Field Notes

010

Emily Vermeule, 72, Dies

A Bright, Humane, Civilized Spirit

Emily Dickinson Townsend Vermeule was a most remarkable scholar of Greek antiquity. Her death on February 6, 2001, at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a deep personal as well as professional loss; she was in turn my neighbor, mentor, dissertation director and friend.

A native New Yorker, Emily rooted for the Boston Red Sox with the zeal of a convert. Trained in archaeology and classics, she wrote with equal authority about texts and artifacts, or about “the Dirt and the Word,” to quote the subtitle of a presidential address she delivered to the American Philological Association in 1996. A rigorous academic, Emily was also a published poet and a devotee of mystery novels.

Professor Vermeule received a Master’s in classical archaeology from Radcliffe (1954) and a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr (1956), with a dissertation on the Greek poet Bacchylides. She deliberately blended literary and archaeological studies long before such interdisciplinary interests became popular. Nowhere is this more evident than in her Sather Lectures at Berkeley (Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry [Berkeley, 1979]), in which she covers topics as diverse as Bronze Age horse burials, heroes immortalized in Greek poetry and Egyptian influence on Greek imagery. In these studies, as in all her work, she keeps a sympathetic focus on the ancient individual. Characteristic, too, is her scholarship’s puckish refusal to be conventionally academic: Penetrating insights are reinforced not only by quotations from Heraclitus or Homer, but by New Yorker cartoons, a letter to Ann Landers and photographs of the cemetery in Cambridge where the Vermeule and Shelmerdine dogs took early morning walks.

Emily will perhaps be remembered best as a scholar of the Aegean Bronze Age. While still a student, she excavated and published a Mycenaean tomb in the Athenian Agora. Later she worked with the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos at Bronze Age sites in Messenia and Santorini (ancient Thera, which was destroyed by a volcanic eruption around 1600 B.C.). Her fieldwork also took her to Cyprus and Turkey.

Of all her books, the most famous is her first one, Greece in the Bronze Age (Chicago, 1964). It is a tour de force providing a vivid, authoritative look at every aspect of Bronze Age Greek life and art, from architectural techniques to fresco styles to Mycenaean political relations with the Near East. When it was first published, a well-known scholar remarked that young Emily Vermeule had written in her 30s a book no one should be able to write until her late 50s.

Greece in the Bronze Age brings the evidence of the Linear B tablets into harmony with the archaeological data for the first time, creating a much richer picture of Mycenaean culture than had previously been achieved. Emily always describes this picture in terms of the people themselves, not just their artifacts. She notes, for example, that Mycenaean painted plaster floors strike us as a rather “fragile architectural investment,” easily damaged by use. Emily suggests, however, that since the Mycenaeans “usually show themselves barefoot in the frescoes … perhaps the floors were not much scuffed by the padding of naked feet.” Given this human focus and unerring eye for the telling detail, it is no wonder that, despite the scholarly advances of the 011last 40 years, Greece in the Bronze Age remains unsurpassed as a readable introduction to this fascinating period.

Emily was also a much admired teacher. At Wellesley College, at Boston University, and finally as the Samuel Zemurray and Doris Zemurray-Stone Radcliffe Professor at Harvard University from 1970 until her retirement in 1994, she delighted students with her erudition, her wit and her tendency to signal for the next slide by whacking any reachable surface with a long wooden pointer. Those of us lucky enough to study with her as graduate students try to write better, think better and reach further in our work because of her training and example. As befits a great teacher and scholar, she was invited in 1982 to give the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government bestows for achievement in the humanities.

Emily Vermeule is survived by her distinguished husband, Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III, Curator Emeritus of Classical Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and their two children, Blakey Vermeule, a professor of English at Northwestern University, and Adrian Vermeule, a professor of Law at the University of Chicago. She is also survived by the most recent in a long series of animals, ranging from Dalmatians and tortoises to partridges. In Aspects of Death, Emily wrote that the songs of the ancient Greek poets could “raise the classical dead and install them once more at the heart of life.” She might have been describing her own uncanny ability to bring the ancient world to life.

011

Mummy Dearest

More Finds in the Valley of the Golden Mummies

This spring archaeologists found 22 new Greco-Roman period mummies in the Bahariya Oasis, about 215 miles southwest of Cairo. One of the mummies was that of a child entombed with his parents (above).

“The most beautiful is a three-year-old child … who appears to be crying,” Gabballah Ali Gabballah, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters.

The mummies are from two newly discovered tombs, each of which contained 11 mummies. Many of these mummies are gilded and set in elaborately decorated sarcophagi. The archaeologists also found gold coins and wine jars among the burial goods.

Tombs containing ornate, gilded mummies were first found by accident in Bahariya in 1996 (see Zahi Hawass, “Mummies: Emissaries of the Golden Age,” AO 03:05). The tombs opened this spring bring the total number of mummies to 230, mostly dating from the fourth century B.C. to the third century A.D. The oldest tombs in the region, however, date to Egypt’s 26th Dynasty (664–525 B.C.), one of the last periods of ancient native Egyptian rule.

Work at Bahariya has only begun. According to Zahi Hawass, the Director of the Pyramids and chief archaeologist of the Bahariya region, “thousands of mummies lie beneath the sands of the Bahariya Oasis.”

012

Inti Loves Mentu

Egyptian Tomb Yields World’s Oldest Love Song?

Czech archaeologists excavating a 4,300-year-old necropolis 12 miles southwest of Cairo in Abusir, Egypt, recently discovered what may be the world’s oldest love song. The hieroglyphic poem, which is illustrated by images of singers and harpists, appears on the wall of the tomb of Inti, a nobleman and judge who lived during the reign of Pepi I (2321–2287 B.C.).

The burial site at Abusir contains tombs of noblemen and their officials, from the Old Kingdom (2575–2134 B.C.) through the latest dynasties. For example, from 1995 to 1998 the Czech Institute of Archaeology excavated the much later shaft tomb (c. 525 B.C.) of the priest Iufaa; in the tomb was an enormous limestone sarcophagus with Iufaa’s mummy and canopic jars.

The discovery of the lyric on Inti’s wall pushes back the date of the world’s earliest love poem by a century or two. As far as we know, the Sumerians did not begin writing such poetry until the end of the third millennium B.C. Inti’s poem, which is still being translated, is “probably a hymn dedicated to a goddess or a song of love honoring Mentu, Inti’s wife,” said Miroslav Barta, one of the Czech archaeologists.

The director of the Czech excavations, Bratislav Vachala, believes that the graves of Mentu and her two sons will be found nearby. The tomb of Inti’s father has already been uncovered at Abusir. The hunt for more lovesick family members will continue in the fall when a new digging season commences.

013

The 2001 White-Levy Grantees

This year New York philanthropists Shelby White and Leon Levy will spend almost a million dollars to enable archaeologists to publish old excavations. The husband-wife team, through the White-Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, which is administered by Harvard’s Semitic Museum, provides funding for the publication of previously unpublished excavations (also called “orphan digs”). The 2001 grants consist of $542,542 in grants to ongoing projects and $385,613 in grants to new recipients.

The grantees are as follows:

Michal Artzy, University of Haifa, Israel, The Final Publication of the Excavations of Tel Nami: 1986–1992, Israel

Amélie Beyhum, Harvard University, The Industrial Role of Sarepta (Sarafand, Lebanon) During the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age

Manfred Bietak, Institute of Egyptology, Vienna, Scarabs from Middle Bronze to Late Bronze Age Contexts in Canaan and the Levant, Israel

Michael Cosmopoulos, University of Manitoba, Eleusis in the Greek Bronze Age

Anastasia Dakouri-Hild, Cambridge University, The House of Kadmos in Mycenaean Thebes: Publication of the Keramopoullos Excavations (1906–1929), Greece

Raphael Greenberg, Tel Aviv University, The Publication of the Excavations at Tel Bet Yerah (Khirbet Al-Karak), Israel

Stefanos Jimatzidis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, The Publication of the Iron Age Settlement of the Double Table of Near Modern Sindos, Macedonia, Greece

Athanasia Kanta, University of Crete, The Study of Historical Conditions in Crete Towards the End of the Bronze Age from Four Sites: Hagia Pelagia, Kastrokephala, Tylissos and Kyra

Marisa Marthari, Greek Archaeological Service, The Publication of the Early Bronze Age Settlement of Skarkos on Ios, Greece

Eliezer Oren, Ben-Gurion University, Israel, The Publication of Tel Sera’: The Bronze Age Strata (Area A), Israel

R.R.R. Smith, Oxford University, The Publication of Roman Sculpture from Aphrodisias in Caria, SW Turkey

Maria Stamatopoulou, Oxford University, The Publication of the Archaeological Society of Athens’s Excavation in the Ancient Cemeteries of Demetrias and Pharsalos in Thessaly, Greece

Marianne Stern, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, The Publication of the Ancient Glass from the Athenian Agora, Greece

Gus Van Beek and Yorke Rowan, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, The Publication of Volumes I-III of the Smithsonian Institution Excavations at Tell Jemmeh, Israel

Photini Zapheiropoulou, Honorary Ephor of Antiquities The Publication of the Cemetery of Sellada, Thera, Greece

013

What Do You Know About Gandhara?

1) Where was ancient Gandhara?

a) off the coast of southern Turkey
b) China
c) Pakistan and Afghanistan
d) the hinterlands of Patagonia

2) After Alexander the Great conquered Gandhara in 327 B.C.

a) the Greeks were massacred in a native uprising
b) Greek soldiers colonized parts of modern Afghanistan
c) Indianized Greeks, the ancestors of today’s Gypsies, migrated into eastern Europe
d) the Greek army proceeded east, stopped only by the harsh conditions of the Gobi Desert

3) The Kusanas, who ruled Gandhara from the first to the third century A.D., were

a) the first disciples of the Buddha
b) Scythians from central Asia
c) surviving remnants of Alexander the Great’s army
d) nomadic Gandharan priests

4) When did the historical Buddha live?

a) 563–483 B.C.
b) 427–347 B.C. (same years as Plato)
c) second century B.C.
d) 4 B.C.–33 A.D.

5) The historical Buddha’s name was

a) Paravati
b) Li Po
c) Kublai Khan
d) Siddhartha

6) What is a “Bodhisattva”?

a) a flowering plant known for hypnotic properties (thus often used in Eastern rituals)
b) a stringed instrument used to accompany ragas
c) a type of silk cloth woven by the Gandharans and traded along the Silk Road
d) a being destined to become a Buddha

7) The Buddhist concept of “maya” refers to

a) the illusory nature of the world we perceive
b) the Road of Compassion, or one means of attaining nirvana
c) perfect wisdom, as represented in art by the Buddha’s forming a circle with his index finger and thumb
d) a final reckoning in which the good of the universe is to outweigh the bad

8) The sixth-century A.D. carving of the Buddha shown below, now obliterated by Taliban artillery, is how tall?

a) 25 feet?
b) 80 feet?
c) 110 feet?
d) 170 feet?

Answers

1) c, 2) b, 3) b, 4) a, 5) d, 6) d, 7) a, 8) d

012

OddiFacts

Aeneas in Judea?

Where would you search for the earliest manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the late first century B.C.? In a Roman or Pompeian library, perhaps? No, you’d have to go to Masada, in the Judean desert near the Dead Sea, where in the early 1960s Israeli archaeologist (and military commander) Yigael Yadin discovered papyrus fragments of Dido’s first speech from Book IV of the epic. The original manuscript probably belonged to an officer of Rome’s Tenth Legion, which had laid siege to Jewish rebels and their families in the mountain fortress during the last years of the First Jewish Revolt (66–74 A.D.) against Rome. According to the first century A.D. Jewish historian Josephus, the rebels committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.

Emily Vermeule, 72, Dies
A Bright, Humane, Civilized Spirit