ABSTRACT
JL J o m e r a n d t h e m o n u m e n t s shows signs of the strain and isolation of wartime, but the period during which Homeric studies necessarily lay fallow was a good opportunity for such a work of con solidation. Since the countries round the Aegean have been reopened to the excavator, discoveries have poured in almost as fast as they did in the amazing years after 1893, when “a book even three years old must be behind the times” .1 Renewed excavations, even on such muchexplored sites as Troy and Mycenae, have been remarkably reward ing, with the promise of more to come; new sites are being opened up with the advantage of accumulated experience on virgin soil; and in particular the enthusiasm and friendly co-operation of Turkish archaeologists have made a beginning in the great area between Greece and Mesopotamia which has long been the most serious gap in our knowledge of early civilization. The results are still for the most part contained in preliminary reports and articles, and many of the most important excavations are still going o n ; but it is already obvious that there is growing evidence for interrelation in space and con tinuity in time. Aegean daggers at Stonehenge2 and Iberian tholos tombs in Greece3 must be considered, whether or not they are accepted, and connexions between Beycesultan in the Maeander valley and the Bronze Age Aegean are established and must somehow
1 J. I. Manatt, The Mycenaean Age, p. xiv. 2 R. J. C. Atkinson, Stonehenge (1956), pp. 84-5. 3 Myres in Antiquity XXVII (1953), pp. 3ff., and Stuart Piggott, ibid.,
pp. 137 ff. 252
be explained.1 On many of the sites written records have been found, and as the number of scripts and languages which are (more or less) intelligible increases, the corpus of published documents grows.2 From annals with names and regnal years, hymns, epics and cosmo graphies, trade accounts and regulations of administration and religion, information can be obtained which turns prehistory into history. If contemporary records are the test, the Hittites of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries are now less genuinely “pre historic” than the Greeks before the Persian Wars. The literary evidence poses a new problem. Historians are used to handling documents supplemented by archaeological evidence, but these docu ments need philologists rather than historians. Archaeologists who try to use them are as baffled by their lack of philological expertise as the philologists are when they try to use the archaeologists’ results in the interpretation of the documents. Shortly before his death, Myres told me that he regretted that he had never had time to become a philologist. Since in both fields scholars realize that their own re sults are curiously misleading without experience in their methods, the ideal would be the combination of both disciplines in one historian, but such a giant has not yet arisen. Hope seems to lie rather in the fruitful co-operation of archaeologists and philologists. Both the difficulties and the potential value of such a double approach are explored by Hugh Hencken in his Indo-European languages and archaeology,3 which he describes as “an experiment in treating simultaneously the evidence of language and the evidence of archaeol ogy to see if and how they may be brought to bear on common problems” . It is significant that of the 129 entries in his useful bibliography, 81 were published since the end of the war and 124 were not available to A. Meillet in 1922, when he wrote his Intro duction a Vetude comparative des langues indo-europeennes. Hencken emphasizes the danger of arguing from culture to language or from either to race. “In Mexico a small band of invaders equipped with gunpowder and horses was able to impose its religion and to a considerable extent its language on peoples of highly developed cultures. On the other hand, conquering armies like the post-Roman
1ASV I (1956), pp. 118ff. 2 An excellent selection is given in J. B. Prichard, Ancient Near Eastern
Texts relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. 1955. 3 American Anthropologist, Memoir No. 84, 1955.
