Volume 4, Number 3 · March 11, 1965
The Anonymity of Antiquity
By M.I. Finley
Greece in the Bronze Age
by Emily Vermeule
Chicago, 406 pp., $10.00
The Mycenaeans
by Lord William Taylour
Praeger, 243 pp., $4.75
The number of sites on the mainland of Greece now known to have been inhabited at some time in the Bronze Age runs to many hundreds. This is in addition to the islands and the western coast of Turkey, and the total grows steadily. In any single year, perhaps thirty are under active examination by archaeologists. Given the present quite remarkable interest in the subject, only limited manpower and funds keep the figure that low. And there are some ancient sites which cannot be properly excavated because they lie underneath the center of a modern community, until a happy chance intervenes, such as the builder's bulldozer at Thebes which recently uncovered rather spectacular finds. A few of the places, Mycenae most notably, have become so familiar, at least as names, that one tends to forget how recent the whole story is—no older than the discoveries of Schliemann at Troy beginning in 1870, at Mycenae in 1876 and at Orchomenus in central Greece in 1881, and of Sir Arthur Evans at Cnossus in Crete in 1899. Since than a veritable Malthusian progression has occurred; hence Professor Vermeule's paradoxical introductory remarks:
Review, 2330 words
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