Letter from Megaw to Schaeffer on Dikaios's work and disagreements over dating, with a receipt for excavation equipmentArthur Hubert Stanley Megaw

Printed: GOVERNMENT OF CYPRUS

Printed: crest

[printed: DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES, CYPRUS.]

Nicosia, 25th August, 1952.

Our Ref.: 36/36/3

Your Ref.:

Dear Dr. Schaeffer,

Thank you for your letter of 16th August. I note your change of plan and will now expect you and your assistants at the end of October. I have made arrangements for Mr. Dikaios to meet the Corinthia, receive from M. Pironin the trunk of shreds and deliver to him the small axes. We are ordering the replacements for the latter and have credited your remittance of £50 to your account. A receipt is attached.

I have written to the British Museum for photographs of the silver bowl as you suggest. I await news from Plenderleith as to when he will no longer require the bowl for the replicas he is making. When I know I shall make the necessary arrangements for its journey to Paris, where it is understood it will remain until your return from your excavations.

I am glad to note that you are prepared, to some extent, to meet my representations about the lacuna in your references in Dikaios-Alasia I to our contribution to the joint enterprise. I prefer that you should revert to this subject in your own next volume, by which time ours may have appeared. For, in view of the abandonment of the original proposal for contributory volumes, under which both Dikaios and I would have contributed to Enkomi-Alasia I, we do not now envisage any contributions by your mission to our volume.

Dikaios is leaving next month for Princeton, where he is spending the coming academic year. So I fear it is not possible to adopt your proposal that Dikaios and I should witness some further excavation by you in the original floors of your building 18, and that you should observe similar supplementary work in our sadjar building. But even if each mutually observed supplementary diggings had been practicable, I do not feel that they would have been very helpful. The nature of the ceramic evidence in the two buildings is not in doubt. The difference of view which exists, "fundamental" as I have admitted, lies in the contrary interpretation of that evidence. The main difference in interpretation is that the Myc. IIIcl and "close style" sherds in contact with the original floors are related by Dikaios to the first use of those floors and by you to their use a second time by newcomers.

In other respects I feel you exaggerate the differences between Dikaios' views and those recorded in your volume. The gap between the lower limit given for the date of your building (1250) and the upper limit given by Dikaios for his (1200) is only 50 years. You suggest that the difference of view implies that the buildings are separated by "the catastrophic events which befell the Island at the end of LCIII", but if you refer to the destruction witnessed by the layer overlying Dikaios' original floors, there can be no question that his building, like yours, antedates the catastrophy.

In any event the difference of view is now much less significant than the gap of some two centuries which in 1950 separated the dates given for the sadjar buildings by Dikaios in his report and you in your analysis of it (p.4 lines 6-10).

Yours sincerely,

Handwritten: signature

Dr. C.F.A. Schaeffer, M.A., D.Litt., St.Germain-en-Laye.

[handwritten: [illegible] (faint marginal annotations at right edge)]