Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
running along the water’s edge. Apparently a sherd of Mycenean pottery had once been found here, hence the name of the beach, which implied there had once been a Bronze Age presence near Knidos, but a very cursory look at the shore showed no further sign of any ancient merchant venturers from the Argolid that day, so we lay on the beach and dozed in the heat punctuated by the occasional dip in the warm, pristine sea. After an hour or so we all jumped in the dinghy and roared back to camp. That ‘survey’ was over, at least.
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CHAPTER FOUR
ONE PROMISCUOUS MASS OF RUINS
The Society of the Dilettante is a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk: the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.
Horace Walpole 1743
Various savants and august bodies have conducted archaeological investigations at Knidos in recent centuries. The first to identify the site as that of the ancient city and to encourage archaeological exploration here was the Society of the Dilettante in 1812. This organisation, originally founded in 1732 by Francis Dashwood, began life as a group of wealthy if somewhat disreputable rakes who created a drinking club for gentlemen under the guise of purportedly studying the Classical world. They had all been on the Grand Tour and felt a corporate association with the ethereal past, though their main interests were rather more inclined to the debauched present. But by the early 19th century the Society was in fact supporting more serious antiquarian pursuits in the Mediterranean, and the discovery of Knidos was at least one of their successes.
It is obvious from their description of the site that rather more of the city’s remains were visible the year of the Society’s visit. A certain William Leake, a military man who visited Knidos at more or less the same time and wrote about his experiences in 1824 in a book about his travels in Asia Minor describes the remains of several temples, stoas, artificial terraces and three theatres, of which certainly only one and a bit now remain. A huge amount of stone-work had clearly been robbed soon after his time. Indeed, we have records that only a few years later, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the ambitious Ottoman governor of Egypt, organised several ship-loads of blocks to be
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taken from Knidos and transported to Alexandria in order to build his new palace at Ras el-Tin, which he began in 1834. This is the very same building which is shown in a lithograph by the famous artist David Roberts where he features himself at an audience with ‘the Viceroy of Egypt’ in 1839; when you think about it, Roberts is actually sitting among the block-work from Knidos! Meanwhile, back at Cape Crio, robbing the terraces, theatre and other buildings of their stone-work to construct such a palace would seriously have depleted the already damaged ancient city and would have left it in a much more ruined state than the passage of time and sundry earthquakes must have previously wrought.
The next researches at Knidos were conducted in the late 1830’s by the Royal Navy. The then hydrographer to the British Navy, Captain (later Admiral) Francis Beaufort, the one who invented the wind scale, had some twenty or so years previously sailed around the coast of Asia Minor in a captured Dutch frigate called the Frederickssteen and in 1817 he published a memoir of his journeys which he called the Karamania, an old name for southern Anatolia. In this memoir he discusses some of the ancient sites which he had examined and identified using classical texts like Strabo’s ‘Geographies’ which he carried with him for reference. These cities of the past had of course been ‘lost’ to the world for over a millennium and one can feel in his narrative Beaufort’s excitement at rediscovering them. It was in the early stages of his voyage that he called in briefly at Knidos, which he described in the Karamania as ‘one promiscuous mass of ruins’. Though he said he had no time to investigate Knidos itself, after his experiences in other parts of Turkey he was considered to be a bit of a self-taught archaeologist and indeed he later successfully described a somewhat more extensive study he made of some of the Classical cities in Lycia further east.
When Beaufort was later made responsible for sending surveyors to the Eastern Mediterranean to make charts of the seas around Asia Minor for the Admiralty, to be used in case of Russian naval expansion from the Black Sea,
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he urged his men to locate and to map as many of the ancient sites near the coast as they could, “against the day,” he rather far-sightedly wrote, “that the local people awake to their importance.” The naval surveyor who actually mapped Cape Crio and Knidos on Beaufort’s behalf was Lieutenant Thomas Graves, Captain of a decommissioned warship ‘Meteor’, a leaky 378 ton tub which had been re-named HMS Beacon. His survey, in 1838, included the whole city – the mainland, the island, the harbours, the walls, the streets, the acropolis and some of the ancillary buildings as well. It’s a masterly work, with the physical features beautifully stippled to show the rugged nature of the coastline.
Twenty or so years later, between 1857 and 1859, the site was looked at again, this time in some detail, by C. T. Newton, later Sir Charles Newton, of the British Museum. He carried out excavations in various parts of ancient Knidos, and especially, he exposed a sanctuary dedicated to Demeter and Persephone high up in the north-eastern part of the city where he discovered a seated statue of what is presumed to be Demeter herself as well as a head which he interpreted as that of her daughter Persephone, more of which later. Meanwhile, in the lower part of the city he cleared part of the theatre and a Temple to Dionysus.
But his most well-known discovery was made a couple of miles east of the city, on a headland overlooking the sea. There he found a sculpture of a huge marble lion half buried in the ground which had once surmounted the roof of a monumental tomb nearby, a building which he maintained had been a victory cenotaph to the mariners who perished in a sea battle off Knidos in 394 BC. After a huge amount of effort he managed to transport this stone lion by ship to London and place it in the British Museum. It now sits in a commanding location in Norman Foster’s recently built Great Court right in the centre of the building.
✳ ✳ ✳ ✳
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Since Newton’s day, there had been no further explorations at ancient Knidos until our present expedition in the late 1960’s. These new investigations had perhaps from their inception been conceived with a somewhat more ethereal goal in mind, a slant towards art history rather than dirt archaeology. Those who conceived, financed and managed the whole affair were basically art historians from the USA, and maybe that characterized their aim at Knidos. I learned that previously there had been some involvement with art objects from other excavations in Greece. Perhaps for obvious reasons a focal interest in archaeology and in the people of ancient Knidos seems to have been secondary to the search for its art treasures, especially its sculpture. The choice of Knidos was of course made because of the city’s association with the Knidia, one of the greatest sculptures ever created, by one of the greatest Classical artists who ever lived, namely Praxiteles. That in the end was undoubtedly one of the ambitions, to rediscover the lost statue of Aphrodite, and if not that, then the temple in which the statue had been displayed. Could the new excavations succeed where Beaufort, Graves, Newton and others had failed – “Knidos reveals the art discovery of the century”; that kind of thing? And remarkably as far as I am able to judge the expedition came very close to achieving this ambition.
It was suggested, no doubt conceitedly among us ignorant foot soldiers, that the excavation permit had been obtained from the Ankara Department of Antiquities only by bringing in ‘trained field archaeologists’ from Great Britain like the Assistant Director, Mark, who then recruited other established field workers to act as site supervisors, small finds and pottery experts, cataloguers and conservators and architects. That would include a field surveyor like me, though I openly have to admit that my own field experience at that time was extremely limited. To this so-called professional team were added all manner of flotsam and jetsam – friends, acquaintances, students and hangers-on who were brought along for politically expediency or simply personal attachment. As for the sponsors, I heard of various East Coast institutions being mentioned, but I was not involved very far up the
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chain of command so I really