Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
fathers of British archaeology. Here might be General Pitt-Rivers, considered to be its initiator through his excavations at Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire. There is John Evans, whose work on the hand axes of the Somme gravels in northern France set the seal on World Prehistory. These Patriarchs of the Past defined the catechism of archaeology. As a student, new to the subject, I was not only in awe of the whole affair, but I was also desperately unsure of the nomenclature and the parameters, the finds and the artefacts.
Before us, in the flesh, stood one of the contemporary icons of world archaeology, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who almost single-handedly through the newer medium of television had raised the subject to its now popular status. His white hair flowed in waves and curls behind his distinguished head, offset by his small moustache and shrewd, twinkling eyes. He was then at the peak of his illustrious career, a colossus among pygmies, in my case at least.
“And never forget,” he encouraged us that afternoon, in his stentorian, commanding voice. “You young students here, never forget, archaeology is about people. People, not things, d’you hear? Not pottery, or brooches, or villas or hill forts. It’s about people; the people of the past; the people of our past. Our own predecessors! Never lose sight of that truth!”
And with that he turned to glad-hand some aging knight of the realm who had been ‘Our Man’ in India or Iran, and merging with him, arm around his
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shoulder, he disappeared into the admiring crowd. The pronouncement was over. God had spoken.
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Two years later, resting on an upturned marble frieze which protruded from the scrub oak and pistachio bushes high above the excavations at Knidos I was confronted with that very dilemma – the people of the past. It was a fine summer morning and the sun was already high, the Mediterranean a silvered, reflective calmness to the far horizon, its symmetry disturbed only by the dark masses of the islands of the southern Dodecanese. Below me, lower down the slope, I could see puffs of dust rising from the various diggings - shovelfuls of earth being thrown into wheel barrows. One hundred men, like insects, were picking and scraping their way into the entrails of the long dead city. The remains of the temple facades and the street junctions they were uncovering were real enough. But where were Wheeler’s people? Surely they had faded into oblivion long since. I squinted into the distance, but no Hector or Lysander, no Helen or Herodotus, no Hadrian in greaves or Socrates deep in thought walked up through the prickly undergrowth to where I sat. This was my first overseas appointment as an archaeologist and here I was unable to connect the ancient rubble with any ancient reality. I was failing at the first hurdle.
But though it didn’t happen quite as I expected that day, or for many days and maybe months to come, it did happen. Not in the way or at the time I thought it might. But happen it did, on many occasions, so that in a moment of time I was able to touch the past, ever so briefly, ever so fleetingly, and in so doing I was able to feel a part of the great warp and weft of humanity rather than being isolated in my own cubical of twentieth century existence.
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It is now years later - I don’t know, maybe twenty, maybe thirty years later. I am sitting at the back of the lower theatre at Knidos. On the seats directly in front and below me is a small party staring attentively downwards to where the orchestra, the place of dancing, once had been. We’ve had a long day on the site, reconstructing the various monuments in our mind’s eye, raising the pillars and the fallen architraves in our imagination. At the end of the visit people are always grateful for a real seat, albeit of weathered marble. To lift the mood a little I mention that in ancient times there would have been cushion sellers at the entrance. Several unvarying hours in the best-made theatre seat would have taxed the rear ends of even the most culturally advanced peoples.
And so we sit contemplating the structural architecture of the past. After a while, I pull out a folded paper from my pocket. On it is typed a piece from Aeschylus’ Persae, ‘The Persians’, written almost 2,500 years ago. The play describes the story of how Xerxes, the Great King of Persia, with five million men, had attacked and burnt the city of Athens only to see his own fleet destroyed at the sea battle of Salamis. It was the classic dramatic construction of the hubris, catharsis and nemesis, the essence of tragedy, the over-weaning pride followed by the inevitable fall. In the play, as in the historical fact, Xerxes had pitted himself against the immortal gods and the people of Greece and had failed.
When news of the burning of Athens had reached the Persian court at Susa, in south western Persia, there has been widespread rejoicing. But now a messenger had followed there with the news of this catastrophic defeat.
I begin to read.
The King himself, escaping by weary, winter journeys with his bare life across the plains of Thrace.
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Nemesis indeed! Xerxes’ Queen Atossa was told the awful news of Salamis.
On that fateful day, continued the messenger, the whole sea was one din of shrieks and dying groans, till night and darkness hid the scene. If I should speak for ten days and ten nights, I could not tell you all that day’s agony. But know this: never before in one day died so vast a company of men.
It is believed that the playwright either saw or may even have participated in the battle, so moving was his description of this wholly factual account. In the theatre the audience would be totally engrossed with the emotion of the plot.
I read the last lines of the play, describing the aftermath of the battle and the resulting horror in Persia.
There, threshed by currents’ eddying motion,
Unsightly lie those well-loved forms,
Now feasted on by voiceless swarms,
The children of the untainted ocean.
Here, every house bewails a man,
And parents, childless now, lament
The troubles that the gods have sent
To end in grief their life’s long span.
Now fear no more shall bridle speech;
Uncurbed, the common tongue shall prate
Of freedom; for the yoke of State
Lies broken on the bloody beach
And fields of Salamis, which hide
The ruins of our Persian pride.
(Trans: The Persians Penguin Classics)
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As I read the last few lines, I can hardly bring myself to finish, so sudden is the sensation, so immediate is the passion. For the others sitting there, I can sense that they feel the same. We have reached the very heart of Greek tragedy, where the audience automatically sympathises with the core of the calamity and the nexus of the people involved. That play would have been performed in this very theatre, here at Knidos, maybe many, many times. And the audience, like us today, would have been drawn into the same emotional climax.
Then two things strike me most forcibly. This play is about actual people. It is a real tragedy. Parents in Susa that long time ago did become childless in their old age. But more astoundingly, it was a Greek audience who, like us, would have cried, lamenting the tragedy of a people, the Persians, who had so recently been their sworn enemies.
In that moment I touch the past, not only in a physical way by being in that theatre among those ancient stones which had witnessed the same play long ago, but in a spiritual way too, empathising with peoples who have throughout time sought to cope with impending doom and actual disaster.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
THE TEA HOUSE
Around the world, the term “tea house” may be used to refer to a restaurant or Salon de Thé. They are present in the Middle East, notably in Turkey. Such tea-houses may be referred to as ‘Chaee-Khaneh’