Dorothy U. Seyler. The obelisk and the Englishman: the pioneering discoveries of Egyptologist William Bankes.

Witcher, Robert

Dorothy U. Seyler. The obelisk and the Englishman: the pioneering discoveries of Egyptologist William Bankes. 2015. 304 pages, 29 colour and 40 b&w illustrations. Amherst (NY): Prometheus; 978-1-63388-036-8 hardback $26.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Alan Kaiser. Archaeology, sexism, and scandal: the long-suppressed story of one woman s discoveries and the man who stole credit for them. 2015. xx+251 pages, numerous b&w illustrations. London: Rowman & Littlefield; 978-1-4422-3003-3 hardback 22.95 [pounds sterling].

Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, Jack L. Davis & Vasiliki Florou (ed.). Carl W. Blegen: personal & archaeological narratives. 2015. xii+240 pages, 85 colour and b&w illustrations. Exeter: University of Exeter Press; 978-1-937040-22-0 hardback 25 [pounds sterling].

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Subjects and narratives was primarily academic and analytical, identifying problems and sketching solutions; our remaining review books seek-- and arguably will find--wider audiences, putting into practice a range of narrative techniques. We start with a conventional biography of an unconventional life, and then move through increasingly experimental forms of biography--as critique, fiction and travel.

First, The obelisk and the Englishman: the pioneering discoveries of Egyptologist William Bankes by DOROTHY SEYLER. William Bankes certainly led a busy and varied life--aristocrat, adventurer, archaeologist, MP, art collector and, eventually, outlaw. Despite the books title, this is primarily a biography of Bankes rather than his discoveries perse. It is not, for example, another account of the decipherment of hieroglyphs or the birth of Egyptology more generally. Instead, Seyler traces Bankes's life from his early years as the second son of a wealthy Dorset landowner, through his extensive Mediterranean travels, to his fall from grace and exile in Venice.

Fortunately--for our purposes, at least--the best-documented years of his life concern his travels and work in the Near East and Egypt. After Cambridge and his first stint as an MP, Bankes set off to Spain in 1813; he did not return to England until 1820. During these years, he travelled from Spain via Italy to the Eastern Mediterranean, exploring Greece, Crete, Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and, most famously, Egypt, where the monuments he saw caused him to muse that "the Greeks and Romans whom we have been content to acknowledge our superiors in the greatness and [...] solidity of their monuments have gained not a step upon their predecessors" (p. 88). An accomplished artist, he drew monuments and copied inscriptions and paintings wherever he went. And he travelled to many places unvisited by other European travellers. We hear, for example, how he managed to charm his way, along with a motley crew of others including John Burckhardt, to the fabled Nabataean city of Petra. Ele also got himself into plenty of scrapes: personal disputes (including with the redoubtable Lady Hester in Damascus--the pair loathed one another), debilitating illnesses and, at one point, being abandoned naked by guides in the desert.

But it was his two extended journeys down the Nile that are his most important legacy. Many of the temples, tombs and inscriptions he documented have subsequently been lost, making his records unique. He published relatively little himself, however, and one has a sense of a life overshadowed by those around him, most obviously Belzoni, Champollion, Burckhardt, Byron and Wellington. Indeed, much of what we know of his travels comes not from Bankes's diaries--he did not keep one--but from the diaries and books of his friends and associates.

Seyler suggest that Bankes "let himself fall into the trap of trying to do a little bit of everything" (p. 220), with the result that he never got round to publishing his copious notes and drawings. Others, however, were keener--or at least more disciplined-- to publish discoveries that Bankes had made, leading to a number of disputes and a long-running libel case that Bankes eventually lost (more on academic theft anon). From his first visit to Egypt, Bankes demonstrated a particular fascination with the temple of Isis on the island of Philae. It was a bilingual obelisk from this temple that, along with the Rosetta Stone, would provide the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. The obelisk was eventually transported to Bankes's family home, Kingston Lacy in Dorset, where it still stands today. This personal appropriation is, however, differentiated by Seyler from the exportation of other obelisks on the grounds that it had already fallen; Bankes "would never have dreamed of taking down any of the standing monuments at these temples" (p. 183). Despite its prominence in the book's title, we do not get much of a 'biography' of the obelisk. Seyler certainly laments the fact that we lack many of the details we might have liked to have had about it; for example, its journey to England. Nonetheless, there is little feel for the material object itself or, indeed, for the political and cultural mess that accumulated around the man, Belzoni, who facilitated its export.

Bankes's fall and exile resulted from being caught and charged not once but twice for indecent exposure. The first time, London society, including his friend Wellington, rallied around him to ensure his acquittal. The second time, they did not and he fled, finally settling in Venice. From there he continued to commission and buy art for his Dorset home, carefully choreographing the location of each piece in the house. He may even have risked a covert visit to Kingston Lacy towards the end of his life, to view his collection in situ.

Seyler has written a welcome account of a pivotal character in the emergence of Egyptology. The narrative unfolds well, and Seyler refrains from attempts to understand Bankes's complicated later life by psychoanalysing his early years or his relationship with his father. If Bankes is sometimes crowded out of his own biography by a digression on Keates, Wellington or Byron (who appears at least three times as Bryon himself), that is probably true to the man.

In Archaeology, sexism, and scandal: the long-suppressed story of one woman's discoveries and the man who stole credit for them, Alan Kaiser presents a cross between biography, autobiography and detective novel. The story begins one rainy afternoon when Kaiser, bored with marking essays, resorts to displacement activity: office tidying. In the process, he discovers a file of documents donated to the Classics department at the University of Evansville, Indiana, concerning American excavations at the Greek site of Olynthus in 1931. This project, directed by David Robinson, occupies an important position in the history of Classical archaeology--due to the scale of the excavations, their emphasis on private rather than public architecture, and the still invaluable series of excavation reports published by Robinson and his collaborators. In just four seasons, the project uncovered over 100 houses and 600 graves, employing hundreds of workmen (as many as 350, p. 43) and eventually publishing 14 monographs totalling some 4500 pages. Might the file found by Kaiser cast new light on this important project?

The contents, he soon discovers, relate to one of Robinson's students, Mary Ross Ellingson. Part 1 of the book presents an account of Ellingson's 1931 journey across the Atlantic to join the Johns Hopkins University excavations. Her letters home provide a wonderful insight into her experiences of Greek culture and both the social and professional aspects of the excavation. It is hard not to warm to Ellingson's youthful enthusiasm and sense of fun--everything is 'marvellous', a 'scream'. But there is also rich ethnographic detail on the subject of Greece at a time of dramatic social and ethnic upheaval, involving not only Turks and Greeks but also Vlachs. Kaiser suggests she may even have used some of her experience of daily life in the village of Myriophito to inform her understanding of the archaeological evidence for spinning and agriculture.

Part 2, 'Sexism and scholarship', shifts gear from biography to an account of the social and academic context within which women such as Ellingson found themselves during the early 1930s, explaining how sexist attitudes and the tenure system actively worked against their chances of achieving full professorships. Kaiser then recounts the life and career of Ellingson after her participation in the Olynthus excavation, and those of two of her female co-workers. Despite the institutional discrimination they faced, each followed a different career route and all of them eventually achieved some level of academic recognition. The male archaeologists who excavated at Olynthus in 1931 generally went on to achieve even greater things. Having discovered more about the excavations and about the difficulties faced by women in archaeology at the time, Kaiser is about to put the file back on the shelf when he spots a brief comment on an administrative form completed by Ellingson, decades after the excavation.

As the book is presented as a detective story, one does not want to spoil the surprise. The book's title, however, clearly pre-empts the plot. Kaiser discovers that one of the monographs is plagiarised, from Ellingson's dissertation. Part 3 presents the evidence and attempts to understand whether this action was considered acceptable academic behaviour at the time and what it might indicate given that Robinson worked hard to train and promote his own students--both men and women--and their work. Kaiser argues that it related in part to Robinson's belief (common at the time, as Kaiser demonstrates) that once married, women such as Ellingson (who is here described under her married name) would leave the field.

The final chapter takes an autobiographical turn as Kaiser relates his own difficulties in getting an article about his findings on this matter published. Despite attracting much interest on the lecture circuit, he begins to smell a rat after receiving 11 rejections based on over two dozen anonymous reviews. Could it be that Robinson's many former students were now acting as gatekeepers, protecting their former teacher's reputation? Possibly, although the scale of conspiracy seems improbable. More significant, perhaps, is that several of the reviewers alleged that Robinson had plagiarised not just Ellingson's work but the work of other students too. In other words, this kind of behaviour was just par for the course. Undeterred, indeed emboldened, Kaiser presents us with a book-length treatment, one that he hopes will encourage Classical archaeology to confront its past complicity with sexist attitudes, its conservatism inculcated through patronage, and its tacit acceptance of plagiarism.

Kaiser's blend of biography, critique and autobiography, all wrapped up in a detective novel, flows well. The volume is richly illustrated throughout with black and white photographs of the people, places, documents and events narrated--the reproduction quality, however, is disappointing and the location map (fig. I.3) is lamentable. Nonetheless, Kaiser makes the events surrounding the excavation and publication of Olynthus speak to the struggles of women in archaeology during much of the twentieth century.

Our next biography, also of an American excavating in Greece during the 1930s, adopts yet another format: Carl W. Blegen: personal & archaeological narratives, edited by VOGEIKOFF-BROGAN, Davis and Florou. Blegen excavated at sites across Greece and Turkey, including Nemea and Troy, but it was his 1939 discovery of a Mycenaean complex--the so-called Palace of Nestor--with its archive of Linear B tablets that sealed his reputation. Unlike contemporaries, including Sir Arthur Evans (A.J.E.), Blegen has not previously received any biographical treatment. But this book is not a biography in the traditional sense, that is, a single author with a single narrative arc, but rather 10 individual papers authored by different scholars. Nonetheless, the editors suggest that the chapters form "a coherent whole that may be read from cover to cover" (p. 2). Arranged in roughly chronological order, the chapters trace Blegen's journey from the USA to Greece, his parting of company with the American School in Athens, his establishment of an "independent salon" (p. 5) and his work at key Aegean sites.

A recurrent theme is the academic dispute between Sir Arthur Evans and Blegen (with his collaborator, Alan Wace, Director of the British School at Athens) over whether developments on Mainland Greece were the result of cultural domination, or even conquest, by Minoan Crete, or--as Blegen and Wace contended--independent. This theme forms the focus of the chapter by Galanakis, which describes how the battle played out in private correspondence and in print, including a 1940 Antiquity paper by Wace that the author indicates, in a letter to Blegen, was intended to "demolish the views of A.J.E" (p. 70). But it was the discovery of the Linear B tablets at the Palace of Nestor that seemed to provide Blegen with the clinching evidence, even if Evans moved quickly to publish a letter in The Times announcing the discovery of a 'Minoan' palace. Wace and Blegen meanwhile exchanged letters expressing their hope that the tablets would turn out to be Greek not Minoan and thus deal the final blow to Evans's position. That hope was subsequently vindicated by the decipherment of the script. The distinctiveness of mainland Greece from Crete finally established, Mycenaean archaeology could develop as a distinct sub-discipline.

The chapter by Davis views the discovery of the palace from a different perspective. Given that the potential significance of the site had been identified over a decade earlier, why, he asks, did it take so long for Blegen (or anyone else) to investigate? There is no single answer, but politics, money and reputations come into the equation. A particular obstacle appears to have been Edward Capps of the American School, with whom there was clearly friction (incidentally, Capps also turns up in Kaiser's book, attempting to set a quota on the number of women studying at the School; an interesting subject for another biography?).

Blegen is best known for the Palace of Nestor, but he worked on many other sites. Rose presents an overview of Blegen's work at Troy, where he helped to establish a firm chronology for the site. Rose reviews Blegen's contributions and how subsequent work has revised some of his conclusions, in particular, Blegen's belief that Troy VIIa was the Homeric city attacked by the Greeks. Instead, Rose suggests that the literary city became associated with the physical site, perhaps as early as the eighth century BC, not only because it matched Homer's description, but also because the extant citadel walls were the most dominant Late Bronze Age remains of the region.

Another interesting chapter is offered by Karadimas, who examines the 'Excavations at the Palace of Nestor as seen in the Greek and foreign press'. This demonstrates that, although Blegen was less media-savvy than Schliemann or Evans, he was engaged with newspaper editors and concerned with ensuring the accuracy of the reports. There is also a fascinating discussion of how the illustrator Alan Sorrell was commissioned to produce a reconstruction of the palace; the image, reproduced as fig. 5 in Karadimas's chapter, is classic Sorrell, but it was never included in Blegen's final report as further work rendered some detail inaccurate (more on reconstruction drawings anon).

In their introduction, the editors comment that "Blegen had a real sense of the significance of his own life, which he recorded in minute detail" (p. 2). After the stylings of the self-effacing Bankes, did I really want to read on? In fact, I warmed to Blegen. For example, in the chapter by Fappas, which explores his friendship and collaboration with Wace (as seen through their correspondence) one gets a sense of his humour such as in their joking exchange about what to name a planned collaborative book: "Collectanea Prehistorica Bilgica" (pp. 78-79).

Although the editors suggest that this book may be of interest to "lay audiences" (p. 2), it is presented in a more scholarly style than those of Seyler or Kaiser. It also lacks an overarching narrative that not only links, but also extracts a story from, the different events of Blegen's life; the book's plural subtitle, Personal and archaeological narratives, is therefore entirely appropriate. It is illustrated with well-reproduced black and white photographs and, most especially, the splendid, colour portraits by Piet De Jong of both Blegen and Evans.

doi: 10.15184/aqy.2016.24