January–June 1936

BRYN MAWR COLLEGE EXPEDITION TO CILICIA AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Box 18, Tarsus, Turkey

Handwritten: p.m. May 4

Dear Mr. Hill,

Your long-awaited letter of April 27 reached me today, with a Turkish stamp; I assume that Mrs. Hill brought it as far as Troy. You said that you would like a check in dollars for the amount owed you. I wonder if you would mind modifying that to the extent of accepting a draft for 2631.50 drachmai on the National Bank of Greece, and the rest in dollars. The point is that, in spite of warnings, my father sent me some money in that form, and it is absolutely uncashable here, and I need the money badly. I am sending you the dollars as you calculated them, save that I have subtracted the 2631.50 dr. of the draft from the 2903.00 dr. which were due you, and rendered the remaining 1172.50 dr. into dollars at the same rate you used, giving $10.49. The other items are: [handwritten: $4-10-0 to you and] George 22.27 To Mrs. Hill, dr.1760.70 16.78 Total $49.54, for which I enclose Miss Goldman's check on N.Y. I wish that I could add the dr.1250.00, but I don't see how I can manage it at the moment. If I recieve any more from my family before then I will send it to you, but in any case I recieve the first installment of my fellowship on th 1st of July, and will be sure to give it to you then. What is going to happen to Kourion? Does the fact that we will probably not be having a fall season indicate that Kourion is being deftinitely shelved? If it is will there be another big season sometime to finish up Palace, Basilica, etc, with my services wanted, or not? And what would happen to the pottery and other small finds in that case. There is still a great deal of work to be done with them. I ask all of this because I must know in a general way what to expect. It would hardly do to tell my fellowship committee that I expect to dig in Cyprus again, not realising that the Paphian Isle was already fated to get along without me. On the other hand, if I am to be wanted for one or more future seasons, I would like to know, even if it is not yet possible to know when they will take place. The work in Tarsus has only increased my desire to get back to Cyprus, and I think that I will be much more useful in Cyprus because of what I am learning here, both as to the actual type of digging, and for what factual knowledge I will have aquired. The connections between Tarsus and Cyprus are amazingly close. At least 75% of our painted pottery, for instance, was imported from Cyprus. The sequence and chronology is going to be clearer here than it has been in Cyprus itself, because the site is beautifully stratified, and objects from many different localities are found together. As an example, on the floor of a house almost certainly built soon after the destruction of Tarsus by Sennacherib in 698 B.C., I found quantities of Cypriote pottery together with many Assyrian tablets with cuneiform writing, and Corinthian, Naucratite, and Ionian pottery. The deposit is perfectly sealed, for the building remained in use for a long period of time, but a new layer of earth was placed upon the floor every few years.