Robert Stuart Merrillees

Robert Merrillees was an Australian ambassador who also wrote the histories of the Cyprus Museum and of the collectors who supplied it. He was born on 25 July 1938, joined the Australian Department of External Affairs in 1964, and served as ambassador to Israel from 1983, to Sweden from 1991 to 1995 (with non-resident accreditation to Finland) and to Greece from January 1996. He was recalled from Athens and retired early in 1998. In 1992 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and in 2012 he published a memoir, Diplomatic Digs¹.

In the field

His fieldwork came first. At Karmi, on the north coast, he belonged to the party of James Stewart of the University of Sydney, which also included Betty and Eve Stewart, Derek Howlett and Mary Ann Meagher. Apart from Jim and Betty Stewart he was the only other official member of the Sydney team. Howlett later criticised his surveying². In the early 1970s he took part with his wife and daughters in two seasons of the Columbia University expedition to Phlamoudhi, led by Edith Porada¹.

The 1955 division of finds from the British excavations at Kouklia gave the records and finds of Asproyi Tomb IV to the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney, in return for Sydney's funding. In the published volume, Hector Catling thanks Merrillees among the Australian helpers in the attempt to recover that archive³.

Histories of the Museum and its collectors

Merrillees's own publications begin with The Cypriote Bronze Age Pottery Found in Egypt (Lund, 1968)¹⁰. He later wrote on a tomb group of the sixteenth century BC from central Cyprus¹², and on Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and the British¹³. His chapter on T. B. Sandwith and the beginnings of Cypriote archaeology appeared in 2001¹¹.

In 2005 he published Farrell's report of 1909 on the condition of the Cyprus Museum. He had first seen it in 1978 among the papers of Cobham, and he wrote there of his "45 years" of association with the Museum⁴.

In 2012 he and Thomas Kiely published a study of the government engineer Samuel Brown and his circle of acquaintances who collected and dug in late nineteenth-century Cyprus⁵. Two years later he reconstructed the collection of George Basil Palma, a Famagusta chemist, from the inventories of the Department of Antiquities. Many of the pieces were later bought by the Cyprus Museum or given to it⁶.

His 2016 study took up the provenance of the stele of Sargon II, found at Larnaca (Kition) in 1845 and acquired by Berlin in 1846, and of the two so-called Dhali silver bowls in the Louvre. He argued that the stele was found probably near the city wall and the church of Phaneromeni rather than at Bamboula⁷. In 2017 he and Craig Barker described the Cypriot antiquities from the Cesnola collections in the Nicholson Museum⁸.