MARGINAL COMMENT By HAROLD NICOLSON N The Times newspaper last
Saturday appeared an article by
Professor John Garstang which seemed to me to concentrate within its two columns all the charm of archaeology. It is a charm which derives from a combination of opposites. You have long and often fruitless labour contrasting with sudden startling rewards ; you have cautious scholarship mating with wildest conjecture ; you have wearisome planning and organisation subjected always to the fantastic quirks of chance ; the dimmest, dullest shard may in one blinding moment reveal to you the secrets of the Minoan language, a stone which one dislodges from a bush of gum-cistus may bear upon its surface the clue to the Iliad. The story which Professor Garstang had to tell was of the discovery in the foothills of the Taurus mountains of a royal site at Karatepe, or Blackdown, above the windings of the river Pyramus. The initial credit for this find belongs to a village school-teacher of the name of Ekrem Kusha, who for the last twenty years had made a habit of camping during the hot summer months amid the scrub and precipices of the Kara- tepe. He was told, presumably by some veteran shepherd, that somewhere among those aromatic rocks there were ruins of a dead city, containing a monument in the semblance of a lion and one huge monolithic statue standing erect. The school-teacher visited the site and found these rumours to be true. He returned on three successive occasions, and when in 1945 an archaeological mission happened to pass through his village he informed them of the site and offered to conduct them to it on the next day. Riding in single file up a rough mountain track they came upon these ruins among the rocks and bushes ; the statue was now lying prone upon its side ; the monumental lion was in position ; and all around lay fragments of carved stones and inscriptions. On returning to Istanbul the archaeologists reported this discovery, and two special expeditions have since been sent to the spot under the leadership of Bahadir Alkin and Professor Bossert.
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The ruins, so it is conjectured, are all that remain of a summer palace constructed in the ninth or eighth century B.C. for Aztuwacli, King of the Danuna. Upon the statue is a long inscription written in the language of Canaan and in the Aramaic script—that powerful vernacular which endured for over a thousand years and which was the language of Jesus Christ and the early gospels. Beside it are other inscriptions written in the later Hittite hieroglyphic writing. These two scripts have not hitherto been found in conjunction, and although it is too early to say whether the discovery will equal in importance that of the Rosetta Stone, yet it is certain that it will provide philologists with many most important clues. Yet what is of more immediate interest to the layman is the occurrence of that echoing name Danuna. Professor Garstang informs us that this name, whether written Danuna, Danauna or Danau, occurs several times in Egyptian and Assyrian records and that it describes a people who, originating in the Aegean islands, eventually established themselves in Asia Minor. They have been identified with the Danaoi who fought with the Achaeans during the siege of Troy and whose wooden horse aroused the belated suspicions of Laocoon. All of which links the school-teacher Ekrem Kusha (a deserving legatee), with Danaus, son of the King of Egypt, and father of fifty most unfortunate daughters. It is an interesting pattern that the shards have disclosed.
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It seems strange to me that, in spite of the high romance pro- vided by excavation, so few great works of literature have been devoted to the theme of archaeology. We have Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia, which—although as excellently written as are all the books of this entrancing author—would not, even by her most fervent devotees, be classed as a major work of art. In fact, in so far as I can recall, the only writer of genius who has taken archaeology as the theme of a creative work is Gabriele d'Annunzio, whose Citta Mona is devoted to the finding of the so-called (and why not ?) tombs of the Atreidae. The scene of that powerful and
unhealthy play is laid in the diggings at Mycenae, and the archaeo- logists engaged upon the operation, unlike Herr Heinrich Schliemann, were romantic, ardent and immensely neurotic. It is true that the exact circumstances of Agamemnon's death are shrouded in obscurity. According to Aeschylus, it took place not at Mycenae but at the adjoining Argos. The King of Kings, on descending from his chariot, and on crossing the threshold, addressed the wife whom he had not seen for ten long years in appropriate terms. "Daughter of Leda," he called her, "guardian of my home " ; being a Greek returning from a highly successful campaign, he adjured her not to strew too many tapestries in his path, lest such insolence might bring down upon him the envy of the gods. Thereafter Clytemnestra killed him with a hatchet while he was having his bath. The Homeric account is different. According to the statement made by Agamemnon himself when talking to Odysseus in the under-world, the murder took place later at the banquet offered to the returning warrior by Aegisthus. "So I died by a sad death and my com- panions were slain around me like white-tusked hogs." In any case, Pausanias stated definitely that Atreus, Agamemnon and Electra were all buried close to the lion gate at Mycenae, the tombs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus being situated at some little distance outside the city wall, "they being regarded as unworthy of a place within it." It was upon the information given by Pausanias that Schliemann worked with such fantastic reward.
*- * * * In d'Annunzio's play the part of Schliemann is taken by an hysterical Italian archaeologist of the name of Leonardo. For two years he has been working on the site, and when the play opens his nerves as well as his domestic relations have become strained. The curse of the Atreidae, the blood of murdered men and women which once soaked the brittle ground, hangs like some foetid exhalation over the opening scenes. He scrapes away at the hot dust and always before his eyes hangs the vision of those gigantic ghosts. At the climax of the play he staggers on to the stage, covered with dust and sweat, shouting wildly that he has found the tombs. "Gold ! Gold ! "he screams, "Corpses ! An immensity of gold ! Corpses all covered with golcl ! " He has raised the mask from the face of Agamemnon and gazed upon the majestic features before they crumbled into dust ; he has looked into the eyes of Cassandra as she lay, with her fingers rich with gems, beside the murdered king. The sacrilege which he has committed mingles with the dark legends of the place and his mind becomes unhinged ; in the last act he drowns Bianca Maria in the Persean spring. Schliemann's own adventures, although almost equally dramatic, had a less tragic ending. He thought at first that the slabs which covered the shaft graves were merely a platform for some Achaean meeting-house ; it was only some months later that he excavated further and discovered the tombs with all the wealth they contained. Thereafter he married a Greek girl and lived on happily in a bright little villa at Athens.
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The Citta Morta is not to my mind the most successful of d'Annunzio's plays, since its climax occurs too early in the action, and the remaining scenes trail off into yelps of doom and passion. But nothing that I have read conveys more vividly the strain and expeCtation of archaeology, or the uneasiness which must haunt thereafter all imaginative people who rifle tombs. Yet the moments of discovery when they occur must compensate for all the months of unrewarding labour, and for all those hours spent in hot huts ranging potsherds in trays. It is comforting to feel that no curse of the Atreidae need fall on those who unearth Hittite or Aramaic inscriptions, who stumble upon monolithic statues lying prone among the arbutus and the cistus, and who ride out from Zenjerli across the Amanus and up the little track which will bring them—guided I hope by the school-teacher Ekrem Kusha—to the rocks and ruins of Karatepe, looking down upon the gulf of Iskanderoon.
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