John Linton Myres

In the summer of 1894 John Linton Myres cleaned, arranged and catalogued the whole Government collection of Cyprus in Nicosia, and the ware classes he set out there were later adopted and revised by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition^2,6. He was born on 3 July 1869 at Preston and died on 6 March 1954 at Oxford¹⁸. He took his degree at New College, Oxford, and became a student of the British School at Athens, where in 1892 he held the Craven Fellowship¹⁷. He was appointed first Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at Oxford in 1910¹³.

Amathus and the Cyprus Museum

In October 1893 the High Commissioner of Cyprus proposed that the British Museum's excavation at Amathus be used to obtain a report on the Government collection. The Chief Secretary then invited Myres, who had been for a while in charge of the Amathus dig². He took over from Arthur Hamilton Smith in January 1894 and supervised the work until March, on tombs numbered roughly 100 to 312. His notebook records finds and architecture more fully than Smith's and contains a first attempt to arrange the pottery in sequence^6,7.

The balance of the Cyprus Exploration Fund had been offered to the British School, and Myres spent it on five small excavations: Agia Paraskevi, Kalopsida, Laxia tou Riou, Tourabi Tekke, and the Kamelarga sanctuary and Batsalos near Larnaca. He also acquired inscriptions and explored Maroni^1,6. His stated aim was to test certain theories current in Cypriot archaeology and to prepare the reorganisation of the museum¹. The finds were divided under the Ottoman antiquities law, with a third to the Government and shares for the Fund's subscribers^1,6. The Ashmolean Museum received about 1,200 provenanced objects from the Fund's digs, and the British Museum later presented it about 240 from Amathus, among them AN1896-1908.C.213^6,24. Duplicate sets of Kamelarga figurines were offered to the British Museum, the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam, the Louvre and the Berlin Antiquarium, and five of them reached Vienna in 1905 as a gift of the Ashmolean^1,19.

In summer 1894 the whole Government collection was cleaned, arranged and catalogued. The preface to the Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum (1899) divides the labour. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter took the Graeco-Phoenician pottery, most of the sculpture and all measurements. Myres took the Bronze Age collection, the Hellenic vases, glass, terracottas, bronzes and jewellery, the Amathus and Kition collections, and the drafting, indices and plates². The preface also describes the museum in 1894: statues stood in the courtyard, duplicates had been sold between 1889 and 1894, and tomb groups had been dispersed². Buchholz reports that the English share should be rated "very considerable", but that Ohnefalsch-Richter's widow Magda conceded only Myres's "occasional help"¹⁵. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East calls the relationship between the two men "uneasy"¹³. The Catalogue and his 1894 report gave the first modern classification of the wares: Red Polished, Black Slip, Base-Ring, White Painted, Black-on-Red and others⁶.

The Cesnola Collection

From 1909 Myres surveyed and cleaned the Cesnola Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. With the help of Charles Balliard he removed restorations made in Luigi Palma di Cesnola's time, divided the collection into a Type-Series and a Students Series, and wrote the Handbook of the Cesnola Collection (1914)¹². He judged the collection "a magnificent series of isolated objects", not scientific evidence¹². Marangou criticises his remarks on the Cypriot peasantry and calls his stance "two-faced", critical of Cesnola yet a colonial representative on Cypriot rights¹². The Handbook added an Early Iron Age phase and tied the Late Bronze Age to Aegean chronology, against the Kourion and Enkomi dating of Murray and Walters^6,7. L. W. King, reviewing it in 1916, noted that it was not a complete catalogue and that duplicates and supplementary pieces had been kept apart as a students' series²⁰.

Fieldwork in 1913 and the Colonial Office

Menelaos Markides, curator of the Cyprus Museum from 1912 and a former pupil of Myres at Oxford, invited him back to dig. With a Government grant, he worked in autumn 1913 at Lefkoniko, Lapithos and Kition-Bamboula; the results appeared only in the Annual of the British School at Athens for 1940 to 1945^9,11. Material from Lefkoniko passed to Claude Schaeffer, who gave it to the museum at Saint-Germain-en-Laye¹⁶. Myres thanked the High Commissioner, Goold Adams, and in March 1915 the Museum Committee gave Lady Goold Adams a duplicate pair of earrings in recognition of hospitality⁸.

Myres also advised the Colonial Office. In 1909, after a report on the Cyprus Museum by Farrell, he urged the British School to press the Office, calling the museum's state "most scandalous"⁸. He wrote memoranda in December 1910 on administration, in 1913 on museum equipment, and on 22 April 1915 on the working of the antiquities law. In 1915 he asserted that the 1905 law had not seriously reduced the supply of high-quality antiquities to London, Paris and New York^9,10. He attended the Archaeological Joint Committee meeting of 16 November 1932, which proposed a Department of Antiquities in Cyprus, and he was the only representative of the learned societies to sign the letter to The Times of 22 September 1933⁹. The Oxford Encyclopedia credits him with insisting on the training of Porphyrios Dikaios¹³.

In December 1933 Sotheby's sold about 390 objects, among them Marion tomb groups that the Museum had classed as duplicates and that Myres had catalogued; Stanley-Price names Rupert Gunnis as the consignor, and some lots were bought for the Ashmolean and the Institute of Archaeology in London¹⁰. Myres wrote to G. L. M. Clauson about the sales on 27 September 1933 and 17 January 1934¹⁰. Some of his own finds from Cyprus later went to the Ashmolean as gifts, including a Kition lagynos, AN1953.551²⁵.