DISCOVERY IN ASIA

Evening Star, Issue 22618, 9 April 1937, Page 12

DISCOVERY IN ASIA

COLONISING GREEKS RESULT OF YEAR'S WORK There has been open in the British Museum an exhibition of the antiquities found during the first season of excavations carried out by Sir Leonard Woolley in North Syria (writes the archaeological correspondent of the ‘Manchester Guardian’). It was a most unusual excavation, both to judge from its results and from the nature of the sites revealed. Two main sites were excavated, one on the coast near the mouth of the Orontes River, the other more inland, but still in the same river valley. The coastal site lies near a mountain, called in antiquity Mount Gasios, and both sites lie on a rich and fertile belt of land that allows of through traffic between Asia Minor and North Syria and the inland regions of Northern Mesopotamia. South of this belt of fertile land is impassable desert, north of it difficult mountainous country. The Orontes Valley thus joins up the Mediterranean poeplea with the peoples of the Upper Euphrates Valley. It is an exciting and important region which has never yet been fully explored except in the district of Antioch itself, where remains of a later period only have been found. PURELY GRECIAN PLACE. The excavators’ first surprise was to discover that the little coastal site of El Mina proved, quite contrary to expectation, to be a purely Greek settlement, the life of which began in the ninth century and lasted without a break until about 320 b.c. Then it was abandoned in favour of the newly-estab-lished Seleucia. The earliest pottery found proved to be pure Greek “ geometric ” ware, from the Cyclades Islands and Rhodes. A small quantity of proto-Corinthian pottery imported direct from Greece was the next importation. The settlement itself, to judge from the small area excavated, was little more than a depot or group of warehouses. In some respects it resembles the Greek trading city of Naukratis, in the Egyptian Delta, or some of the “ emporia ” which Greeks established purely for trade on the coasts of Thrace and Spain and in the Black Sea. The pottery shown in the exhibition illustrated perfectly the changing fashions of Greek works of art throughout the history of the settlement. After the proto-Corinthian ware wo find Corinthian wares in small quantities, and it was clearly the Paloponnese which exported its wares here. But from about 520 it was Athens whicli obtained the monopoly of export, and from then to the end it is mainly Athenian wares that are found. In the exhibition one could also see part of,a fine hoard of silver Attic coins which cover a period from 475 n.c. to 400 b.c. and a series of fragments of the very finest Athenian pottery from 500 b.c. to the fourth century, FIVE MASTER PAINTERS. Among the finds resulting from an excavation that only lasted a month were examples of the work of no less than five master painters of the early fiftit century whose work is to be seen in the museums of Europe and America. In the sixth and early fifth centuries there was a close connection with Cyprus, and there were many Cypriot importations ranging from a carved stone head to a fine Cypriot painted

amphora measuring two and- a-half feet in diameter and a smaller vessel on which is painted a most lively scene of a fight between two bulls. 'But the Cypriot connection finally gave way to the Athenian. Undoubtedly the merchants whose warehouses were built there were importers and exporters of Greek merchandise and Greek pottery of high artistic value. Their clients were the sophisticated residents of the Middle East, The nature of the site and its very early foundation also now throw much light on at least one of the routes by which Oriental influences* reached the Greeks and stimulated them so deeply in the seventh century. Among the noteworthy exhibits were a bone statuette of the archaic period which resembled in type and style the famous ivory figures from. Ephesus. CONNECTIONS WITH CRETE. The other site excavated was Tell Atchana, some 40 miles inland. Here the excavators found a prehistoric settlement which showed marked Cretan connections. Whether those connections arrived by way of Cyprus remains yet to be seen. But they testify to a similar connection between Crete and the iEgean and the Oriental world of the Middle East in the middle of the second millennium b.c. The strange pottery with Minoan or Mycenaean designs there found was well exhibited in the British Museum. And with the pottery was found a fine sword of Syrian type dating to about 1700 B.c. Clearly the finds from both sites indicate that here in the Orontes Valley lay one of the big routes to the centre of the Middle Asiatic world by which influences could pass ■ from the Mediterranean and in the reverse direction. But the greatest surprise was the small Greek warehouse city with its continuous connection with Asia. Even the disturbances of the Persian Wars do not seem to have stopped tho steady flow of trade from Athens to the East nor to have led to any occupation of the site by Persians. This is the furthest east yet identified for Greek enterprise. _ Probably the little town is to be identified with an ancient settlement known as Poseidon. Legends concerning it associate its settlement both with Crete and Cyprus. The mountain near by, Mount Casios, is, in fact, visible from Cyprus and serves as a notable landmark for mariners. Further excavations of this site should reveal wider information. All Greek historians and archeologists will watch progress at this site with interest.