Letter from Schaeffer to Megaw on Dikaios's workClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

Continued from scan 25

… layers and its importance on Cypriot archaeology. I regret that this has not been acknowledged.

But much more important than this is Dikaios' mistake in the evaluation of the real significance of the catastrophe of the main building (floor V). If my date for the erection of this building and its use in the late Bronze Age (LC II) prevails, and I am convinced it will, then the reconstruction, the altering, the transformation into smaller units of the building after the catastrophe on floor V, is the fact of another civilisation, that of the early Iron Age occupants of Enkomi, so completely different in their material culture compared with the preceding Bronze Age civilisation of Enkomi. In this way it becomes also clear why the character of the architecture was entirely changed after the disaster on floor V and why the fine earlier masonry was abandoned and replaced by poor rubble or mud brick constructions.

The reconstruction of building after disaster on floor V, coincides, and that is vital, with a total break of the life and culture of the town; it marks the passage from the Bronze Age and and Mycenean culture to the earliest Iron Age culture and its arrival of newcomers in the city and, probably, in the island as a whole. And there is the possibility of a more or less long interruption to be kept in mind, between the time of the destruction of mainbuilding with floor V and its reuse at the beginning of LC III.

If Dikaios' dating of the erection of the mainbuilding at the beginning of LC III or beginning of Iron Age is accepted, it would mean that it was the early Iron Age occupants of Enkomi with their culture so different from the preceding Bronze Age inhabitants of Enkomi who introduced the fine earlier architecture to Enkomi.

Well, why did they then abandon this technique so completely when, according to Dikaios, they reconstructed their own buildings and why did they then modify it throughout?

Has such a fact ever been noticed elsewhere? Does Dikaios know in the whole Mediterranean region of any site of similar fine architecture at the beginning of the Iron Age? He refers p.169, note 2, to similar pillars in Minoan and Mycenean architecture in Crete and Ras Shamra without underlining the fact that these similar constructions are typical of another period and another culture, the Late Bronze Age culture - than that to which he wants to attribute the Enkomi earlier buildings. Did he forget that I recognized and dated the first town remains discovered by myself in 1934, by their identical architecture with the Late Bronze Age constructions found by Masse opposite Enkomi at Ras Shamra-Ugarit?

Did he think about these questions? I suppose he did not. I am afraid he has run with a minimum of baggage of knowledge into a succession of errors of tremendous consequences.

Here are some more of them among his conclusions. P. 170. To refer to a Megaron architecture because in a rather