Books in Brief

006

Archaeological Giants

The Bull of Minos: The Discoveries of Schliemann and Evans

Leonard Cottrell, with a new introduction by Peter Levi

(New York and Bicester, England: Facts on File Publications, 1984) 224 pp., 16 color plates, numerous black-and-white illustrations, $19.95

Schliemann and Evans. The two names are inseparable from any account of Greek Bronze Age archaeology; they were its founding fathers. Heinrich Schliemann first established the historical reality of Mycenaean civilization that lies behind the epic Homeric world of Agamemnon and Menelaus, who, eight centuries before Pericles, launched a thousand Greek ships to besiege and conquer Troy. Arthur Evans revealed the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete, the predecessor and begetter of so much in Mycenaean culture, and itself remembered in the no-less-colorful legends of Minos, king of Knossos, of the labyrinth and the Minotaur.

Schliemann’s own life-story is scarcely less romantic, though in a modern mold—the poor boy, apprenticed to a village grocer, who made himself a millionaire by his forties and, in the face of academic scorn for the upstart amateur, realized his childhood ambition of digging up the physical remains of Troy and Mycenae.

Evans belonged to a different world. Born to affluence, he was the son of a successful paper manufacturer who was also a learned and enthusiastic collector of artifacts from the ages of stone and bronze. Evans was equipped by all the advantages of an Oxford education for the scientific pursuit of archaeology, and with an individual genius of imagination that led him from the study of coins and engraved gems to seek a prehistoric, Bronze Age form of writing in Crete. He found it, and in doing so uncovered a whole unknown civilization, whose architecture and decorative arts achieved a fairy-tale beauty surpassing even the poetic memory of them.

The story of the Greek Bronze Age and of its discoverers has been the subject of many books. This one, by Leonard Cottrell, not by training an archaeologist but a journalist and a writer for radio and television, was first published in 1953. He wrote with skillful experience of what the nonspecialist reader needs and can enjoyably absorb. He prepared himself by wide and careful study. Though not a professional archaeologist, he consulted the professionals, used their advice and had their good will. He could not of course know Schliemann, or even Evans, who lived to 90 and died in 1941, but he knew Alan Wace, who did so much to supplement Schliemann’s work at Mycenae and to systematize our knowledge of the Greek Bronze Age. He also knew J. N. L. Myres, who belonged to Evans’s world both at Oxford and in the Aegean, and he first visited Knossos with Piet de Jong, the brilliant archaeological draftsman who had worked with both Evans and Wace, and who, after the Second World War, was resident curator of the Palace of Minos at Knossos for the British School at Athens.

The second edition of The Bull of Minos (1971) included a new appendix on the decipherment of the Mycenaean script (Linear B), achieved while the book was in 007the press. Here again, Cottrell was in close touch, both with the decipherer, the young English architect Michael Ventris, and with the professional philologist John Chadwick, who was Ventris’s collaborator.

But why does the book merit another new edition now? The answer is clearly and convincingly expressed in the fresh introduction contributed by Peter Levi. Cottrell’s book is a minor classic, and still perhaps the best book of its kind. It was not his first venture in archaeological writing, nor his last; but it is probably his best. It was, and is, alive with the freshness and enthusiasm of one to whom the information he purveys is still new, exciting, fascinating. We share with him, as well as with Schliemann and his young Greek wife, the thrill of unearthing “Priam’s treasure” at Troy and the astounding riches of the shaft graves at Mycenae.

What he tells of Mycenae and Knossos and their discoverers is framed in the account of his own first travels to those places, undertaken for the writing of the book. He does not merely describe the architectural wonders of the Lion Gate and the beehive tombs of Mycenae and the palace at Knossos; he shares his own first view of them. With him the reader peers through the window of the diesel car to see the improbable, village-railroad-station sign, “Mykenai”; with him one is waited on at the village inn (which had accommodated Schliemann) by a modern Agamemnon and Orestes; with him one reluctantly lays aside Homer or The Palace of Minos to go to sleep in the basement bedroom in the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, where Evans had confidently sat out the seismic tremors and rumblings that helped him to understand the condition of the Minoan ruins. It is a book about a distant past, seen through the recent past, seen in the present.

Not only is it a good book in itself, it was written, as Peter Levi states, at the right time. By the 1950s, the controversies that surrounded the discoveries of both 008Schliemann and Evans (and sometimes their successors) had settled; and it was just before the fresh phase of startling new discoveries—especially the decipherment of Linear B and the excavations on Santorini. Moreover, it was a turning point in Greece itself. The disturbances of the Second World War, and the Greek civil war which followed it, were recently over, and the tide of tourism had not yet inundated the country. Cottrell saw a Greece not drastically changed from that which Evans and Schliemann had known.

The book is still a first-class beginning for the general reader who wants to know about Minoan and Mycenaean archaeology, and who cannot cope with the bulk of Schliemann’s own books or with the six volumes of Evans’s Palace of Minos (as a 17th-century writer said of another work: “a very portable book; a horse may carry it, if he be not too weak”). It starts from the background of the Homeric story that was Schliemann’s own inspiration. It traces his work at Troy, at Mycenae and at Tiryns, and shows the transition from Schliemann’s overly romantic desire simply to validate the historical truth of the epic to the establishment of a wholly new discipline of Greek prehistory. The tale then passes to Evans and to the very different career and outlook that led him to dig at Knossos and to reveal the older and complementary Minoan civilization. The account of these two civilizations is skillfully and continuously blended with the history of their discovery.

Peter Levi’s introduction, ably outlining what has happened in the field since Cottrell wrote, sets the book and its contents in a fuller perspective. Most important has been the decipherment of Linear B, but that is not all. The same year, 1952, saw the excavation at Mycenae of further shaft graves, second only to Schliemann’s finds. The 1960s saw the revelation of Akrotiri, a new, island province of Minoan civilization beneath the deep volcanic deposits on the island of Santorini. There is new evidence on Mycenaean religion from excavations at Hagia Eirene on Kea and in the citadel of Mycenae itself, and new light on the “dark age” between Mycenaean and historical Greece from the British dig at Lefkandi in Euboea. The reader may well want to go on to pursue these topics. What a pity that there is as yet no book like Cottrell’s to guide him.

Thirty years have seen great changes in book production. This new edition is displayed on a good quarto paper (about 9½ × 12 inches), with a far greater wealth of illustrations than the original. The black-and-white photographs, as so often nowadays, are somewhat deficient in clarity of tone, but that is outweighed by the 16 fine color plates.

Delightful Surprise

The Archaeology of the Jerusalem Area

W. Harold Mare

(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1987) 323 pp., $19.95

Jerusalem is not only one of the most excavated cities in the world, it is also one of the most written about. So many books on Jerusalem have appeared in the past decade alone (James Purvis’s Jerusalem, the Holy City: A Bibliography, soon to be published, has 6,000 entries) that when asked to review another book on this subject I wondered whether it was needed. My slight hesitancy disappeared as I went through the book at hand, and I can affirm that another will not be needed for some time because Professor Mare has done his work so well. He has produced a well-researched, thoroughly reliable, clearly written book on “Jerusalem, holy city” (Isaiah 52:1).

Since 1968, extensive archaeological excavations have been conducted in Jerusalem. Among the most significant are the following: Benjamin Mazar’s near the retaining walls of the Temple Mount, which has illuminated the magnificent architectural achievements of the Herodian period (37 B.C.–70 A.D.), Nahman Avigad’s in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, which established the extent of Jerusalem during 010the Monarchy (about 1000–586 B.C.), as well as revealed the cardo (main street) of the Byzantine period (324–640 A.D.); and Yigal Shiloh’s uncovering the City of David, with its pools and fortification system.

This is only a small sample of the topics that Mare deals with in much detail. He starts with the earliest times and goes to the Turkish period (from the third millennium B.C. to this century). It is easy to follow his chronological approach as he moves through the centuries, stopping along the way to call attention to archaeology’s contribution to the history.

Mare’s text is enhanced by a generous supply of maps, photographs, plans and sketches; the selected bibliography, glossary and index are also very useful. The book is so well organized, and the material is presented so clearly and completely, that it could serve as a textbook on Jerusalem.

Only because reviews usually contain at least one negative comment, I will say that the illustrations fall a bit below the quality of the other parts of this fine work.

Weighty Reference

Illustrated Dictionary and Concordance of the Bible

Edited by Geoffrey Wigoder, with Shalom M. Paul, Benedict T. Vivano, O.P., and Ephraim Stern

(New York: Macmillan, 1986) 1070 pp., $100.00

Long awaited, this magnificently produced dictionary of the Bible now claims a distinctive place for itself among the many recently published dictionaries surveyed in my review, “What Is a Good Bible Dictionary?” BAR 12:06. Geoffrey Wigoder of Jerusalem, an experienced editor of reference works, has found a happy formula for the Bible dictionary. He has kept the text to a single column, has used quite large type, and has selected a type of paper that enhances color photographs, maps and illustrations. He has also devised a plan that combines a concordance with a dictionary by recording, in the adjacent inner margin, every Biblical occurrence of the listed terms. The outer margins are used for the illustrations.

Such a plan adds size and weight to the book. It is large and heavy (8½ × 11 inches and over 7 ½ pounds!), but it is also very well bound and sure to wear well. It is less portable than other dictionaries recently published, however, and is clearly less suitable than they might be to serve as a textbook supplement (or as the basic textbook) for introductory Bible classes.

There are hundreds of maps, but there is no set of comprehensive maps. One must turn to the article on, say, “Mesopotamia” to find that country highlighted in its setting within the Middle East. I am not sure whether it is a serious loss not to have the familiar overall maps. In any event, no other Bible dictionary has more maps and photographs of the countries and the topography of the Bible.

In their respective entries, the books of the Bible are all summarized, and then attractively outlined in highlighted form at the end of each entry. But the summaries only occasionally reflect any critical evaluation of the literary units within the books; they appear to be sense-outlines capable of being made with no scholarly competence in the books in question.

The treatment of theological themes is less detailed than that found in evangelical Bible dictionaries, as one would expect. The treatment also shows one of the distinctive marks of this dictionary: It is done by scholars who are immensely sensitive and successful in relating Jewish and Christian ways of understanding Biblical religion. The articles (e.g., “Covenant” and “Creation”) do not first give a “Jewish” treatment of the subject in the Hebrew Bible and then a “Christian” treatment of the New Testament part of the subject. They simply flow right along, honoring Jewish and Christian understanding and presenting that understanding fairly. It is a remarkable partnership that the authors and editors have forged, no doubt due in large part to the fact that Jewish and Christian scholars have worked together long and well in Israel, where the editors all reside.

The treatment of the archaeological material is superb. Not everyone will agree with some of the views and conclusions, of course, but everyone will benefit from the profuse illustrations, from the careful presentations of the evidence and from the emerging picture of how richly archaeological finds do illustrate, and help to make comprehensible, the Biblical record.

Rating this new dictionary as I did those in the previous survey article, my conclusions are (using 5 as the highest favorable rating) Scholarship: 4/5; Clarity: 5; Maps: 4/5 (because of lack of comprehensive maps); Illustrations: 5; and Production: 5.

065

Updated Classic

The Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land

Edited by Avraham Negev

(New York: Thomas Nelson Publishers, Revised Edition, 1986) 419 pp., $24.95

Even those familiar with the 1972 edition of this one-volume encyclopedia will welcome this more recent version. Many of the articles in the original edition have been brought up to date, and several new ones have been added. While the format of this revised edition is identical to the original, there are 16 new contributors out of a total of 32, compared to a total of 20 for the old edition. However, in both editions the authors of the individual entries are not identified, a practice that this reviewer found rather annoying.

The new edition’s 32 pages of superb color photographs greatly enhance the book’s aesthetic appeal, as well as the amount of information provided. In addition, most of the black-and-white pictures, figures and maps of the earlier volume are included in the new edition. Additional work since 1972 at archaeological sites reported on in the first edition required the rewriting of many of the original essays. Among these sites are Acco, Aphek, Dan, Dor, Ashkelon, Lachish, Megiddo, Shiloh and especially Jerusalem. On the other hand, the article on Capernaum is very much out of date, having ignored the work that has continued since 1978 on the Greek Orthodox side of the site. It should also be noted that in both editions Capernaum is erroneously located on the map of archaeological excavations. Among the new entries are articles on Tell Anafa, Khirbet Shema, Herodian Jericho, Tel Batash, Susiya and Deir el-Balah. Conspicuously absent from this list, however, is any mention of the work at Ebla in Syria.

The articles as a whole are concise and well written. They contain valuable information on the places, peoples and customs of ancient Israel and its environs. This fact, plus the glossary of archaeological terms and the chronological tables gathered at the end of the book, make this archaeological encyclopedia a useful reference tool. The double-column format and clear, crisp print enhance readability. A timely new “Foreword” by Carol Meyers places the volume in the context of the on-going controversy surrounding “Biblical Archaeology” and the challenge of the “new” archaeology to the methods and goals of the old.

Archaeological Giants

The Bull of Minos: The Discoveries of Schliemann and Evans