The Prehistoric Pottery of Carchemish

Extract

In 1913 the British Museum Expedition had excavated a Late Hittite cemetery at Yunus, just outside the walls of Carchemish, and as the work drew to a close and the graves on the outskirts of the cemetery became sparse and poor, my foreman Gregori Antoniou and I started to prospect for a fresh site in the neighbourhood. Beginning from the graveyard on which we were still employed we went inland towards the little village of Yunus (= Eminik), examining both the top of the plateau and the slope down to the mill-stream (see sketch-map, Carchemish, 11. 37); on the high ground about half-way to the village, which is cultivated ground, we noticed quantities of potsherds covering an area of about 100 metres by 50. Gregori, who found the first pieces, hailed them with joyful confidence as Mycenaean-joyful because in this strange land they brought memories of his native Cyprus, confidence because his fifty years and more of excavations in the eastern Mediterranean had given him a working knowledge of antiquities such as few possess. That Mycenaean wares should be found on the banks of the Euphrates sounded incredible, but when I looked at the sherds which Gregori held out to me and saw the smooth buff clay with its decoration of lines and curves in lustrous black and brown paint I was almost convinced, and it needed an examination of the back of the sherds and the recognition of the fact that they were of hand-made pottery to make me realize that we had to deal with a prehistoric and not an Aegean ware.