others are slightly broader, versions of the commoner later phialai.”® They were handled on fingertips.” Finds in metal and pottery as well as many representations of cups in use demonstrate all this quite clearly. The difference is virtually that between the cups used for the English and Japanese tea ceremonies, or between a beer tankard and a wine glass. Can we really suppose that for a short period the (As)syrian élite, sought after handled, footed Greek cups, and of mere clay and not metal?"’ - a shape which found no echo in scenes or local production then or at any time later, until classical Greek behaviour became more pervasive in the nearer east.

Apparent exceptions prove the rule. The most prominen copies of Greek cups in the Phoenician world are in the west, where Greeks as well as their cups were constant visitors, and where handled cups were the norm, if not for easterners. For these, see above. At Al Mina there is evidence from the earliest levels of the Euboeo-Levantine cups, made by Greeks, for Greeks, with some Cypriot traits in the decoration; and beside them, it seems, much CyproLevantine, made somewhere off the island and well distributed in Syria and Cilicia. The appearance of stray Greek cups from the 10th century on in many eastern sites, in Cilicia, Phoenicia and to the south, shows merely that these were atriving sparsely and casually in the area. Their very strong presence in Syria means something else and to describe Al Mina as “simply a Syrian port with imported Cypriot and Greek pottery” betrays a strange unwillingness to face the evidence in all its volume and complexity.”’ Remembering too the Greek presence in Cyprus, I repeat the query whether we can be sure that the considerable import of Cypriot pots into Syria in these years has nothing to do with Greek-speakers in the island, quite apart from the production of Cypro-Levantine vessels, just mentioned? The matter is made clearer by closer inspection of the Al Mina finds, which is reported elsewhere.”

The clear division in cup preferences east and west must reflect drinking habits: the Greeks went for draughts of diluted wine, returning often to the cup which betweenwhiles they put down;” the Easterners went for the quick gulp from a generally smaller cup which was constantly being replenished by the attendant always shown in drinking scenes.” If it is set down, a separate ring base would need to be supplied. These are by no means conspicuous in the published archaeological record though I understand that stand-rings of ivory and other materials were common finds at Nimrud. The difference has some interesting repercussions in later Greek copying of eastern shapes, to which I return in the next section.

Feet and Handles

Greek obsession with having a cup that will stand on its own and which can be lifted by its handles has some interesting consequences. For one thing it enabled the Greeks to anthropomorphize their cups as they did other vase shapes. This seems an appropriately Greek interest. The cups can be made to look like heads or masks, with eyes, mouths, feet and handle-ears. Though figure vases are known in the east this metaphorical use of standard vase shapes seems uncommon at least.

From time to time Greek potters were moved to copy foreign shapes and their treatment of some eastern shapes is revealing. The drinking horn has to be slung and has no foot. It appears in 6th-century Greek art mainly in the hands of ribald revellers (the komastai) and is a normal rustic vessel, not for house use. The eastern form of horn rhyton, with animal head spout, is copied in 6th-century Smyrna, footless.”” But in the 5th century the horn-shaped cups (not, of course, necessarily copying the eastern vessels, though probably so since they often carry eastern or foreign subjects, perhaps for export) are invariably given figure groups to support them on a flat base: negroes with crocodiles, camels, etc., notably those from Sotades’ workshop, but they are very few.’° The eastern rhyton with an animal forepart and a spout for pouring has a long history and there is a rich Achaemenid Persian series. For some the forepart is so arranged that the creature sits flat, supporting the cup, but for most the horn stands free and could only be suspended or lain down when not in use. When Greeks made one in the 5th century for a customer east of the Black Sea, they provided it with an incongruous flaring foot.’’ Otherwise the Greeks only copy the type late in the Persian period and thereafter, and it acquires particular importance seen in the hands of the heroised dead; an importance not matched by any numerous finds of Greek rhyta of the type in corpore, although the protomes of the eastern rhyta soon assume realistic Greek animal forms in place of the hieratic and stylized eastern, and the threatening lions become little more than playful pussies. The only other comparable eastern type, the animal head cup, acquires an upright handle in Greece, but cannot stand unaided if full, although some are given flaring feet; most others must have been used as were drinking horns (or stirrup cups), and put down empty, upside down or hung up.” Human-head cups can stand on their neck cut-offs. Otherwise the only Greek cup shape which is footless is the mastos, explained by its suggestive name. Even clay cauldrons (lebetes, dinoi) which are essentially shapes to be supported over a fire on tripod stands, are often supplied with ring bases, or, as in /ebetes gamikoi, get high stands attached in place of the separate tripods or stands, and handles.

One eastern shape known in Greece since the early Iron Age could usually sit still without a foot or handle - the phiale. It is not too clear whether it was normally used as a drinking cup in the east. This shape too is copied in Greece in clay, but it may be significant that it has no real role as part of symposion equipment,” rather than as a cult instrument, into which a libation is poured, to be spilled on to the ground. It is not normal dining-room furniture, but for a special purpose and commonly used by the libator standing. Exceptions are few and many carry a cult or heroic connotation. Even then some Greeks can add a handle.”

There are other types of shallow dish current in the east, their bottoms either flat or lightly convex. There are, for example, the eastern Red Slip dishes with straight rims, slightly angled out, and there are eastern types with vertical concave rims. It is unlikely that these were all used for drinking. It remains something of a mystery why the Greeks were prepared to use open, shallow cups (what we call Aylikes) from the mid-6th century on, since they must spill very easily and their use for playing kottabos can hardly have been an essential one. Take the eastern dishes just described; add handles and a high stem, and you have the Greek Little Master cups of the mid6th century on, which develop into the classical kylix, a shape that remains popular until the late 4th century, when it begins to decline in favour of more practical deep cups. If this derivation of the shape is correct - an adaptation of eastern dishes for Greek symposiac purposes - then it is more likely to have happened in the East Greek world than in Athens, where it is best attested. There are few, but early Little Master shapes in Ionia, notably Samos, and that the shapes spread thence to Athens at a time of other Ionian influence, both in the arts and behaviour, is quite plausible. The Greeks would have been predisposed to such shapes by the broader but deep skyphoi of Late Corinthian and the Athenian Siana cups, both far easier to manage than the new open Apjlix bowls since they are inturned below the rim, which counters spilling. The eye-cup shape is essentially a handled, footed phiale. Fig. 1 is designed to show how eastern bowls with additions resemble Greek cups. I would not suggest that this is the direct derivation but the eastern forms were surely influential in what is generally regarded as a purely Greek development. The same phenomenon is as clear in the 5th century when the source of inspiration for closely comparable shapes (notably the Acrocup) is Persian loot.”!

Non-Greek Western Asia Minor seems to have been neutral in terms of the preferences for cups with feet and handles in the early period. They are generally absent in Hittite and Phrygian pottery. In Archaic Lydia there was a close cultural symbiosis with neighbouring Ionia from the late 7th century on. Both behaviour and art seem shared in a common LydoIonian style which mingles some eastern pattern-formality with Greek novelty, and may have helped contribute to the Greek adoption of stemmed cups, explored in the last paragraph. Medes threatened in the early 6th century, and in the mid-century, successfully, the Persians. Sardis became a Persian capital and mainland Ionia with some of the islands was subjected. Eastern forms were already known before the Persians arrived but soon become yet more familiar, especially in metalware in which a distinctive Perso-LydoIonian style may be recognised. The komasts shown on some East Greek vases carry eastern-type small handleless cups.”

The commonest Lydian cup type is generally called a skyphos and superficially resembles the Corinthian skyphos (which started life in archaeological parlance as a kotyle). It is roughly the same shape, with ring base and loop handles, but much more rounded in profile, often closing perceptibly towards the lip. This is not a characteristic of Greek skyphoi/kotylai of the period, where a degree of narrowing at the lip only starts in the 5th century, and on slimmer shapes. Surely the Lydian cup is simply a version of the eastern hemispherical, given handles and foot in the western manner (Fig. 2). Sometimes its foot is conical. Another eastern cup or small bowl shape, especially common in the Persian period and probably deriving from Assyrian cups, has a rounded bowl with a vertical concave lip. Add a conical foot and we have something very like the Lydian vessel generally known as a /ydion and thought to be a container for perfumed oil, which might have been one of the functions of its model. It 1s not given handles.”

Finally, to pursue elsewhere the Greek preference, consider their practice with oil or perfume containers, whose shapes derive from small skin flasks. These were generally carried slung from the wrist, or hung up. Even the early ovoid and piriform aryballoi of Protocorinthian have such narrow feet that they cannot stand, though they may derive from eastern globular flasks which do have feet, but in the east the preference for the handleless was exercised wholly on drinking vessels, not other shapes. The Greeks come to use two types of what we call alabastra: one (the ‘Corinthian’ ) is simply an elongated aryballos of pear shape - both shapes deriving from leather vessels. The other copies the Egyptian stone alabastron, again with a rounded bottom. In time the Greeks gave this a base too, in 4th-century South Italy,” while in Macedonia there is a silver version supplied with both base and two handles.” Even the Corinthian alabastron can be persuaded to stand by cutting off its lower part and creating the so-called Columbus alabastron, a shape that starts in Greece but was most popular in Italy. When the aryballos is made large it too may be given a ring base, in Corinth and Athens. And in Athens small flasks are given a monumental, footed apparel in the tall cylindrical lekythoi many of which effectively disguise the relatively small capacity of their bag-like interiors. The yet larger Greek version of the sagging-shaped oil container, the pelike, always has a flat base and handles. Egyptian bronze situlae are round-based with swing handles; the closest Greek version is the Archaic Rhodian clay ‘situla’, which 1s, inevitably, given a base and side handles. In the many studies devoted in recent years to the Greek copying of foreign shapes, or of shapes in other materials, too little attention may have been paid to quite different cultural preferences which dictated how such translation or copying was conducted and the appearance of the end product. It is a socio-cultural factor of some importance.

People, Ancient and Modern

The ‘people’ of my title was intended to embrace not only ancient cup-users but modern scholars. In a recent article which convincingly modifies without dispelling theories about a major Euboean role in Early Iron Age settlement in the north Aegean, John Papadopoulos remarks on the role of “particularly those associated with excavations in Euboia” (named Britons and a Greek) who “have tended to exaggerate Euboian participation in early Greek maritime enterprise” (1996). Later he refers to other scholars as ‘a Euboian man’ and ‘another Euboian man’. Whether these scholars’ alleged exaggeration is the result of bias or of a better knowledge than most of the relevant evidence is not easy to judge. The latter must count for something, but we all are well aware of the tendency of any excavator to magnify the importance of his/her own site; or should we say ‘draw attention to the importance of’, which is no more than his/her duty? There are national preferences to be observed too, both for sites and subjects, preferences fostered by teachers, universities, colleagues, life in general (more on this below). Papadopoulos, an excavator at north Greek Torone, might be judged by the same criteria either to have better knowledge of north Greek archaeology (which he well displays), or himself to be exaggerating through prejudice; possibly both.

The archaeology of colonies has became very fashionable again. In keeping with other issues of the day, not all of them scholarly, it has led to speculation about the degree to which former studies have been influenced by more recent practices of colonialism. Before World War II this could be regarded by westerners and even many colonies, as mainly beneficent, at least in the long run. In the last 50 years the aspirations of former colonies and dominions of European countries have meant that the European-based empires have gradually disappeared (while the American has grown; there were only 48 states when I was a boy). Moreover, there is growing resentment of the colonizers by the colonized, as well as guilt over long-past treatment by colonists of indigenous peoples i America, Africa and Australasia, which has, with certain events of the last war, conspired to throw disapproval on the west’s cultural ancestor (Greece rather than Rome, it seems).”” This has now led, not to the exploration in more detail of the role, achievement and influence of ancient nonGreek cultures, since these studies have long flourished in the west, but to award them a more conspicuous and sometimes dominant place in the history of western man and to demote the colonizers. The Greeks, of course, have a lot to answer for. They were responsible for ‘the first significant contraction’ that the great Persian Empire suffered (an observation, incidentally, made by an orientalist),”* and eventually contributed to its overthrow, and they unwittingly provided the intellectual basis for subsequent western, now almost global, culture. Their own earlier debt to the east and Egypt has been well explored and acknowledged, but this is not enough and a degree of ‘affirmative action’ is required. Unfortunately, scholarly exploration of these aspects of antiquity have not been immune to modes of Political Correctness which have no roots at all in accurate scholarship or observation, yet seek to impose rules of conduct and censorship in many walks of life, including the academic. In this sphere it is resisted with varying success and conviction. Sometimes it seems to have become motivated by self-preservation (in the academic community) or self-assertion.

We are wise enough to realise that every generation, and therefore every scholar, has a view of the past coloured by its/his/her own education, experience and environment. There is no reason why we should not consciously try to avoid doing the same by exploring and admitting such prejudices as we may be exercising. I do not say ‘try to avoid the mistake’, since it is arguable that since the past is in the main unknowable, it is not by any means a mistake to explain it in the light of whatever we currently believe to be a proper view of history, past or present, although it is obviously (to my mind) a mistake to apply criteria which derive from studies of totally alien periods and cultures. Take colonialism.

What follows tries to be a dispassionate assessment of attitudes and will not, I hope, give offence. It explores areas which are familiar to all scholars but usually never laid out in print. Papadopoulos (Greek/Australian, now resident in the USA) has expressed critical comments on European ‘Euboean men’, as we have seen. He has himself excavated in what antiquity regarded as the Euboean colony of Torone, and worked on Zagora on Andros, which a colleague of his (then Swiss in Australia, but a ‘Euboean man’ through excavating at Eretria) had described as an Eretrian colony.” One might understand the feeling of being beleaguered by Euboeans, mainly championed by native Europeans. R.A. Kearsley (Australia) had cut the Euboean pendentsemicircle-cup culture down to size by down-dating its appearance at Al Mina in the east (with some justification), but also prolonging its life unduly and suggesting that much was made in Cyprus or Syria.” But she is not essentially anti-Euboean at all. A more determined anti-Euboean scholar, J.Y. Perreault, is French/Canadian.°' A former Oxford doctoral student, Franco De Angelis (Canadian), has pointed out what might be evidence of a colonial approach to archaeological evidence on the part of T.J. Dunbabin (Australia) in The Western Greeks.” When this was being worked on, pre-World War II, colonialism was viewed with less passion than it is today, when it is judged unfair to compare the colonial and post-colonial conditions of some countries, and any non-dominant partner must always be on the side of the angels. (Dominant peoples are racist; nondominant are at worst prejudiced.) I notice that serious study of South Italian (colonial Greek) red figure pottery has become an Australian virtue, for which we are all deeply grateful. A major conference whose papers are entitled Greek Colonies and Native Populations was held in Australia in 1985, very conscious of the possible special contribution to such studies of Australia, ‘both a colonized and colonizing power’. I hope is is not churlish to voice the suspicion that such a background might prove as distorting as illuminating when antiquity is under review, but could hardly insist that a European one might be any better. A scholar ought to be affected by neither.

I have confined observations, selectively, to east/west, colony/mother-city relations in the Greek period. It could no doubt be extended. Not all biases need be misleading nor prejudices wrong, but the mere mention of modern colonialism in the same breath as ancient should invite caution, and the assumption that all attitudes of earlier scholarship are wrong is uncritical. Some colonies were castoffs, others a successful venture for a mother-city with need for land or aspirations to wealth; some colonists’ new neighbours enjoyed an enhanced culture through their presence, others were utterly blighted. But it is not for scholars to exercise old or new resentments. Serious scholarly interest in such matters in antiquity has been generated in the last 50 years not by modern experience but by new excavations and by the fact that these are excellent subjects which respond well to that marriage of archaeology and socio-economic history to which all archaeologists and some historians aspire. It need not have been, nor continue to be a matter of taking sides, whether Marxist, Structuralist, Imperialist or Correct.

Reformed attitudes to colonialism in antiquity are not confined to the Greek world or period. In a recent paper on the Kushite kingdom the tendency to regard it as dependent on Egypt is criticised, but without dispelling the fact that its real contribution depended mainly on Egypt, whatever its independence of attitude from time to time.”* Whole volumes have been devoted to studies of nationalism in scholarship,” without, so far as I can see, poimting out that it is up to authors to self-regulate in this respect if they wish to be taken seriously. For a different classical period, the Roman, Ronald Syme (New Zealand) vigorously argued in The Colonial Elites, Rome, Spain, the Americas (1958) - lectures delivered in Canada - the debt that Imperial Rome owed to its colonials: ‘Energy, ambition and opportunism brought the provincial élite to the conquest of the metropolis.’.”” It is the choice of subject rather than its correctness that is interesting, the vigour with which it is argued, and the assumption that modern experience can help explain antiquity rather than simply mould expectations. Thus, I have heard it questioned whether students of Rome in the East have been ready enough to acknowledge the importance of Arab presence, until, with Mohammed, it becomes unignorable.

On a narrower front, Classical scholars have long been trying to be less Atheno-centric in their approach, difficult for most who have been brought up on Athenian art because it is the most prominent and demonstrably influential, becoming easier for those who have also worked seriously outside Athens and Athenian art. All are now enjoined also to be less Helleno-centric. This need not lead scholars to adopt the Mis-hellenism which some non-Classical scholars, and those Classical who have been swept along by Correct approaches, now exercise. It has some unusual effects. One of the oddest is the presentation of the great Dipylon amphora as ‘Phoenicianizing’.°° Latent anti-semitism is sometimes invoked, though carefully projected onto past generations. The allowable ancient champions of the non-Greek world have been chosen: Egyptians and Phoenicians, the former for their assumed dependence on Black Africa, the latter because they are thought (equally wrongly) to have been given a bad time by Greeks (ancient, and modern scholars), and deserve better. It was M. Fredericksen (Australia, an expert on colonial and native Campania), who remarked some years back that ‘the Phoenicians are on the way back’. In near eastern studies (As)syria, which was the really influential Semitic area, is brushed aside. So far as can be judged from texts, most ancient Greeks would have agreed about their foreign mentors, though Herodotus’ obsessive interest in making assimilations with Greek deities north, east and south, has not helped to a balanced view of this; and Classical scholars of the last hundred years may have lauded Hellenism but have generally not been at all dismissive of non-Greeks, although they can be made to appear so through selective quotation and abridged bibliographies. It is as though F. Poulsen’s Der Orient und die friihgriechische Kunst (1912) has been forgotten, as well as many a 19thcentury dictionary article. Such evenhandedness cannot now be admitted. I take one or two recent cases to illustrate the point.

Nicolas Coldstream, in more complete control than most if not all scholars of the evidence for Geometric Greece, observed imitation of eastern pottery in Rhodes. He cited many parallels from Cyprus and Syria, few in Phoenicia. The most conspicuous class of pottery in question (KW flasks) copied Cypriot. He proposed that there was an eastern presence in Rhodes. This was not an altogether necessary deduction, and decidedly not to the extent that it relied on identity of people from pottery being copied rather than imported, especially when the motive seems to have been commercial rather than local use. Moreover, he identified the immigrants as Phoenicians, in line with common archaeological bias in their favour (which I find I exercised to some degree in The Greeks Overseas).”’

For the second case, Papadopoulos identifies Phoenician presence at Lefkandi and the grave of a resident alien there, on the strength of the Egyptian, Cypriot, Syrian and dubiously Phoenician objects found in it.’ If similar evidence had been Greek on a foreign shore, even from a single source, he would probably have been reluctant to explain it as evidence for Greek presence, but such double standards are sadly rife in these areas of study, so deeprooted is commitment to the Correct solution. His views on these matters echo those of Sarah Morris, whose Daidalos is a singularly brilliant if sometimes prejudiced attempt to define and explain the eastern in Greece. Thus, she writes of the exaggeration of the Euboean role “largely by European excavators of Al Mina, Lefkandi and Pithekoussai”,”” and that to “identify ‘Euboians’ in Syria, Cyprus, Crete, Ischia, and even Euboia itself may be a mistake”!’” The ‘European’ tag is interesting in the light of what I have already written about colonialism.

Whether hobbies affect attitudes or are determined by them I do not know, but I remarked some time ago that in Who’s Who the hobbies of a scholar dedicated to survey and decrying excavation were ‘mountaineering and skiing’, and of a devoted excavator ‘ gardening’.”! I have mentioned national preferences already. These are quite apparent throughout the world of classical scholarship, from Britain to Greece. I have not detected the same tendencies in the near east, no particularly chauvinistic Lebanese/Phoenician views opposed to Israeli/Israel-Judah, or Egyptian; the prejudices are more readily exercised by foreigners to these areas or perhaps expatriates. In the United States I suspect that scholars who are first- or second-generation Americans are most likely to champion the colony or non-Greek than the longer established, who have forgiven the ‘poverty, oppression and persecution’ (sic; I quote from the film Independence Day) suffered under the British, and have come to adopt a colonizer’s viewpoint. No one seems to reflect that Britain has been more colonized, from Romans to French, than most European countries.

There are many other less academic motives which might induce some to adopt unusual attitudes, especially the revisionist: disappointment in jobs, in an unfinished or unpublishable thesis, the publicity value of saying something apparently outrageous or _ revolutionary (academic hooliganism), fear of not keeping pace with new ideas in other disciplines, discovering that the best way to deal with the complicated structure of a subject may be to deny its validity, envy, showing-off, unwillingness or inability to face the rigours of some traditional approaches, ill health, delusions of inferiority/superiority, pique at being left out of something. The rarity is passion for the truth and readiness to admit either failure or the impossibility of finding a solution.

The Phoenician question has assumed an important role in determining scholarly allegiances, and requires some comment in the context of this article. Our evidence for the importance of the Phoenicians depends in part on eastern texts, in which they generally play the role of traders, often tributaries of the Great Powers, or craftsmen-patrons of the kings of Israel, and Greek texts, where they are often merchant adventurers, allegedly treated rather on a par with latterday car-salesmen and estate agents. In fact Greeks and Phoenicians got on with one another better than many might admit.” No one doubts the Phoenicians’ eventual role in the west Mediterranean, but we are invited to believe that they led the Greeks there, despite the Greeks’ far longer involvement in the west and closer proximity. But this is another story. Except in the west, the Phoenicians’ archaeological identity remains elusive. The excuse that their main cities have never been properly excavated is a thin one, and has given some carte blanche to declare Phoenician what they will. There is a mass of material from Phoenicia, and if its precise provenance and context is commonly unknown this is hardly a worse case than that in many other eastern areas. At any rate, the well-documented finds in areas south are regularly recruited to fill the gap, possibly correctly, although in a craft which we can judge - scarabmaking, identified as Phoenician or other by inscription there are very marked regional differences away from Phoenicia.” Pottery helps hardly at all since most major eastern classes are proving from analysis to have been made in many different centres, from Cyprus and all along the Levant coast: this applies from Red Slip to the so-called Canaanite amphorae. Thus, the difference between the Red Slip at Al Mina and in Palestine is shown by analysis, and Joan du Plat Taylor long ago observed that the former was unlike the classic ‘Samaria ware’.’’ So whence is the Red Slip on Ischia, for example, and by/for whom was it ever copied (see above)?

Coldstream gave a good account of Phoenicians in the Aegean long ago, in 1982, and there have been several since, more partisan.” Phoenician identity is simply assumed and in many cases is demonstrably wrong, as some of even Coldstream’s own observations and parallels show, but he has the advantage of a mainly archaeological rather than ideological approach. The tendency to declare Phoenician anything that looks Egyptian in the Mediterranean is uncritical and does less than justice to the Phoenician achievement. The Phoenicians’ egyptianizing is highly competent; we can judge that from the inscribed scarabs (see above), metalwork and ivories."° Garbled versions of Egyptian style are generally Greek - certainly in Naukratis and almost certainly earlier in Rhodes.’’ To call the egyptianizing work of Cyprus (an island often close to Egypt politically and with direct sea access) Phoenician cannot be the whole truth and disregards the remarkable record of continuity, identity and prosperity in the island. Moreover, we now know that both Greek and probably Phoenician were being spoken and written in the island from about 1000 BC. There is no convincing archaeological support for thinking that the Greek Orientalizing Revolution was a product of Phoenician influence rather than Syrian/Assyrian; it is not an either/or question and generally the customer can be shown to have called the tune. The wrong Semites are being privileged. The Greek Classical Revolution of the 5th century depended, in arts and crafts, on the way Greek art had developed in the preceding Archaic period of the 6th century, and this in turn depended wholly on the preceding Orientalising period. Any independence still enjoyed by the Syrian states disappeared under the blows of Assyria by the early 7th century, but their legacy was the Orientalising culture of Greece. The phenomenon was due to a combination of Syrian skills and Greek enterprise. Both deserve their share of the credit, without belittling Phoenician enterprise in the west Mediterranean and parts of Italy, or the quality of Phoenician art.

The Greeks used the term ‘Phoenician’ rather loosely, while for Herodotus much from the Black Sea to Egypt was ‘Syria’. From Homer on Phoenicia was Sidon rather than Tyre. We would naturally have taken the women who painted the ivory cheekpieces in Homer (//. 4. 141-142) for Phoenician, but for the fact that he calls them Lydian and Carian. Helen’s ‘Cypro-Phoenician’ silver workbasket on wheels was in fact a gift from Egypt (Od. 4. 128-132). Most modern accounts of Phoenicians in Homer make him appear critical of them, yet the attitude is no different to that applied in his poems to all seafarers, who are regularly asked whether they are merchants or pirates (Od. 3. 71-74), while all merchants are despised by landowners (Od. 8. 161-164). And when Odysseus does speak well of a Phoenician (Od. 13. 276-277) this has now to be dismissed as a deliberate indication of uncharacteristic behaviour.” There is far more complexity in these matters than many make appear, and we would do well to use no ethnic epithet for people or objects without circumspection.

Neglect of Egypt is no less reprehensible, and comes easily to those who apply the label ‘Phoenician’ indiscriminately. A recent review of the Mediterranean economy in the early first millennium manages to ignore it almost entirely.” A champion of Egypt has been Martin Bernal, with whom we return to the ‘people’ and modern intellectual aspects of this subject, and leave antiquity behind. So far Bernal’s detailed arguments have concerned the Bronze Age and we have yet to see what he makes of the Iron Age though there are many hints in Volume I of Black Athena (1987). He has been much misquoted but his heavily partisan approach must leave him open to the suspicion that at least in part there is a response to western guilt over Black Africa, and he is open in his belief that anti-semitism has been a major factor in western scholarly attitudes. But even casual reading in 19th-century literature suggests that the record is more evenly balanced, or at least no more unbalanced than it is today. He came to the subject from an already distinguished career in the study of east Asian languages. What he calls the ‘scattered Jewish components of my ancestry’ played, he writes, no obvious part in his decision to turn to Hebrew studies, though then to be convinced by the historical conclusions of the linguists Gordon and his pupil Astour is even less obviously explicable, unless he was more heavily predisposed to be convinced than many scholars, including orientalists.*’ He has attempted the impossible but totally desirable task, to move from linguistic studies to a comprehensive view of the history and archaeology of the Bronze and Iron Ages of the Middle East (which may be allowed to include Greece and Egypt). The impossibility has led him to be rather highly selective of evidence from the work of scholars whose own motivations are not readily judged by an outsider, let alone by many insiders. It also encouraged a very single-minded approach which brooks no challenge or willingness to accept either evidence for broader issues or more detailed objections, a style of reasoning that is met in several of the wilder extremes of Politically Correct thought (Animal Rights, etc.) where what might be a laudable intention becomes a passionate obsession.

Bernal’s grandfather was a distinguished Egyptologist, Sir Alan Gardiner, whom I had the privilege of knowing. Bernal is able to quote his apparent, but not passionately felt, resentment of Greek attitudes to Egypt.”! Bernal’s father to whom he dedicates Black Athena, ‘who taught me that things fit together, interestingly’, was a polymath and _ brilliant physicist and geneticist; also possibly a model for singleminded devotion to a defective cause.”

An influential work of recent years on related matters is E. Said’s Orientalism (1978). He paints a vivid picture of the partly imaginary ‘orient’, its eccentricity and shortcomings conjured by the scholarship and prejudice of the west, from its partial, though often profound, experience of ‘the east’. He quotes his sources generously so that it is possible to see where his commentary on them may sometimes seem strained. In these matters whatever you seek you can find. Criticism led to his polite retraction of some misapprehensions of his intentions in his appendix to a later edition (1995). He has a short, perhaps revealing explanation of what led him to the work, and comments ‘The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening’. He had been brought up in colonial (sic) Palestine and Egypt, and the USA. One cannot help wondering what he would have written had he spent his adult working life, not in the USA, but in Britain, which has been traditionally more sympathetic to the Arab world.

And then there is Boardman (1927- ). Perhaps this will set a fashion for declaration of interests by scholars dealing with special issues where other and prejudicial factors might be thought to operate.”’ I have no colonial affiliations but one grandmother was Irish (Dublin). I was educated at a Public School (‘Private’ to Americans) but did not ‘live in’, and all my education and early research were paid for by the state or scholarships from school and college, a product of the ‘preWelfare-State’. This is one reason why I feel that scholars who can should repay their debt by making their subjects accessible to the wider public that has supported them. A significant part of World War II was spent in London air-raid Shelters - which might account for a certain realist or even fatalist approach to the world, but also a touch of chauvinism and deafness. My father had been a devout but not obsessive Christian, my mother the daughter of a village carpenter. My father came from what seems to be a long line of City clerks which might explain my (and my brother’s) aptitudes for mathematics rather than languages. My education was heavily linguistic in classics until I attended a lecture by Charles Seltman at Cambridge and realised what more there was. Post-war I was as leftist as most of my age, and subsequently rather a-political. My army service was spent mainly teaching map-reading in Sussex. I became ‘a Euboean man’ by accident. Any pupil of Robert Cook naturally looked for an Archaic Greek ware to study, but in 1948 none was accessible in Athens except for Eretrian, which was suggested to me by Semni Karouzou, while Dr Threpsiades let me loose in the Eretria apotheke. J recall sitting out the effects of a hangover on the hill overlooking the Stadion in Athens in 1949 with a philosopher friend (Renford Bambrough) who asked why on earth I was studying such dull pottery. I said, with no conviction whatever, that it might prove to have some historical significance. My job in Oxford enabled me to identify a few pieces of Euboean pottery in the Al Mina material, and I speculated that there might be much more, a view that was vindicated by the finds at Lefkandi and clay analysis. I have not dug in Euboea and visited Al Mina for the first time in 2001. I was more ‘an Ionian man’ after Old Smyrna (Bayrakli) and the Chios excavations; or ‘a Cretan man’ after the Knossos tablets and the Oxford Cretan Collection. I wrote The Greeks Overseas not because I was interested in colonies, which was what Max Mallowan, the editor, asked for, but because he allowed me to include east and south, for which the Al Mina material, editing Dunbabin’s last book, and the Chios-Naukratis connection had supplied an interest. Some of my friends thought I had defected to the oriental. I recognize the book as old-fashioned but it seemed worth updating modestly after 20 years, and several recent translations suggest that old-fashioned approaches have a significant survival value. I distrust work in which theory drives the evidence rather than emerges from it. Excavating a colony, at Tocra, was the result of sheer cupidity in the face of the promise of so much fine Archaic pottery. Gem studies resulted from idle moments in Athens fascinated by Furtwangler’s great volumes, and from the arrival in Oxford of R.M. Dawkins’ brother with an old sock full of Island Gems. I was not a pupil of Beazley and learnt to trust his method by practising it. Iconographic interest stemmed from casual observations about specific scenes, not a deliberate search for political symbolism or any other -ism, although they came to serve such subjects; and from involvement in LIMC. J am neither a gardener nor physically assertive, only sporadically energetic in early years; I value comfort but distrust luxury. I find I have a growing affection for the postantique east. And so on. My resentment at being thought prejudiced may be misguided, and I am sure I cannot detect all influences, but I am far more conscious of the effects of assisted serendipity and joy in the subject than of any programme or attitudes induced by education or politics or persons; I hate being misquoted or misrepresented but am well used to it by now; and I can do little about my instinctive intolerance of the intolerant, or desire to ridicule the ridiculous.

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