Alexander Stuart Murray

Alexander Stuart Murray ran the British Museum's own excavations in Cyprus between 1893 and 1899 and was lead author of the volume that dated their Mycenaean finds to the 7th century BC, a dating that Arthur Evans and John Linton Myres rejected. He was born at Arbroath on 8 January 1841, studied at the Royal High School in Edinburgh and at the universities of Edinburgh and Berlin, and joined the museum in 1867 as an assistant in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities under Charles Newton^1,11.

Before the excavations

Murray's first public link with Cyprus was the pottery appendix to Luigi Palma di Cesnola's Cyprus of 1877, and Cesnola's preface and letters show him overseeing the book's production in London¹⁷. He succeeded Newton as Keeper in 1886¹¹. In 1887 he published "Two Vases from Cyprus" in the Journal of Hellenic Studies¹⁵. In 1886 he also bought what Kiely calls "very choice objects" from the Polis excavations, and received an offer from Falkland Warren of further digging at Frangissa for about £100, together with Warren's denunciation of Max Ohnefalsch-Richter^9,23. Murray sat on the committee of the Cyprus Exploration Fund. In 1889 he tried to stop Ohnefalsch-Richter's Berlin-funded work at Tamassos, and he lobbied against a German permit to dig at Idalion^8,9,21.

In 1890 the Trustees gave him £70 to finish the Fund's work at Polis, and the bull's-head capital from the site went to the museum. He also proposed a second season at Salamis, paid for by £1000 from the department's purchase budget, and the Trustees refused it⁹. Kiely notes that neither Newton nor Murray managed to obtain public money for Cypriot excavation⁷.

The Turner Bequest digs

The money came from a private source. Miss Emma Turner left £2000 on her death in 1892, and it paid for the museum's first excavations of its own in Cyprus¹⁰. Murray directed them from London. Arthur Hamilton Smith and John Linton Myres dug at Amathus in 1893 and 1894, and Henry Beauchamp Walters at Kourion in 1895 and Maroni in 1897^4,10. Murray instructed his field staff to report and record¹¹. Nikolaou reads the correspondence as showing that his priority was good value for the money, in Mycenaean material fit for exhibition¹¹.

At Enkomi he went himself. He led the work from late March to early May 1896; Percy Christian took over until July and Smith until September^11,12. His rough notes cover tombs 1 to 37. The Trustees' minute of 9 May 1896 records a letter and a telegram from him about the visit⁴. His list of tombs 1 to 36 chosen for the Cyprus Museum is printed in the museum's 1899 catalogue²². N. Lanitis protested in 1896 that the finds were being taken to London¹⁹. In 1899 F. B. Welch and Christian dug at Kouklia and then at Klavdhia for the museum, and reported to Murray²⁰.

Excavations in Cyprus

Excavations in Cyprus appeared in 1900 under the names of Murray, Smith and Walters, with Murray writing the Enkomi section^6,14. He treated Mycenaean art as the immediate predecessor of Ionian Greek art of the 7th century BC, dated the Enkomi tombs to match, and dismissed the evidence of Egyptian scarabs^5,10. Myres had already questioned the dating, and Arthur Evans answered the book in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute in 1900^11,13. Fitton writes that Murray has been rightly censured as a bad excavator, though perhaps an unlucky interpreter⁵. Myres's Handbook of 1914 replaced his scheme⁸.

One third of the retained finds went to the Cyprus Museum⁶. In July 1902 Murray put requests from Leeds and Birmingham for duplicates to the Trustees and drew up a list of 34 objects for Leeds from Enkomi and Klavdhia-Tremithos¹⁰. He died on 5 March 1904².