Dorothy Evelyn Stewart (née Dray)

The sale of her father's house at Tjiklos in 1986 helped the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute buy its Nicosia building; the seller was Eve Dray, who had dug and drawn in Cyprus since 1937^1,7. She was born Dorothy Evelyn Dray on 25 June 1914, the daughter of Tom Dray, a Survey of Egypt official, and Margery Mills¹. The family lived at Kyrenia, and she first visited Cyprus in 1926, aged twelve¹. She read for a BA at University College London, where her principal described her as interested in art and archaeology¹.

Karpas and Vounous, 1936 to 1940

In 1936 Joan du Plat Taylor introduced her to excavation at Maiden Castle in Dorset¹. The next year she volunteered at the Cyprus Museum alongside du Plat Taylor, Judith Dobell and Rowena de Marchemund¹. In spring 1937 she joined du Plat Taylor's season at Ayios Philon in the Karpas. With the Australian Margaret (Kim) Collingridge she dug Hellenistic tombs at nearby Aphendrika¹. Dray and du Plat Taylor published that cemetery and the one at Tsambres as "Tsambres and Aphendika" in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus 1937-1939, which appeared in 1951³. Powell notes that the two women, unlike J. R. B. Stewart at Vounous, recorded which institutions received which tomb groups, a point a reviewer had raised against him¹.

The Cyprus Museum lent her to draw finds in the workroom at Bellapais for the Vounous excavation of 1937-38¹. That dig and its 1950 report are credited to Stewart and his first wife Eleanor Stewart, not to Eve⁵. Her name appears elsewhere in the Vounous literature: in his report on his own 1931-32 excavation, Porphyrios Dikaios wrote that "all the references on the drawings were marked by Miss E. Dray who also rearranged all the plates of drawings"⁶. In 1939 she enlisted in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and gave her vocation as archaeologist¹. Her paper with O. H. Myers on glazed quartz beads of the Romano-Arab period appeared in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology in 1946⁴.

Stewart's agent in Cyprus

From the end of 1946 she worked in Cyprus as an agent for Stewart, who had moved to Sydney. He sent her to the dealer Petros Kolokasides, whom Powell spells Colocassides, to trace coins from the Stavrokono hoard from Paphos, and she obtained 51 of them from him for Stewart. Powell quotes Stewart's letter calling the dealer "a crook"¹. She also handled export permits for pots bought for the Nicholson Museum. Stewart told her to mark them as of no commercial value, which made her uneasy, and Dikaios refused a permit for one of them¹. Peter Megaw wrote to Stewart, in Powell's quotation, that "the scale of your purchases from the local market is embarrassing", since buying could induce clandestine digging¹. In 1947 she spent three months in Cyprus with Stewart¹.

Australia and the Stewart finds

Eve moved to Sydney, where Dale Trendall found her work as a technical assistant at the Nicholson Museum for a short period around 1948 to 1951¹. She and Stewart married in New South Wales. Powell implies early 1951, while the Nicholson Museum's catalogue of its Cypriot collection gives 1952^1,7. They lived at Mount Pleasant near Bathurst. She dug with him at Vasilia and Nicosia Ayia Paraskevi in 1955², and in 1960 and 1961 at the Karmi cemeteries of Palealona and Lapatsa with Robert Merrillees and Derek Howlett, based at her father's property at Tjiklos^1,7.

Stewart died at Bathurst on 6 February 1962, and Eve was joint executor of his estate¹. She sold his library, about 580 linear feet of books, to the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney¹. After negotiations with the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Sydney failed, she took his coin collection of roughly five thousand pieces to England, where it was eventually sold to A. H. Baldwin & Sons¹. She also drew up a typescript list of his personal collection of antiquities, which Merrillees later consulted⁸.

A dispute with Alexander Cambitoglou and the University of Sydney followed over custody of the Karmi, Vasilia and Ayia Paraskevi finds and records. Powell's account rests on the letters she selected from Eve's archive, and the university's side is not given there¹. Eve later gave the Nicholson Museum Roman coin moulds, medieval bowl fragments and sherds, and pots she had bought from Colocassides, delivered through Basil Hennessy¹.

The Corpus and CAARI

With Paul Åström she edited Stewart's Corpus of Cypriot Artefacts of the Early Bronze Age, published as SIMA 3:1-2 in 1988 and 1992^2,9. She also worked on his manuscript on Lusignan coinage and sent casts of the coins to Michael Metcalf at the Ashmolean Museum¹.

She had inherited Tjiklos from her father in 1961¹. In 1985 Stuart Swiny visited her, and she chose CAARI as the beneficiary¹. The property had been taken over by the United Nations in 1964 and confiscated in 1974. She sold it in 1986 for US$150,000, and the money went towards the J. R. Stewart residence in Nicosia^1,7. She died in a nursing home in New South Wales on 8 December 2005¹.