July–December 1936

Athens Dec. 30,1936

Dear Miss Goldman,

December, and to note your work on the L.H.III pottery from Tarsus. I was delighted to receive your letter of the 3d of December, and to note your work on the L.H.III pottery from Tarsus. I would have answered sooner, but I felt that I needed a few days to work on some of the points you raised.

You must have my other letter by now, so that you know in part my reaction to our splendid new dated material, and what I think of its relation to the pottery. I was also very much pleased to see that you are in favour of a change in late Helladic terminology; I feel quite strongly about it. I only wonder if it wouldn't be better to wait for that until I have had an opportunity to work over our material in greater detail and until another season will have made it clearer just what the relation of our Granary Style levels is to that of the "Big House" below. The old Wace-Blegen chronology is so firmly entrenched that it seems to me that the death blow can only be dealt effectively only when it is backed up by an exhaustive study of the available material, such as we should be able to make in another year.

In my Kourion article I have kept the old division between Mycenaean and sub-Mycenaean, and have contented myself with using Hutchinson's division of L.H.III into three parts a,b, and c. I admit that I did this only against my will, and because of Blegen's rather violent objection to the adoption in my first draft, of Heurtley's L.H.IV. I am glad now that I did this, and I hope that you will agree to doing the same in this admittedly preliminary report on Tarsus, because I now feel that the change which is necessary is a good deal more fundamental than that conveyed in Heurtley's L.H.IV. If you will look at my article again I think that you will agree with me that it is not really necessary to take a stand on the question of terminology as yet. If you like, it would be possible to refer to Heurtley's view by putting a footnote after my first use of the term "Granary Style" which would say something like this: "Heurtley (Q.P.D.A....) has advocated the separation of the granary style from the earlier L.H.III and combining it with the "Salamis style" into a class L.H.IV. This would call attention to the problem and to his view, without committing us to anything which we might want to reconsider later."

I feel that Heurtley's suggestion of segregating a L.H.IV is a partial remedy for a difficult situation, but I do not feel that it really solves it. I am in favour of publishing, as soon as I can get the great amount of material together, and attack the problem from the bottom up, and I feel relatively certain even now that the results will go beyond a mere L.H.IV, incidentally I think that L.H.IV's chances of finding general acceptance. I hope to see Heurtley in Jerusalem next month and discuss the question in detail with him, and imagine that we can come to an agreement.

I admire Heurtley as a scholar and like him as a man, but in spite of that I cannot awake any enthusiasm for his article on the relation of Philistine and Mycenaean pottery. In fact I think that only a first rate scholar could have done so badly. He has gone on a minimum of material, has taken dates forgranted with no evidence, and has overlooked the contexts in which these pots were found. Some of his artistic criteria are suggestive, but I don't believe that they are valid. He has based everything on where the pots happened to be found, and has … continues