Archaeology Magazine - June 1952 - Cover3

house built about a court (B. Schweitzer), the identification of individual
artists who decorated Mycenaeanpottery (F. Stubbings), and Mycenaean
quiver ornaments (A. W. Persson).
In the field of Classical sculpture,
Ashmole writes on the pose of the
Blacas head in the British Museum,
Jenkins on some evidencefor the history of the bronze Athena at Byzantium. In Epigraphy, Zaki Aly publishes a stele from HermopolisMagna,
where Wace has recentlybeen excavating, Meritt and Andrewes a new text
of an Athenian decree concerningNeapolis, Tod some laudatory epithets on
Greek epitaphs, and Woodward some
notes on Spartan lists of victorious
"ball players." For Greek vases there
are articleson a finegeometricamphora
in the Stathatos Collection(J. Cook),
a seventhcentury anthropomorphicjug
from Samos (E. Buschor), a hoplitodromos cup (J. D. Beazley), on the
place of vase-painting in Greek Art
(M. Robertson), and on accidental
and intentional red glaze on Athenian
vases (G. M. A. Richter). Architecture too is consideredin an article by
R. M. Cook on the origin of the triglyph, in a reconstructionof the tomb
of Porsena at Clusium by J. L. Myres,
and in an article by A. Boethius on
the reception halls of the Roman emperors. Celebrating Professor Wace's
interest in the post-Classicalworld are
accounts of a Byzantine manuscript at
Cambridge (E. H. Minns), post-Byzantinefiguredsilks (D. Talbot Rice),
and modern Greek folk tales (R. M.
Dawkins). In this widely varied collection are also included studies in
Homeric archaeology, Greek religion
and mythology.It would be difficultto
select any articles from this group as
being significant above the others; all
are short studies of considerable interest and scholars in many fields will
profit by them, just as they have profited from the works in similar fields of
ProfessorWace.
Saul S. Weinberg
Universityof Missouri
MycenaeanPottery from the Levant,by
Frank H. Stubbings. xvi, 111 pages,
18 plates, 37 figures. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge1951 $5.00
It is appropriate to review, at the
same time as the Wace volume reported above, the work of one of
Summer 1932

Wace's students and a contributor to
his anniversaryvolume.In the series of
regional studies of Aegean civilization
to which several of Wace's students
have'devoted themselves,Frank Stubbings worked on Attica and published
a definitivestudy of the Mycenaeanpottery of that region. Turning to a
broader sphere, he has ^collected, for
the Wace volume, the Mycenaeanpottery that can be grouped by painters'
individual styles, and now in this volume he studies and analyzes all the
Mycenaeanvases known from a much
wider region, the Levant. Here Mycenaean pottery is obviouslyforeign, but
often imitated locally. This is the first
special study of such ware in Syria and
Palestine; for Rhodes, Cyprus, and
Egypt it brings previous studies up to
date. For chronology, Stubbings uses
Furumark's dating of the successive
phases of Mycenaeanpottery, most of
which are derived from the very contacts of the Mycenaeanworld and the
Near East which are here illuminated.
Rhodesvery early yieldedMycenaean
pottery and the great accumulationhas
become convincingevidenceof its importance as a center of Mycenaeancivilization. Almost all the vases are from
graves, for the one settlementwhich has
been explored yielded nothing after
about 1400B.c.But the serieson the island ranges from Myc. H (about 15001425 b.c.) into the twelfth century. Illustrations of pottery from Ialysos,now
in the British Museum, give welcome
new photographs of well known vases.
So too there are many new and excellent reproductionsof Mycenaeanvases
found on Cyprus, which abounds in
this ware and continues to yield some
of the finestexamplesknown,especially
vases decoratedin the figurestyle. Here
Stubbings has not attempted a complete enumeration,for the list would be
far too long and the characteristicfeatures are clear from a general survey.
As in Rhodes, the pottery here starts
with Myc. II and continues to the end
of the series.Stubbings, among others,
believesthat the great majority of the
Myc. HIB (1300-1230 b.c.) pottery
found on Cyprus was locally made, but
he has not answered the objection of
the late John Franklin Daniel that
there is no sign of any influenceof this
highly skilled technique on the generally inferior Cypriotepottery. In view
of recent finds at Corinth and of those

in the pottery factory at Berbati, this
reviewer also feels that the theory of
local manufacture must be taken with
reservation.
Stubbings next proceedsto a chronologicalstudy of the Mycenaeanpottery
of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Myc. II
is extremelyrare in the first two regions,
but is sufficientto indicate some trade;
in Egypt there is more, all of which had
already been collected by Wace and
Blegen in a study of this pottery as
evidence for trade and colonization.
One of the most interestingdisclosures
of their study was that in this period
Cretan pottery was much scarcer in
Egypt than was the ware from mainland Greece. Myc. hi pottery is much
more common in Syria and Palestine,
as the listing of this material from each
site shows. The Myc. hi ware from
Egypt is now capable of closer subdivision and attribution than it was before
Furumark's study was available.
Thus this survey shows that the
mainland Greeks were trading in competition with the Cretans already in the
period before 1400, that is, before the
collapseof Cretan power, sending their
products to Egypt possiblythrough stations on Rhodes and Kos. Scantier evidence may indicate early Mycenaean
trade with Syria and Palestine, where
there had been notable Minoan trade.
It was late in the fifteenth century that
the first Mycenaean pottery appeared
on Cyprus. After this much less went
to Syria, now largely under Hittite
domination, but Myc. iiia pottery is
found in Palestine. The reign of Akhnaton in Egypt, during which foreign
connections were encouraged, saw a
great influx of Mycenaean pottery to
Tell el Amarna; Stubbings believes
that most of this pottery came from
Rhodesand Cyprus. But in the reaction
that followed,Amarna was abandoned
and the Mycenaean trade largely died
out. Some Syrian and Palestinian
coastal stationsstill receivedMycenaean
pottery, believedto be largely of Cypriote manufacture. Here in Cyprus was
the stronghold of Mycenaean civilization in the Near East until the general
disintegrationof the cultures of that region in the troubled years of the late
thirteenth and the early twelfth centuries.
Saul S. Weinberg
Missouri
Universityof
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Archaeology Magazine - June 1952

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