Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
the British contingent who without doubt rather pompously felt that they were there to give archaeological respectability to the whole affair.
The actual digging at Knidos, such as it was, was conducted by a varying number of between seventy and one hundred local men from the nearby villages on the Peninsula who, of course, lacked even the simplest understanding of what they were supposed to be doing. It was the site supervisors who kept the men in order and the assistant director who oversaw the site supervisors in what I suppose might better be classed with one or two exceptions as controlled clearance rather than forensic excavation. But labour relations were always a bit strained between the workers and the Management, not helped by the Management’s apparent lack of empathy with what might be considered to be uncouth Turkish villagers, and the fact that they were overseen by a rather effete Turk, and man called Ümit. He tended to behave rather imperiously towards the diggers, hiring and firing them at will. Ümit notwithstanding, the villagers for their part, ignoring the hardships involved, saw the expedition more as a means of gaining a little cash during the slack summer months, when from the fields the wheat crop had already been harvested and in the orchards the olive crop was yet to be gathered. It was also perceived by them to be something of a lark and from my own observation they all played around relentlessly much of the time and on the whole thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
I personally had very little to do with the High Command. Being one of the two surveyors, I didn’t have to report the discoveries in any trench and I didn’t have to get on with any of the other eccentrics on the excavation. But it did mean that I got to know all the trenches being excavated throughout the site. It was Mark, the Assistant Director, to whom I reported and otherwise I could watch the whole social jamboree taking place without getting involved in any intricate personal politics and its proponents and opponents. In this regard I counted myself very fortunate!
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Actually, one of the Inner Cabinet was a rather approachable lady called Mary. Mary was like the ‘aunty’ to the team, a rather laconic, unflappable lady of older years. She acted like a guardian, protector, and mother figure to the Commissariat, all rolled into one. I think I remember once someone telling me she might have been somehow related. Whatever the association, Mary prevented the over-enthusiastic Management from becoming involved with any kind of imbroglio and being battered senseless by irate creditors, workers, staff and friends alike. Mary could recognised the tell-tale signs of anyone becoming agitated - any slight involuntary quivering of the head, a combative positioning of the feet, any knotting of the brows or clenching of the fingers – which preceded an all-out show of belligerence. At the critical moment she would physically interpose herself between whoever it was and their tormentor and gently push them away from the seat of the fracas, and quietly say, like a prayer, “Don’t lose your cool. I’ll take care of it. OK? Just don’t lose your cool.”
And amazingly calm would be restored, and whatever the problem was, it would recede under Mary’s soft voice and gentle persuasion. Those involved lived to fight another day.
Mary tried valiantly to supervise a trench or two as well, and approached the workers in the same casual way, speaking to them in a kind of pidgin Turkish but with a full East Coast New England accent.
“Oh, say, Moo-stafa, would you just kaldir the taş over buraya. Çok mersi,” (would you lift the stone over here? Many thanks!).
“Oh Fewsi, would you just temiz the toprak from around that pillar?” (would you clean the earth from around that pillar?).
Somehow, her temperate approach worked, and the toprak would get temized. If any of us had a domestic problem, it was to Mary we would go
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and ask her advice rather than to The High Command, who tended to float above the melee.
Over the years since I was at Knidos, I have listened to some very unkind things spoken about those in charge of the dig. Several local Turkish archaeologists have more recently totally pooh-poohed their ideas quite publically, along with their methods and their results. A number of other American archaeologists have recounted outrageous stories which they say were circulating, of dynamite being used to remove difficult objects from the excavation, of not grasping the elements of basic techniques, and of riding rough-shod over the local people. I have to say I saw none of these things, and always have thought of such stories as more a case of them venting generalised academic spleen than anything at all realistic. Relations on the dig might have been a touch brittle now and again, as they so often are in such unfamiliar circumstances, but they were not impossible; certainly the Director of the whole operation was really encouraging to the underlings on the staff, me included. And, consciously or otherwise, the excavation gave me the opportunity to soak up all there was to learn about this beautiful site, on my own, without interference. For that I will always express my heartfelt thanks, though some over-serious Classicists have sometimes suggested that there were plenty of other sites that would have been more educational. I have to say that I don’t think so!
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But I read that one or two of the Management were nothing if not controversial with other contemporary scholars. One incident, widely reported at the time, stands out amongst several contretemps that came about; this one relates to the British Museum and the material that had been brought back there in the 1850’s by C. T. Newton. Some time during excavation at Knidos it was decided to look at Newton’s discoveries stored in the Museum’s vaults in London to see if there was anything which might relate to the current
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researches. There among the finds was a small head, the sculpture of a female which Newton had discovered during his excavation in the Temenos of Demeter and which I mentioned earlier. This was immediately seized upon and it was publically suggested that it was the head of Aphrodite, and if not THE Praxiteles head then one very similar to it, and it was implied that the Museum had neglected this masterpiece and left it to gather dust in a store room. A huge song and dance was made about the said sculpture, and somehow the newspapers got hold of the story and inflated it into a full-blown scandal – this all-important piece of art history which the British Museum had ignored for over a century, unrecognised and unpublished, which had been consigned to the bowels of the basement – that kind of thing.
Well, all hell broke loose. Classical scholars waded in demanding to know what was happening. But the art historians stuck to their guns. It had been carved, they said, in the same fine-grained white Parian marble favoured by Praxiteles, just like the Aphrodite would have been, and the quality of workmanship, a late classical variety, the styling of the hair and the delicate folds in the neck, all indicated that it came from the hand of the master. The experts in the Graeco-Roman Department of the Museum were embarrassed, exasperated and angry by turns, accusing all and sundry of impugning their custodianship of their international collections, not to mention their own scholarship. They pointed out that the head had come from a very specific part of the site, the Temenos of Demeter, a shrine which was well known to them, and that this location precluded the sculpture from being anything to do with the famous statue of Aphrodite.
Actually, you will remember that at the time when it was first found, Newton had tentatively identified the head as that of Persephone, the daughter to Demeter, and most contemporary specialists tended to agree with this diagnosis. Far from being ignored, as was being suggesting, the head had actually been mentioned by Newton in his excavation reports and alas, the
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Museum experts intimated, their present detractors appeared not to have done the homework on the original discovery. It represented a considerable fracas while it lasted. And as for me, I was rather pleased that Knidos, which I had just had a hand in excavating, and the temple which I had just surveyed, had come to attract such public attention. I was able to bask in the warm glow of the media spotlight, albeit caused by an academic furore, which, of course, was in any case far beyond my own competence, a point I was only too eager to admit.
Alas, apart from the occasional newsy notes in the early 1970’s in some annual American journals, as far as I know no-one ever went on to publish fully any of the discoveries that were made at Knidos. In a way I suppose this behaviour might