Robert Stuart Merrillees

A graduate of the Sydney Church of England Grammar School, Merrillees enrolled at Sydney University in 1956 to study ancient history and Latin²⁶. He had first met Paul Åström in 1955 at Mount Pleasant in Bathurst, where Åström was staying with Professor J. R. B. Stewart to research his dissertation on the Middle Cypriote Bronze Age²⁷. Soon after his studies began the two started a correspondence that ran without interruption until Åström's death²⁷. He later wrote that Professors Stewart and Hennessy, under whose direction he studied, oriented him away from Egypt and towards Cyprus, which he made his own specialization, and that he was one of very few of his generation still active who had studied Cypriot prehistory as an undergraduate²⁸.

Judith Powell, Stewart's biographer, counts him among Stewart's most promising students, and he was the only student in 1959 to complete an Honours year²⁶. He left Australia in November 1958 to join Stewart and Eve Stewart in England, and in April 1959 he wrote that he was "overwhelmed by the recollection" of the five months in Europe²⁶. Back in Australia he moved to the Stewarts' house, The Mount, to work on the Vounous material of Schaeffer²⁶. At the beginning of 1961 Stewart made him his research assistant²⁶.

That year he dug with Stewart at Karmi, on the north coast of Cyprus²⁹. Apart from Jim and Betty, Powell writes, he was the only other "official" Sydney University team member, and he was on salary; he shared a smaller house with Derek Howlett and Mary Ann Meagher, and Howlett criticised his lack of practical surveying skills²⁶. In Powell's account, a final rupture with Stewart came on the voyage home, and Stewart's later reference for him was "vicious"²⁶. His diaries of the dig played an important part in the publication of Stewart's Karmi excavations in 2009, a book he did not write: he supplied information, commented on the final text, and several of its site photographs are his^24,29.

Merrillees took part in excavations in Cyprus and Nubia and obtained his doctorate in 1965²⁸. The sources name the department differently: he places it in the Department of Egyptology at University College London, and his book's preface thanks Professor W. B. Emery, who supervised the thesis throughout^10,28. Thomas Kiely writes that he completed the PhD at the Institute of Archaeology²⁴. The thesis was submitted in April 1965, examined in June, and the degree awarded on 7 July 1965¹⁰. Åström and his Swedish colleagues, especially Einar Gjerstad, arranged its publication, which appeared in 1968 as The Cypriote Bronze Age Pottery Found in Egypt¹⁰.

The book concludes that the inhabitants of Cyprus made the hand-made pots found in Egypt and "probably also transported them there", and that the initiative for the exchanges probably lay with the Cypriots, who found markets in Syria and Egypt¹⁰. He held that Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, played "an integral part" in communications between Cyprus and Egypt, and that Pharaoh did not enjoy an exclusive monopoly on overseas trade¹⁰. He made the same point about Mycenaean pottery in Egypt at an international archaeological symposium in Cyprus in 1972³⁰.

His opium proposal dates from 1962, when, as a research student, he published "Opium trade in the Bronze Age Levant" in Antiquity³¹. As Chovanec, Bunimovitz and Lederman sum it up, the idea rests on the close resemblance between Base Ring juglets and the seed head of an opium poppy incised to draw its latex; since the narrow necks pass only fluids, it was suggested the opium travelled in a syrup such as honey²³. In the 1968 book he granted that the contention could not "a priori" be proved beyond doubt, though fresh data seemed to enhance its plausibility¹⁰. On a visit to Cyprus in 1963 he saw the opium poppy growing wild on the north and south coasts, and experiments with green capsules showed how the juglet's form could have been derived from the poppy head¹⁰.

Reviewing Trade and Transcendence in the Bronze Age Levant, James Weinstein noted that Merrillees renewed the thesis while admitting that analyses of juglet contents had failed to prove it³². Chovanec, Bunimovitz and Lederman note that analyses he reported in 1989 claimed opium in two juglets, but that the results were criticised as methodologically vague, and that Koschel and Bisset and colleagues warned against taking a single positive analysis as vindication²³. Louise Steel judged that the hypothesis "has received some support" from recent chemical analyses of residues in Base Ring juglets³³. Chovanec, Bunimovitz and Lederman, who called it "a brilliant hypothesis", found no opium but aromatic oils in three juglets from Tel Beth-Shemesh, and concluded that their results cast "grave doubts" on the idea²³. Bunimovitz and Lederman added that the poppy-head shape was not a reference to the contents, and that his argument disregarded the Late Bronze Age texts on Cypriot trade³¹.

By 1965 he had joined the Australian foreign service, which, he wrote, "put paid, not unhappily, to my digging days"²⁸. He described the department as run on club-like lines, "requiring exclusive adherence"²⁸. In 1971 he was First Secretary of the Australian Mission to the United Nations in New York, and spoke in Canada that October on "Problems in Cypriot History"^16,34. He served as Australia's ambassador to Sweden in the early 1990s, and most recently as ambassador to Greece and Bulgaria before 1999^35,36,37. Wikipedia adds that he was ambassador to Israel from 1983 to 1987 and led a team to Cambodia in 1990 for talks with officials of the Phnom Penh government before a peace agreement¹. He called Cambodia and Israel "exceptional cases of professional synergy" between the two callings²⁸.

During annual leave he acted as pottery consultant to Edith Porada's Columbia University expedition to Phlamoudhi, taking part in 1971 and 1972^28,38. Through Porada he was appointed Adjunct Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia³⁸. He was asked to give the closing paper at the New York symposium on Phlamoudhi on 21 January 2005, and in the published volume argued that Red-on-Black pottery marked a cultural region in northeast Cyprus lasting three hundred years³⁸.

He and James D. Muhly both wrote on Alashiya for the First International Cypriological Congress in Nicosia in April 1969, and their views on its location, he wrote, were "diametrically opposed" and unchanged since³⁹. A. Bernard Knapp lists him among the detractors of the identification of Alashiya with Cyprus⁴⁰. In 1995 he wrote that the study of Old World prehistory had "entered the silly season" and attacked the "vacuous theorising" of the New Archaeology, "epitomised by the writings of A. B. Knapp"⁴¹. The same article printed a satire, "The Alashia/Cyprus Equation Made Easy", which ironically concludes that "Alashia can only be Cyprus"⁴¹.

In 2009 he restated his central objection: the texts imply that Alashiya was a Late Bronze Age superpower, while the archaeology of Cyprus "suggests just the opposite"³⁹. He held that the petrographic study of the Amarna letters by Goren, Finkelstein and Na'aman would not lessen scepticism, objecting that they examined no pottery from Alassa or Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, the sites they named³⁹. Knapp judged the recent round of the debate "superficial at best", and Bunimovitz and Lederman call his stance "uncompromising"^31,42.

Kept from digging, he found the reward of "excavating in museum storerooms, libraries, and archives"²⁸. In 1983 he compiled a catalogue of finds from Dikaios's excavations at Ambelikou-Aletri, and his 1984 report on the site was later called invaluable by those to whom he handed the project⁴³. In 1992 he traced a Base-ring figurine with child from the collection of the French consul Auguste-Emile Boysset, concluding that Boysset's antiquities came mainly if not wholly from Marius Tano⁴⁴. His 2001 paper presented T. B. Sandwith's paper of 1871 as the first academic attempt at a synthesis of Cypriot prehistory¹¹.

In 2005, writing of "45 years' association with the Cyprus Museum", he published Jerome Farrell's unpublished report of 1909 on its condition, first seen in 1978 among the papers of Claude Delaval Cobham⁴⁵. Later studies reassembled the collection of the Famagusta chemist George Basil Palma from Department of Antiquities inventories, and argued that the stele of Sargon II more probably came from the city wall of Kition near the Phaneromeni church than from Bamboula^6,7. Kiely calls this "indefatigable historiographical work" of "immense importance"²⁴.

He directed the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute from 1 July 1999 to 2003, his only full-time academic post^28,37. The conference "Egypt and Cyprus in Antiquity", held in Nicosia in 2003 for the institute's 25th anniversary, originated with him, then the institute's director, and with Maria Iacovou, and he co-edited its proceedings⁴⁶. As he left the post, an honorary volume of 30 of his papers appeared, On Opium, Pots, People and Places, with a bibliography of 146 titles²². Reviewing it, Sabine Fourrier called him a pioneer in showing, from 1965, regional cultural facies in Bronze Age Cyprus²². She also called him a man of strong and of fixed ideas, citing his refusal to identify Alashiya with Cyprus and a humorous text written "with as much brio as bad faith"²². She likened him, archaeologist and diplomat, to the great nineteenth-century figures whose portraits he drew²².