Muhly

ON RE-READING HELENE KANTOR

This has been, and will, I am sure, continue to be a most wonderful conference. We must be grateful for the work of the organizing committee and their efforts on behalf of all of us. They have conceived, organized and produced a splendid conference that has undergone a number of surprising transformations while, at the same time, staying much like what it was first intended to be. A special vote of thanks goes to Eric Cline and Diane Harris for devoting much of the past academic year to ensuring the success of this conference. They have done a fantastic job and deserve a special round of applause. I want to say a few things about Helene Kantor and her remarkable monograph, The Aegean and the Orient in the Second Millennium B.C., the publication that has provided both the impetus and the framework for this conference. Having spent the past few weeks re-reading the excellent reprint of this monograph, recently published by the AIA (and still available at a very modest price), I now have a renewed admiration for this remarkable scholar, who must have come from the Midwest as she received her BA from the University of Indiana in 1938. It is important to realize that this monograph represent the work of Miss Kantor as a young scholar. This is hard to believe, given the deft assurance she shows in dealing with material both difficult and controversial, but it is true. Dr. Kantor was one of those scholars able to combine attention to detail with a willingness to make broad generalizations. She was a highly gifted art historian with a trained eye for the relevant detail and a great sense of style and form. This, I would argue, lies at the heart of her success. It is what makes the monograph worth careful consideration even fifty years after its initial publication. As Aegean prehistorians, we all tend to believe that we can function as art historians, forming critical judgments based upon art historical evidence. Some of us are even capable of doing this successfully. What Kantor does, however, is to make all too clear the poor quality of much of the literature in Aegean Bronze Age archaeology. Again and again, she critically reviews and firmly rejects many of the favorite theories of Sir Arthur Evans, Axel Persson, John Pendlebury and George Mylonas. Even Bernard Schweitzer and Georg Karo are evaluated and found wanting. As for Friedrich Matz and his Die frühkretischen Siegel, Kantor remarks that his interpretation of various styles of ornament “as manifestations of certain mysterious psychological predispositions inevitably inherent within certain groups of people is highly controversial and open to doubt.”1 Schachermeyr’s famous review of Matz’s book, published in Klio for 1940, is dismissed as a work that “cannot be considered to be on a scientific level as it was completely conditioned by untenable racial and genetic theories that were directly derived not from scientific evidence, but from the political dogmas prevailing in his country at the time he wrote.”2 We must remember that Kantor was writing this monograph in 1945 and 1946; she clearly had very strong feelings regarding the fate of German scholarship in the 1930s and the 1940s. What I want to emphasize here, which Kantor demonstrates in brilliant detail, is the importance of art historical analysis in Mediterranean archaeology. This is at the heart of all our problems regarding the Tell el-Dabca wall paintings. The material has yet to be published in full and, therefore, there has been as yet no critical art historical analysis of the Dabca paintings. When such a study has appeared we will be able to answer many of the questions raised at this conference.

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KANTOR, 20 n. 31; see also 50 n. 148. Ibid.

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Kantor was not afraid to formulate general principles. Among these are the observations that “the foreign features most likely to be adopted by another culture are usually those appearing on easily transported objects important in commerce”3 and “The appearance in any country of foreign objects acquired by trade or as tribute, testifies to far less significant connections than those which resulted in the actual adoption of alien cultural traits by another civilization.”4 As for the difference between LH I and LH III, we read that “The LH III style was a strong, vigorous one in which very swift, free motion continued to be rendered by the characteristic f lying gallop and f lying leap, although the complete abandon of some LH I works was not often achieved.”5 And the f lying gallop brings us to what has now become the most controversial aspect of Kantor’s monograph. Although the title of the work refers to the Orient, it has to be admitted that Kantor says little about the Near East outside of Egypt. The reasons for this are obvious: almost nothing was known about the Late Bronze Age Levant in the 1940s. But Kantor believed in very strong Mycenaean inf luences upon the art of New Kingdom Egypt. And she was emphatic upon not only the reality but also the source of this inf luence. It came from the Greek mainland, not the island of Crete. This position, in fact, accounted for much of Kantor’s disagreement with her predecessors. Minoan Crete had its heyday in the Middle Minoan period, according to Kantor, but it was all over for Crete by LH II, if not even LH I and the time of Shaft Graves at Mycenae. What makes all this so controversial is the new Aegean chronology. For Kantor, LH I-II were contemporary with the early part of the Egyptian New Kingdom, down to the time of Thutmose III. The designs on the dagger of Ahmose, from the tomb of Queen Ahhotep, could be understood only in reference to the daggers from Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae. The Shaft Grave daggers were, for Kantor, “clearly the masterpieces after which the Egyptian craftsman must have modeled his simplified version.”6 There were major differences, for Kantor recognized “the extreme reduction which the pattern has suffered at the hands of the Egyptian metalworker.”7 The niello technique itself came to Egypt from mainland Greece, according to Kantor, not from Crete, having been brought to Greece from Syria (Byblos) by mainland travellers.8 But, on the basis of the new radiocarbon chronology, all this seems to me to be quite impossible. For Warren and Hankey, who put the end of LM IA, the beginning of LH IIA and the eruption of Thera all at about 1530 BC,9 Kantor’s art historical correlations between Greece and Egypt fit beautifully. For Betancourt and Manning, Aegean chronology becomes irreconcilable with currently accepted Egyptian chronology. I leave it at that for now, but it seems to me that the new Aegean chronology is on a collision course with what passes for Egyptian chronology. One of them has to be wrong. As an art historian, Kantor seems to have been as comfortable in the Iron Age as she was in the Bronze Age. One of her finest publications concerns a bronze horse frontlet from the excavations of the Oriental Institute at the site of Tell Tainat.10 For Kantor, this frontlet was the product of a North Syrian art style that had its apogee in the 9th century BC; it also represented “a direct continuation of the Mycenaeanizing branch of “Canaanite” art of the thirteenth century BC.”11 Canaanite appears here in quotation marks, for the art of the Mitannian Empire also played a significant role in the formation of this style.12 This

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Ibid. 39 n. 68. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 64-65. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 65. P. WARREN and V. HANKEY, Aegean Bronze Age Chronology (1989) 215. H.J. KANTOR, “Oriental Institute Museum Notes. No. 13: A Bronze Plaque with Relief Decoration from Tell Tainat,” JNES 21 (1962) 93-117. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 108.

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Mycenaeanizing Mitannian-Canaanite style was outlined by Kantor in her famous 1960 article in Archaeology magazine on “Ivory Carving in the Mycenaean Period.” This article presents what I feel should be meant by the “International Style” or the “International Koiné.” In 1988, the German excavations at the Heraion on Samos uncovered, in a 6th century BC context, a magnificent bronze horse frontlet decorated in the same North Syrian style that Kantor found on the Tainat frontlet. But the Samos frontlet contained an inscription of Haza’el, king of Aram (Damascus) in the second half of the 9th century BC. The inscription stated that the frontlet was part of the booty brought back by Haza’el from his campaign across the river [Euphrates] against the land of Unqi.13 Here was confirmation not only of Kantor’s 9th century date for such bronzes, but also for her general provenience. Unqi was the Neo-Hittite kingdom which had Tell Tainat, ancient Kinalua, as its capital city. All of this demonstrates the artificiality of the Bronze Age-Iron Age dichotomy now becoming entrenched in the way archaeology is being taught and practiced in this country. “Aegean” has become a code word. An Aegean archaeologist is someone who works in the Bronze Age, one who has nothing to do with those hapless individuals who excavate in the Athenian Agora, Corinth and Nemea. They are Greek archaeologists or Classical archaeologists; Aegean archaeologists now do all they can to disassociate themselves from their Classical colleagues. In some circles, “Classical archaeology” has become a pejorative term. I find all this very disturbing and, as Director of the American School, I will be determined to do what I can to rectify this situation. There is no royal road to geometry and no single way to pursue good archaeological research. Research designs are essential, but the inf luence of the goddess Fortuna is not to be denied. I need only remind you that Lef kandi was supposed to be an Early Bronze Age excavation. Joseph Shaw, at Kommos, certainly had not planned upon excavating the earliest temples in the Greek world, temples that also contained early Phoenician pottery and even a Phoenician tri-pillared shrine. It is time to reconsider what we are doing and to think about what sort of archaeology we want to be doing in the third millennium AD. John Bennet has just published, in the Journal of Archaeological Research for 1997, an interesting discussion of many of these issues.14 I close on a personal note. As my daughter has now converted to Judaism and my granddaughter is named after Miriam, the sister of Moses, I feel justified in quoting the Talmud. According to Rabbi Hanina, “I have learned from my teachers and from my colleagues. But I have learned the most from my students.” I have had the great good fortune to have had dedicated teachers (who were also productive research scholars), including Tom Jones and Bill McDonald at Minnesota and Albrecht Goetze, Ferris Stephens and Bill Hallo at Yale. I could not have asked for better colleagues. Over the past 30 years I have worked with Mike Jameson, Bob Dyson, Jim Pritchard, George Bass, Machteld Mellink, Phil Betancourt, Ake Sjöberg, Erle Leichty, Greg Possehl, Bernard Wailes, David O’Connor and David Silverman. It has been one of the glories of the University of Pennsylvania and the University Museum that we have excavated in almost every part of the world and could cover every relevant language, ancient and modern. No other university in the world could make that claim; nor, alas, is it any longer the case at the University of Pennsylvania. I remember once having dinner with what were then all six of our professors of Sanskrit. Any other institution considers itself lucky to have even one faculty member in such a field. No American university can maintain such a faculty today, but it certainly was great while it lasted. When I came to the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1967 my first class included Chris and Carol Hamlin (née Kramer), Harvey Weiss, Peter Kuniholm, Vince Pigott and Tamara Stech. I had little time to think about what was happening to me; my goal was to keep one jump ahead of my students. Then Ake Sjöberg told me that he was not qualified to teach Near Eastern archaeology; I would have to do it. And in my spare time I ran the new Ancient History program. Yet no one coming into the field today will have the freedom that I have

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I. EPH’AL and J. NAVEH, “Haza’el’s Booty Inscription,” IEJ 39 (1989) 192-200. J. BENNET and M. GALATY, “Ancient Greece: Recent Developments in Aegean Archaeology and Regional Studies,” Journal of Archaeological Research 5/1 (1997) 75-120.

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enjoyed for the past thirty years. I have done what I felt like doing, taught what I wanted to teach, and have been able to work throughout the entire eastern Mediterranean. I have enjoyed a very special academic career and am deeply grateful for that privilege. What I hear about students at other universities tells me that I have been singularly blessed with gifted, usually very opinionated and headstrong students who have been great fun to work with. I have tried to provide advice and guidance, but never direction. All of them have gone their own way, even if that meant taking 25 years to write a 3,000 page dissertation. That dissertation, on Egyptian and Egyptianizing objects at Greek sanctuaries, ca. 1150-650 BC, put me at loggerheads with the administration of the university. The idea today is that every graduate student should be able to complete his or her entire graduate career within a period of five years. If they cannot do so they should be thrown out. It seems to me that if we go along with this we will produce an entire generation of poorly-trained, incompetent scholars. A love of scholarship is going to involve one in research that has no immediate objective. What one does today may turn out to be relevant only twenty years down the line. It is not possible to do serious work with one eye on one’s notes, the other on the clock. My wife and I look forward to many productive years in Athens. When I first presented to her the possibility of my becoming Director of the School in Athens, her reaction was “Great: we can live next door to the library.” That is what scholarship is all about. James D. MUHLY