A Clash of Empires at Enkomi: A French Excavator, a British Director, and a Cypriot Curator

Giorgos Papasavvas examines the mid-twentieth-century dispute over the excavations and stratigraphy of Enkomi through official and personal correspondence preserved in the archives of Claude Schaeffer. Opening with Emily Vermeule's account of the heated debates at the 1972 Mycenaean Congress in Nicosia, the paper traces the conflict back to the joint expedition established in 1947 between Schaeffer, A. H. S. Megaw as director of the Department of Antiquities, and Porphyrios Dikaios as curator.

Although the two teams excavated the same levels in the Late Bronze Age town, Schaeffer and Dikaios reached conflicting chronological conclusions about the arrival of the Mycenaeans. Based on his soundings in Building 18, Schaeffer dated the monumental structures and Mycenaean colonization to the 14th century. Dikaios, finding 12th-century pottery of Mycenaean types in the earliest layers of his Ashlar Building and discovering the Horned God near the French trenches, dated the construction of the building to the 12th century.

When Dikaios submitted a 200-page report on his findings in 1950, Schaeffer demanded that Megaw halt Dikaios's excavations and claimed exclusive authority over the site and its interpretation. The dispute escalated after Schaeffer's 1951 presentation to the Académie des Belles-Lettres and his 1952 volume Enkomi-Alasia I. Megaw accused Schaeffer of failing to acknowledge the Department's work and of plagiarizing Dikaios's unpublished report. Schaeffer denied the charge, accused Dikaios of stealing his ideas, and refused to name him in a twelve-page reply, referring to him twenty-seven times as "your curator". The joint mission was formally terminated by a new memorandum taking effect in 1954.

In the second half of the paper, Papasavvas sets the dispute against post-war British and French mandate archaeology in Western Asia and the political tensions of 1950s colonial Cyprus. He notes that Schaeffer attempted to use the political climate by accusing Dikaios in a report to Megaw of being guided by philhellenic sentiments rather than scholarly truth, a charge Megaw dismissed. Papasavvas concludes that Schaeffer acted as a "colonialist by opportunity" driven primarily by personal pride, while Megaw defended scientific standards and the interests of Cypriot archaeology, and Dikaios prevailed on his scientific strengths.