Merrill Ees

EGYPT AND THE AEGEAN*

To understand the relations between Egypt and the Aegean in the second millennium BC we must try to divorce ourselves from the notions to which we are accustomed today and see antiquity through the eyes of the peoples for whom our past was their present. To start with, Egypt was not the name used by the ancient Egyptians for their own country. Egypt comes from the ancient Greek word for the Nile Valley, which in its turn is thought to have been ultimately derived from the hieroglyphic phrase “hwt - k3 - Pth” meaning “Temple of the Ka of Ptah,” the name for the city of Memphis in the New Kingdom. Egypt is not even the name used in Arabic by the people who live there now. They call their country al-Misr, which descends from the Semitic word “msrm” meaning the “two (border) regions.” In fact the ancient Egyptians did not have only one name for their country but several. One of the most frequent is a word which means “the black,” referring to the life giving mud which was brought into the Nile Valley by the river, and contrasting it to “the red,” designating the desert. Indeed the Nile River was the focal point of the ancient Egyptians’ lives and the central phenomenon by which their orientation and global outlook were shaped. Because the silt with which the Nile covered the valley when it f looded each year came from the African highlands, the south was associated with the beginnings and therefore became the most important cardinal point. The north was downstream and lost itself in the “great green,” a generic term used for the sea. You will note that the Delta, the fan-shaped mouth of Nile, only resembles the Greek letter from which it takes its name when the valley is approached from the north. Since the ancient Egyptians oriented themselves looking south, east was on their left and west on their right. Though the sun rose in the east, the left was less favoured than the right in ancient Egyptian superstition and so primacy was given to the west. The Pharaonic universe therefore consisted of four directions arranged in the reverse order to ours — south, north, west and east — but not always reproduced in that order. These points of the compass were conventionally characterized, in word and image, by the Nubians for the south, Asians for the north and Libyans for the west. There were no peoples to the east, except the Egyptians themselves. However, in the tomb of Rekhmire of the 15th century BC, east was represented by the coastal land of Punt in the eastern Sudan, which lies more to the south than the east of Egypt. Given the ancient Egyptians’ world view, it is not surprising that they had some difficulty placing in their inscriptions and graphic representations the names and peoples we assume to be connected with the Aegean, which lay to the north-west. The name Keftiu, which is generally identified with Crete, the expression, “Isles in the Midst of the Great Green,” customarily taken to mean the islands in the Aegean, and Tanaya, equated with mainland Greece, occur in lists of countries belonging to the north and the west. In the tomb of Rekhmire they represent the west. Though people from the Aegean could have arrived by ship in the Delta from the north or west, it seems very doubtful that the ancient Egyptian scribes and artists responsible for immortalizing these titles and pictures had ever been to the Aegean or had any first-hand acquaintance with what they were actually recording.

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In the preparation of this paper I have greatly benefitted from the assistance, advice and critical comments of Professor George Bass, Professor Manfred Bietak, Dr. John Chadwick, Mr. Peter Clayton, Dr. Henry Fischer, M. Jean Leclant, Dr. Christine Lilyquist, Ms. Marie Mauzy and Dr. Yannis Tzedakis. A special debt is owed to Dr. Eric Cline and Dr. Diane Harris-Cline for giving me the opportunity to update my treatment of this subject, even if I remain irredeemably minimalist.

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Moreover, funerary scenes were not used to record for posterity actual events that necessarily took place during the lifetimes of those being buried but mostly comprised stock images from the equivalent of pattern books designed to illustrate idealized happenings which were considered appropriate for representation in the owner’s after-life. Most of the references we have to Keftiu, the Isles in the Midst of the Great Green, and Tanaya were part of a vainglorious tour d’horizon, in much the same way as we today talk about people and goods coming from the four corners of the earth. As such they were intended to symbolize the omnipotence of Pharaoh and the universality of his power, whether or not these actually accorded with the facts. Nevertheless they are not without historical significance, even if they cannot be taken literally or at face value. The name Keftiu is first attested probably at some point during the First Intermediate Period, around 2000 BC, and occurs sporadically until the time of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Thutmose III, in the first half of the 15th century BC. It is then mentioned on numerous occasions and is included in later but derivative lists and practically disappears after the reign of Amenhotep III, about 1375 BC. These more historical references happen to coincide with the bulk of the tangible evidence for Minoan contacts with Egypt. It is only from the time of Thutmose III that the expressions “Isles in the Midst of the Great Green” and Tanaya are for certain first recorded. The former is encountered again in an inscription from the reign of Amenhotep IV, better known as the heretic king, Akhenaten, and is well attested in the XIXth Dynasty, from the times of Ramses II and III, in the 13th century BC. To this period belong most of the finds associated with the Mycenaean civilisation in Egypt. More detailed knowledge of the human geography of the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age is thought to be provided by a list of place names on one of five statue bases in the north part of the forecourt of the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III at Kom el-Hetan in Upper Egypt. The inscriptions on the five statue bases extant were evidently intended to represent the alleged authority of Pharaoh over the peoples and lands to the north, not only through their location in the temple but because of the hieroglyphic texts introducing the place names below. In addition to mentioning Keftiu and Tanaya, the list included locations which have been read as Amnisos, Knossos, Kydonia, Lyktos and Phaistos in Crete, Messenia, Mycenae and Nauplia in mainland Greece, the island of Kythera in the Aegean between Crete and the Peloponnesus, and possibly Ilios, the Greek name for Troy in north-west Anatolia. Even if all of these places have been correctly identified, no assumption can be made that any were conquered by or made tributary to Pharaoh or that Amenhotep III or his emissaries ever sailed to the Aegean. Recent research makes it very unlikely that this listing reproduces the itinerary of an actual sea voyage, or ref lects geographical knowledge first acquired in the time of this ruler. The very purpose of this row of inscriptions renders its historicity suspect, though the names of Aegean Bronze Age towns and regions were evidently somehow known to the Egyptians before the early 14th century BC. When we turn to the Aegean, our knowledge of the names in use is less complete but more historically indicative. The Aegean, like Egypt, comes from an ancient Greek word and was originally the personal name of a deity who according to legend drowned in the sea. As Minoan Linear A has not yet been deciphered, it is not known whether the Cretans of the Bronze Age had a name for themselves or for other lands or peoples. However, the documents in Mycenaean Linear B, which have been found in both mainland Greece and Crete, and were written in an early form of Greek, contain no indications of an ethnic term for the people who compiled them. At the same time the tablets from Pylos refer almost entirely, if not exclusively, to settlements and areas within its own administrative boundaries in Messenia, while those from Knossos mention sites throughout Crete but none outside the island. There is no word in Linear B which can be equated with the Egyptian names Keftiu or Tanaya, and no Linear A or B texts have yet been encountered in Egypt. There is also nothing in the diplomatic archives from Akhenaten’s palace at el-Amarna that can be connected with the Minoan or Mycenaean worlds. Few hieroglyphic inscriptions have been found in the Aegean in the Bronze Age, and they are mostly confined to royal names on objects of presumed Egyptian manufacture. Well known examples are the alabaster lid of the XVth Dynasty Hyksos Pharaoh Khyan from Knossos; the alabaster amphora engraved with the

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name of the XVIIIth Dynasty Pharaoh Thutmose III from Katsamba, the port of Knossos in Crete; and faience objects from Mycenae bearing the names of Amenhotep II and III. Quite apart from legitimate doubts about the contemporaneity of these objects with the deposits in which they were found, the Egyptians’ practice of deifying their own rulers and using Pharaohs’ names to demonstrate royal associations in time or function limits the historical value of these objects. Not everything with the name and title of a king or queen was of necessity made by or for the ruler, or even during his or her lifetime. Suggestions that a Linear B ethnic term designates Egypt because of its similarity to the ancient Greek or Semitic words owe more to wishful thinking than historicity since the contexts in which the term occurs have no foreign connotations at all. No archaeological discovery in recent times has a greater potential to enhance our understanding of interconnections in the ancient East Mediterranean than the Bronze Age ship which sank off Uluburun on the south coast of Turkey in the late 14th century BC. It is a time capsule which graphically illustrates the way in which goods were transported around the east Mediterranean, the nature of that commerce, and the extent to which information was exchanged between peoples. Even then its evidence may not be complete, for certain categories of object on board could have perished without leaving a trace, such as textiles, papyrus or unbaked clay tablets, and no skeletal remains have been found. The most tantalizing discoveries have been two examples of the writing-board set or diptych made up of two, hinged, rectangular boards with interior recesses which originally held wax. Into this substance marks or characters were made with a stylus, and scholarly opinion favours the impression of wedges, or the cuneiform script, in which most Indo-European and Semitic languages of the 2nd millennium BC were rendered. It seems that these diptyches were closed and probably sealed during the voyage, and analogous data suggest that they may have contained inventories of goods or the Bronze Age equivalent of a bill of lading. There were regrettably no traces of the wax which once filled the recesses or the writing which was presumably incised into it, but circumstantial evidence favours Western Asiatic sources for the materials and the message. In the first place the boards were made of boxwood, which probably came from the Amanus mountains in north Syria. Secondly all the parallels for the type occur in Hittite Anatolia or Mesopotamia. None is known from Palestine or Egypt, not to mention Cyprus, Crete or mainland Greece, though conditions in these lands were less favourable for the preservation of organic materials. It seems therefore that we are here dealing with Near Eastern texts originating most probably in Syria. If only the diptyches could reveal their secrets our eyes would be opened to the reality of exchanges in the ancient East Mediterranean. As it is, the Uluburun shipwreck suggests that the transmission of goods, people and ideas between the Aegean and Egypt in the Bronze Age was in this case at least effected indirectly by intermediaries, such as the Syrians, rather than directly by the principals involved. Though the remains of the Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya shipwrecks tell us little about the places where they were built, it is a fact that the only graphic depictions from New Kingdom tombs in Egypt of seagoing vessels in the Levant were Syrian in origin. In the burial places at Thebes of the Chief Physician Nebamun and Mayor of Thebes Kenamun, either side of around 1400 BC, are portrayals of cargo vessels which have crews dressed in distinctive Syrian garb. These scenes include processions of porters dressed not only in Syrian costume but in Aegean costume as well. If their evidence is to be trusted, crews were then, as to-day, multinational and complement the multifarious origins of the merchandise on board the Uluburun shipwreck. Despite the numerous depictions of the Keftiu in the Theban tombs of the XVIIIth Dynasty, there are no paintings of the Keftiu ships mentioned in contemporaneous texts or indeed of any vessels which could be identified as having been built in or come from the Aegean. Likewise there are no representations extant of Egyptian merchantmen which may have plied the eastern Mediterranean basin. That Crete at least had seagoing vessels as early as Middle Minoan I-II is well attested, but the most evocative representation of what has been interpreted by some as a cargo vessel occurs in the famous so-called Ship Procession on the South Wall of Room 5 in the West House at Akrotiri on the island of Thera in the middle of the Aegean Sea, belonging to the

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end of Late Minoan IA. It is the only vessel with a central hold on the deck, and the only one propelled by sail rather than oar. It was part of a naval parade or regatta travelling between two ports, probably to celebrate the opening of the sailing season in the eastern Mediterranean. The tradition of Blessing the Sea continues to this day in Piraeus, when ships are decked out in bunting and prayers said for the safety of those who set sail. All the iconographic evidence strongly suggests that the scene from Akrotiri on Thera portrays a festival that took place annually in and around the island and that the ships were all constructed and crewed by the local inhabitants. There are, however, other experts who consider the vessel with a sail not a merchantman — what, you might ask, was a cargo boat doing in a f lotilla of ceremonial ships? — but prefer to see it as a messenger boat bringing news of the procession’s arrival. It was, after all, smaller than the other vessels and could no doubt travel faster than those powered only by rowing. As for the movement of peoples between Egypt and the Aegean in the 2nd millennium BC, we have much circumstantial but little direct or concrete information. From the centres of Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation there is no evidence at all for the arrival or presence of Egyptians, such as portrayals in frescoes, references in texts, or burials. The only possible exception is the scene in a fragmentary mural from around 1500 BC at Knossos showing a black skinned man, presumably African, running behind a Minoan soldier armed with spears. They both wear the same kind of loin cloth and head dress and have fancifully been interpreted as representing the “Captain of the Blacks.” There is an intriguing parallel for this depiction in a papyrus from el-Amarna in Egypt, to which reference is made below. That is not to say that the ancient inhabitants of the Nile Valley did not visit or live in the Aegean at this time, only that we have no incontrovertible proof that this happened. The occurrence of objects of Egyptian origin in settlements and cemeteries in Crete, mainland Greece and elsewhere in this region is not on its own enough to support a case for travel by Egyptian traders, never mind envoys to the Aegean. On the other hand there is a significant body of indirect evidence for knowledge in the Nile Valley of peoples from the Aegean, probably based mostly if not entirely on the presence of visitors to Egypt. The earliest data are the remains of frescoes from the Delta site of Tell el-Dabca belonging to the beginning of the XVIIIth Dynasty in the mid 16th century BC. This was the capital city of Avaris where the Caananite rulers held sway during the Second Intermediate Period until they were ousted by the first king of the Egyptian New Kingdom, Ahmose, who built a palace of his own on the same site. The themes of the fragmentary wall paintings are typically Minoan — bulls and bull leapers, acrobats, large scale human figures, landscapes and animals, including griffins, and mazes. The choice of colours — black, grey, red, yellow, blue and white — conforms with the range encountered in Late Bronze Age Crete, and even the mural technique is standard for Minoan frescoes but unknown in ancient Egypt or the Near East. There can be little doubt that these wall paintings were executed by artists from Bronze Age Crete or the region under Minoan cultural inf luence. Their presence in the Delta nicely complements the evidence of a contemporaneous Egyptian writing board which purports to list the names of individuals from the land of Keftiu. The fact that some appear to have had purely Egyptian names suggests nothing more than that they had lived long enough in the Nile Valley to have taken on a local identity. Seamen and artists may not have been the only Aegean travellers to Egypt in the second half of the second millennium BC, for there are some intriguing references to Pharaonic knowledge of the practice of medicine amongst the Keftiu people. A papyrus dated to the start of the New Kingdom but probably ref lecting older knowledge notes the laxative properties of a special kind of bean from ancient Crete, and an alabaster vase from the tomb of the XVIIIth Pharaoh Thutmose IV appears to have contained an organic paste from Keftiu, possibly used as a drug. Most significantly a text from the time of Amenhotep III records a medical incantation used by the inhabitants of Keftiu, which proves that in the 16th and 15th centuries BC there must have been visitors from the Aegean speaking a foreign language, perhaps the one rendered in Linear A. And from the reign of Amenhotep III’s successor, Akhenaten, comes a remarkable papyrus, which shows a battle scene with a sequence of running troops, one of whom may have been wearing a boars tusk helmet and oxhide-tunic of possible Mycenaean derivation.

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If the evidence for people from the Bronze Age Aegean visiting and even living in Egypt in the 2nd millennium BC is not without its ambiguities, there can at least be no uncertainty about the source of the Minoan and Mycenaean pottery found in deposits along the Nile Valley. From the Middle Kingdom onwards, a small but steady trickle of Aegean ceramics arrived in Egypt. Cretan exports, which started in Middle Minoan I and ceased in Late Minoan IB, no later than the first half of the 15th century BC, were so few and heterogeneous that they are less likely to have been transported directly than brought in by intermediaries. The later shipment of Mycenaean vases, though comparatively more numerous and homogeneous, may again have been indirect but was in any case no doubt due, like the Minoan, entirely to commercial transactions. Though up to 2000 Mycenaean pot sherds and half a dozen vases have been found in Akhenaten’s capital at el-Amarna, only one specimen has been recovered from the palace of his father, Amenhotep III, at Malkata, no foreign vessels were discovered in the tomb of his successor, Tutankhamun, and the stirrup jars depicted in the tomb of the XIXth Dynasty Pharaoh Ramses III are of more decorative than historical significance. Overall, the Minoan and Mycenaean pottery from Egypt represents only a minute fraction of the millions of ceramic remains turned up in contemporaneous sites along the Nile Valley and indicate how minor the imports were in comparison. That the archaeological record must, however, be incomplete is demonstrated not only by the tomb paintings of the Egyptian XVIIIth Dynasty, but by the graphic and scientific data pointing to an Aegean derivation for various organic and inorganic items. Most striking are the portrayals of various containers of indisputable Aegean origin, for example, the so-called Vapheio cups in the Egyptian tombs of Senmut, Amenuser and Menkheperresoneb, all of the 15th century BC. These cups, with their distinctive splaying sides, spool-shaped handles and ornaments of bucrania, running spirals and rosettes, were evidently made of precious metals, gold and silver. They have good parallels in the Late Bronze Age Aegean, the best known being the specimens from Vapheio itself. All these imported containers, both metal and ceramic, stimulated the creative genius of the Egyptian artisans, who reproduced in the idiom, techniques and materials familiar to them, vessels of non-indigenous shape, such as rhyta and stirrup jars, made of stone, glass, blue composition and clay. Long considered to be evidence of Aegean inf luence, the dolphin on the loop-handled jar of Palestinian shape from el-Lisht, and the griffin on the axe-head belonging to Ahmose, the founder of the XVIIIth Dynasty, may well owe their presence more to Levantine than Minoan workshops. Much circumstantial evidence has also been cited for the import of Aegean patterned textiles, though no samples have yet been encountered in Egypt. From the Bronze Age Aegean has come a scatter of miscellaneous items attributable to an ultimate Egyptian origin, though whether all were made in the Nile Valley is itself open to question. In addition to the items inscribed with Egyptian royal names, an array of containers, scarabs and figures of stone, glass and composition have come to light in settlements and funerary deposits, mainly of the Late Bronze Age, in Crete, mainland Greece and the Cyclades, including Rhodes. The evidence suggests that their occurrence was due more to random than systematic transshipment. The only contextually discrete assembly of imported articles occurred in the Royal Tomb at Isopata in Crete from around 1400 BC. They comprise 10 New Kingdom alabaster vases, together with an Old Kingdom diorite bowl, and could have been part of a single consignment. Perishable goods, or those that have been absorbed into the archaeological record without leaving a trace, may well have reached the Aegean from Egypt or Libya, but the only items that have identifiably survived are the ostrich egg shell rhyta from sites around the Aegean, including Akrotiri on Thera and Mycenae. Signs of specific Egyptian inf luence on Aegean Bronze Age art and artefacts are few and varied. While it is generally assumed that the appearance of the blue monkey in Aegean iconography was due to the import of the actual animal from north Africa, it is less easy to explain why it was given a votive or ritual role in Minoan and Mycenaean cult scenes. Equally the so-called Minoan “genius,” an upright wasp-like figure which evolved in Crete and spread to the rest of the Aegean, is thought to have owed a large debt to Egyptian images of the standing hippopotamus deity, Taweret. An enticing sphinx-shaped plaque of clay, once attached to a Middle Minoan/Late Minoan vessel, shows distinctively Egyptian leonine

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features with a Minoan head typically rendered even down to the curly hair. It came from Malia. Another is an elephant tusk from a tomb in Mycenae with sculpted low relief decoration showing a human figure standing and adorned in the Egyptian manner and other elements taken from the artistic repertory of the Nile Valley. It could, however, have been made in Syria, where both the material and style are attested. Overall, these traces of contact with the civilisation of the Pharaohs give the impression of being once removed, in time or in space, or both, from their original sources of inspiration. All this evidence demonstrates quite conclusively that for most of the 2nd millennium BC there was an ongoing if insubstantial movement of people and goods between the Aegean and Egypt, which only came to an end when the Sea Peoples disrupted the f low and indeed the whole pattern of settlement throughout the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC. Starting with the arrival of Minoan ceramics in the Nile Valley during the 19th to 18th centuries BC, these transfers seem to have proceeded without significant interruption, intensification or organisation, and been motivated by commercial, professional and other non-political factors. Logistically at least they must also have been regulated by the limitations imposed on mariners by distance, especially the open seas, weather and the shipping at their disposal. The nature and extent of these contacts do not argue in favour of direct bilateral exchanges but rather suggest indirect routes involving middlemen, such as the Syrians, and staging posts like Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast. The notion that Egyptian hegemony extended into the Aegean at this time seems as far-fetched as the legend of Minoan thalassocracy. Both hypotheses are impossible to demonstrate archaeologically, and the textual evidence lends no support to the idea that the Cretans or Pharaohs, like Britannia, once ruled the waves. In the final analysis, the question of whether Pharaonic Egypt had a greater impact on the Bronze Age Aegean than vice versa is more political or religious than historical. Despite make-believe reconstructions like the Jugendstil mummiform sarcophagus from the Shaft Graves at Mycenae illustrated by Bossert in Altkreta in 1921 (Fig. 271), what evidence there is for the transmission of cultural inf luence appears to suggest that tangibly at least, the Aegean left a bigger mark on Egypt than the other way round. That does not, of course, mean that Egyptian civilisation was weak or vulnerable and unable to withstand the new concepts, fashions and techniques to which it was regularly exposed from outside. Rather it was a function of the strength and durability of the millennial traditions of the Pharaohs that it willingly adopted and adapted foreign designs and transformed them into something unmistakably Egyptian. But all this presupposes direct and deliberate interchange by organised national entities. There is much collateral data from Palestine, Syria, Cyprus and now Libya for the movement of goods, people and ideas between the Aegean and Egypt around this circuit, and the Uluburun shipwreck illustrates as decisively as any archaeological context could the difficulty of assigning nationality to merchantmen in the Bronze Age Levant. Indeed so varied are the sources of its cargo, we don’t even know for certain what its next destination was. Robert S. MERRILLEES

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY M.R. BELL, “Preliminary Report on the Mycenaean Pottery from Deir el-Medina (1979-1980),” in Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte LXVIII (1982) 143-63. M. BIETAK, Avaris. The Capital of the Hyksos. Recent Excavations at Tell el-Dabca (1996). E.H. CLINE, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: International trade and the Late Bronze Age Aegean (1994). W.V. DAVIES and L. SCHOFIELD (eds.), Egypt, the Aegean and the Levant. Interconnections in the Second Millennium B.C. (1995). N. DE G. DAVIES and R.O. FAULKNER, “A Syrian Trading Venture to Egypt,” in Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 33 (1947) 40-46. E. EDEL, Die Ortsnamenlisten aus dem Totentempel Amenophis III (1966). L. GODART, The Phaistos Disc. The Enigma of an Aegean Script (1995). N. GRIMAL, “L’Égypte et le monde égéen préhellénique: entre commerce et histoire,” in J. LECLANT (ed.), Entre Égypte et Grèce. Actes du Colloque du 6-9 octobre 1994 (1995) 11-28. V. HANKEY, “The Aegean Deposit at el Amarna,” in V. KARAGEORGHIS (ed.), Acts of the International Archaeological Symposium: “The Mycenaeans in the Eastern Mediterranean,” 27th March-2nd April 1972 (1973) 128-136. V. HANKEY, “The Aegean Interest in el Amarna” in Journal of Mediterranean Anthropology and Archaeology 1 (1981) 38-49. L. HIMMELHOCH, “The use of the ethnics a-ra-si-jo and ku-pi-ri-jo in Linear B Texts,” Minos 25-26 (1990-91) 91104. B.J. KEMP and R.S. MERRILLEES, Minoan Pottery in Second Millennium Egypt (1980). J. LECLANT, “L’Égypte et l’Égée au second millénaire,” in Atti e memorie del secondo Congresso internazionale di micenologia, Rome-Naples 14-20 octobre 1991, vol. 2 (1996) 613-25. L. MORGAN, The Miniature Wall Paintings of Thera (1988). J. OSING, “La liste des toponymes égéens au temple funéraire d’Aménophis III,” in Aspects de la culture pharaonique (1992) 25-36. E. OTTO, “Ägypten im Selbstbewusstsein des Ägypters,” in W. HELCK and E. OTTO (eds.), Lexikon des Ägyptologie Band I, Lieferung 1 (1972) cols. 76-78. G. POSENER, Sur l’orientation et l’ordre des points cardinaux chez les Égyptiens (1965). D. SYMINGTON, “Late Bronze Age Writing-Boards and their Uses: Textual Evidence from Anatolia and Syria,” AnatSt 41 (1991) 111-23. J. VERCOUTTER, Essai sur les relations entre Egyptiens et Préhellènes (1954). J. VERCOUTTER, L’Égypte et le monde égéen préhellénique (1956). S. WACHSMANN, Aegeans in the Theban Tombs (1987).

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Discussion following R.S. Merrillees’ paper: C.W. Shelmerdine: A comment and a question. The comment is really on behalf of a student of mine, Patricia Parker, who has done a paper about the monkeys. She thinks she has identified an actual species which does have rather bluish-looking skin — not fur, but skin — and has isolated the time when they appeared in the Aegean to Late Minoan IA. Her notion, which I will pass on to the community here, is that an exotic foreign object will not only have an elite status, but is very likely to take on a ritual role, particularly because as an animal stepping between the world where the humans are and the level where the goddess is, as it does in the Xeste 3 fresco, it performed an intermediary function, for which she has some parallels. I find that an interesting idea. My question for you, because you are such a good sceptic about direct contact, is: What is the use for a plaque, such as the nine plaques with the cartouche of Amenhotep III that have been found at Mycenae? To what use would they have originally been put, and what is your view about how they might have arrived at Mycenae? R.S. Merrillees: On the first point over the monkeys, it would, I think, be much more plausible to postulate that, in fact, the Cretans and indeed the Bronze Age Aegeans adapted the motif and the role of the monkey from an actual specimen rather than from an object in its form, if only because you can tell that a monkey is midway between earth and heaven because it climbs a tree, in a way that an object doesn’t indicate. So, I think that is very interesting indeed. As far as these other objects are concerned, they are very small, they are very miscellaneous, and it is difficult to see them as being objects of trade, but rather the sorts of things that belong to that very nebulous category of keepsakes, souvenirs, and other bric-a-brac that are accumulated by people who travel the seas. There is a certain amount of that already in evidence on the Uluburun shipwreck, to which no particular role can be assigned. I see them as belonging very much to that category and certainly not in the nature of what are called “elite objects,” for the simple reason that if the Egyptians were to send anybody an elite object, it would not be a faience plaque or a faience monkey. It would be something of very great value and no doubt would be the last thing that we would find, except in a tomb or a closed deposit, because of course so much of this material has completely disappeared, exactly like the Vapheio cups that are represented in the Tomb of Senmut. J.D. Muhly: I think it was salutatory to hear this minimalist view of the relations between Egypt and the Aegean, and also to hear you give a paper in which you never once referred either to Alashiya or to opium. (Laughter). I would like to return to the Kom el-Hetan Aegean List. One of the most distinctive things about royal inscriptions in Pharaonic Egypt is the way in which Pharaohs appropriate the deeds of their predecessors and simply copy long sections of other royal lists. What is so interesting about the Aegean List from Kom el-Hetan is that it is a unique inscription. I don’t think that those names ever appear again in any other Egyptian text. Are you going to say that it is simply accidental that this list also comes from the reign of the Pharaoh who has left the greatest number of inscribed objects in the Aegean? R.S. Merrillees: No, I am not going to say it’s accidental, but what I do say is that it only gives you a terminus ante quem for the first acquisition of the knowledge. In other words, you cannot say that the knowledge was specifically acquired only during the reign of Amenhotep III. Nor do I say that people at the time of Amenhotep III in Egypt did not also know these names as well too. But if we are looking at it from an historical point of view, and we want to say ‘when did the ancient Egyptians first acquire knowledge of those place names?,’ then we cannot say ‘it can only have happened in the time of Amenhotep III.’ Jurgen Osing provides a convincing case to my way of thinking, philologically at least, for demonstrating that it must go back earlier, and possibly to the time before the arrival of the Mycenaeans in Crete. He says the time of Thutmose III; I would say that it could be anytime in the Eighteenth Dynasty before [the time of Amenhotep III], because it’s not as if we lack contacts with Crete before the time of Amenhotep III, and so many of the names referred to in that list are Cretan as well as Greek and Aegean. G. Kopcke: I just wonder whether Eric Cline has either a question or comment. He stands out by really commendable modesty so far, but I think we need your participation. E.H. Cline: I was actually going to say something this time, I can’t resist. I must congratulate you on your minimalist position, which you’ve held consistently for 25 years, since at least 1972. I would

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like to address many of the points which have been raised. First of all, concerning the monkeys, Patricia Parker is quite correct. In my BSA article for 1991, I identified them as guernons or “Green” monkeys, and they do indeed have bluish fur with greenish skin; that’s exactly what they are. And indeed, the picture that you showed of the Amenhotep II monkey figurine, even the yellow cheeks are quite correct, which I found to my astonishment. So, anyway, I would agree that you have to see a monkey to paint it; we do have that. As for the plaques, which would usually have a religious connotation back in Egypt, and would be found under temples, or statues, or buildings, they are obviously not being used in that way at Mycenae. I would argue that the Mycenaeans, perhaps, did not quite know how to use these plaques once they arrived, but virtually all of them are found in some kind of a religious content at Mycenae. So, whether or not they are using them properly at Mycenae, they do realize that they are religious objects of some kind. Beyond that, if you say the Aegean List means nothing basically, or not much, I would ask first of all how you would correlate the fact that Amenhotep III has more objects in the Aegean in proper time contexts than anybody else. There are six sites that have produced those in the Aegean, and of those six, four of them are on the List. Now, that may be a coincidence, but it is interesting. I would argue that someone is bringing them, and that they are not just your ordinary bric-a-brac. Finally, in terms of the names on the List, not only do they not appear afterwards in Egypt — [the names] Mycenae, Knossos, and Nauplion never appear again in Egypt — but they also never appear before. So, while Osing’s article is very persuasive philologically, as you say, I don’t think he’s proved his point, because if these names had come over earlier, I would like to see them somewhere. Certainly, considering Thutmose III and all of the people recording contacts during his reign, there should be a mention of Mycenae somewhere, or Knossos and other Minoan sites at the very least, but they don’t appear anywhere up until Amenhotep III’s time. This leads me to think that it is a unique occurrence. We can’t just dismiss the plaques; we can’t just dismiss the Aegean List. Whether you want to go as far as I have, and say that there was an embassy — you don’t all have to come along on the voyage with me — I don’t think we can dismiss these, or be too minimalist about them, but we may agree to disagree on this. R.S. Merrillees: I would just make two comments. One is that we have actually recorded in the time of Thutmose III what appear to be Annals, that are taken from records kept on papyri or some other form of perishable material, which do suggest that those inscribed on stone were actual records that were kept, such as a document, a day book, or a register, or something like that. So, we do know that the Egyptians did maintain documents that were contemporary with the events that took place, and when they transcribed them, we can tell where they came from. Now, if you look at those lists of names [at Kom el-Hetan], they are in a typically random Egyptian order. There may well be some preservation of the way in which they were recorded once, but they already have been adapted in typical Egyptian fashion, so that they are no longer recognizable as being a topographical list, as Osing says, or necessarily an itinerary, as you say. You have the sense that they are not taken directly from the ship’s log, let’s say, but something that has been derived over some period of time. The second thing, as I pointed out in an article in AJA many years ago, is that the range of evidence from each reign is so inconsistent that it is impossible to draw any real conclusions about the degree of contact between Egypt during one reign and the Aegean. For example, in the time of Amenhotep III, granted, there are probably more objects in the Aegean [of Amenhotep III] than there are of any other Pharaoh. On the other hand, how do you then account for the almost complete absence of Mycenaean pottery that could be associated with either the palace at Malkata, or indeed any other deposit that was specifically associated with Amenhotep III, whereas in the reign of his successor, you have exactly the opposite? You have relatively large quantities of Mycenaean pottery at el-Amarna and Sesebi, but not a single reference to any knowledge of the Aegean in the inscriptions datable to the reign of Akhenaten. I find it very difficult to draw any real conclusions about the degree of contact from what is, after all, a very sparse amount of information. We would need much more, I think, to be definitive about the degree of historical contact that had been engendered during those times. Unidentified: I would like to comment on two things. First, Dr. Cline is correct. Those are foundation deposit plaques; they are usually put in the ground in front of a tomb or temple, prior to the building of that tomb or temple. Second, you should all be aware of a talatat plaque formerly from the Norbert Schimmel collection, published in the volume with Oscar Muscarella as Editor. One of the bound figures that runs alongside the chariot has often been said to be a Greek mainlander. He is not of a typical type; he is not a Nubian, he is not a Syrian, so a Classicist should look at that example.

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Robert S. MERRILLEES

E.H. Cline: Yes, I would like to see this — I’ll come to New York. (Laughter.) In terms of the lack of pottery, this is a sticky point. I would argue that perhaps we are dealing with heirlooms that came over to Egypt and stayed in circulation, as such things do, and wound up in contexts much later in time, i.e. those of Akhenaten or Tutankhamun. But, we could also follow Vronwy Hankey, who wants Amenhotep III to have died in the meantime — by the time the Mycenaeans got back to Egypt, Akhenaten was there and they gave him the pottery. One final point that I would make for those of you who have not looked at these plaques [of Amenhotep III] very much. There are no other plaques of this size — granted that they are not that big, but they are not just simple scarabs — there are no other such plaques found anywhere else outside of Egypt, except at Mycenae, and I think that is significant.