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.
