Letter from Megaw to Schaeffer on a possible collaborationArthur Hubert Stanley Megaw

Printed: No. ...

Actually, reading the page: the reference line reads "No. 586/36" with a white patch (correction tape) over part of it.

No. 586/36 [partially obscured by white correction patch]

Handwritten: Enkomi

Printed: TELEPHONE No. 61

Printed: DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES, CYPRUS.

Figure: Cyprus Government coat of arms; labels: none

Nicosia, 18th September, 1946.

Handwritten: Dear Dr Schaeffer,

I have been giving more thought to the question you put during my visit to Enkomi last week: whether the Cyprus Government could collaborate with your Expedition with a view to laying bare a larger part of the Mycenaean town than could be done with your own resources alone.

My instinctive reaction was that with our present slender resources we could not hope to collaborate in an enterprise on so large a scale. But, on reflection, it seems to me that owing to the advantages we possess in having the salaried personnel of the Cyprus Museum continuously available it might be possible to make a useful contribution even if it were based on a modest budget. The circumstances would permit us to allocate Dikaios and some of our skilled diggers but to use only a small number of labourers. Their work would necessarily proceed slowly but as time would not be a limiting factor they should in the end uncover a considerable area.

But it is not only in laying bare an additional area of the Mycenaean town that I think that such a contribution on our part might produce useful results. I observed that you have already found evidence of successive occupations after the original construction of the houses. As Daniel discovered numerous strata in his Late Bronze Age settlement at Curium this is what one would expect. Indeed Myres in his recently published report on his 1913 investigations notes that your settlement "lasted long, from about 1400 B.C. to about 1200 B.C., or even later". Certainly the stratification has been terribly disturbed by stone-robbers, tomb-looters and even previous excavators. I realise that despite this you are already securing evidence of the later history of the city. But perhaps if a limited area were slowly excavated and the maximum attention paid to all surviving undisturbed deposits above the original floors more light could be thrown on the obscurities of the Sub-Mycenaean period.

If you should wish to set aside an area in which this would be the main objective (I think it can only be secondary in the areas where you are endeavouring to establish the town plan as soon as possible) and would accept our collaboration on the modest scale I have indicated then I have this proposal to make: that the Cyprus Museum should join your Expedition; that this particular task should be its contribution to the Expedition's work; and that Dikaios, who previously collaborated with you at Vounous, be put in charge of it and be made responsible for preparing a report on the results. As finds would not be numerous we would not ask more than would come to us in the normal equal division. Furthermore, if the enterprise became a Joint-Expedition in this way we could, if you wished, undertake the protection of the whole site and any other business connected with it which you may find difficult when not in the Island. And the services of such of our staff as we lend for your own excavations would of course be free.

Dr.C.F.A.Schaeffer, Savoy Hotel, Famagusta.

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