THE VALUE OF STAMATAKIS' REPORTS AS COMPARED WITH SCHLIEMANN'S ACCOUNT (BY O.T.P.K. DICKINSONFootnote ¹ WITH LENA PAPAZOGLOU-MANIOUDAKI)

It cannot often happen that, almost a century and a quarter after the original excavation and publication of a site of great significance, important new data should become available. But this is undoubtedly the case with Grave Circle A at Mycenae. The series of events which led to a thorough re-examination of the skeletal material from Circle A has been described by Professor Prag in Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2009, 234–5. The rediscovery of the Grave VI bones, the publication of plans and details of the grave, and the study of the bones of the burials, the best preserved from Circle A (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2009), would constitute a valuable enough contribution on their own, but to have a full account of all the stored bone material attributed to Graves III–V, and plans of the position of the burials and at least of some major finds in all the graves, together with many other previously unknown details (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010), can only be described as priceless.Footnote ²

This new documentation derives from the reports of Panayiotis Stamatakis, a senior member of the Archaeological Service who was appointed by the Archaeological Society to act as its representative at Schliemann's excavations. For too long unjustly ignored or dismissed, he is now conclusively demonstrated to have been far closer to the modern ideal of an archaeologist than Schliemann himself. This might already have been suspected from his attempts to persuade Schliemann that all remains of antiquity deserved equal care (Dickinson 1976, 45). There is also an indication that he had a better eye for style than Schliemann, in his recognition that his finds in what is now known to be a rich Mycenaean chamber tomb at Spata were related to those in the Shaft Graves (see Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2009, 235), an interpretation that Schliemann himself vigorously but erroneously disputed (1880, xli–xlviii, especially xlv, xlvii).

Now we can see that Stamatakis was also aware of the potential value of detailed documentation. This was remarkable for the period, when even trained scholars were most concerned with finding portable art works and antiquities of historical significance, and rarely gave more than a very summary account of the setting in which they found them (see Daniel 1975, ch. 5, especially 152–9, 161–2 on activities in Mesopotamia and Egypt). Schliemann himself expressed such hopes at the end of a letter to The Times about his investigations at Tiryns: ‘I confidently hope to find in Mycenae important inscriptions and more of such sculpture as the two lions above the entrance gate’ (The Times, 11 September, 1876, p. 11; these words do not appear in the version of this letter published as ch. 1 of Schliemann 1880).

Schliemann had not excavated graves before, and it is hardly surprising that his approach was fairly rough and ready, concerned essentially with clearing them and taking note of the more significant finds. In this respect he was no different from many other excavators, who did not consider it important to give an account of the layout of finds in a grave or of associations of finds with a particular burial if there was more than one. But Stamatakis clearly had other ideas. He methodically numbered the burials in order of discovery, including those found outside Graves II and III, and noted the position of many significant finds within the graves and often their association with particular burials. To illustrate his reports to the Archaeological Society he produced plans of Graves I–V which are admittedly schematic, but are clearly based on notes that he made during excavation. When he returned in 1877 he also produced a rough drawing of the whole Grave Circle and the surrounding area (Fig. 1). It forms a separate page in his report to the Archaeological Society on his excavations from 10 November 1877 to 15 January 1878 (the first page of the report is illustrated in Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2009, 237 fig. 3). Marked ‘Pinax A’ in ink but otherwise drawn in pencil, it shows the Lion Gate, the Granary, the Grave Circle and its six tombs, the House of the Warrior Vase, a wall of the South House and part of the Ramp House. After giving a detailed description of Grave VI Stamatakis' report continues with an account of the area around the graves. Some features and houses are identified by Greek letters on the drawing and he refers to them in his text. The drawing may have been intended for the final publication of Grave VI which he never realised.

Fig. 1.

Plan of the Shaft Grave area from Stamatakis' original report: the Granary, the House of the Warrior Vase and part of the Ramp House are clearly visible. The Greek letters refer to descriptions in his final report.

However schematic, his plans are extremely welcome, for they offer details that students of the Shaft Graves had never expected to know. For example, Stamatakis' plan of Grave IV (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 162, fig. 6) clears up the problem of where the pair of burials laid out north–south were placed in relation to the three laid out east–west. Neither of the previously favoured solutions, putting the pair of burials to the north or south of the others (Graziadio 1991, 436, n. 260), proves to be correct; Stamatakis shows them to the west.

Such a detail simply fills out Schliemann's account, but Stamatakis' reports flatly disagree with his statements at several other points. Stamatakis reports four burials in Grave I, not three as Schliemann states, and two burials in Grave II, not one. He also states that there were two burials in the earth over each of Graves II and III (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 159–60), each with associated vases, while Schliemann simply mentions an unspecified number of bodies over Grave III, with five vases (1880, 162; ‘many’ in Calder and Traill 1986, 195). Further, Stamatakis' account of which burials in Grave IV wore which masks is quite different from Schliemann's (1880, 219–22), as has already been noted (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 162; see further below), and Schliemann states that the three burials in Grave V were laid out east–west, side by side (1880, 295), while Stamatakis shows the southernmost burial as laid out north–south (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 164, fig. 10). There are further disagreements on less significant matters, e.g. the position of certain finds within Graves III and IV, and the attribution of the tiny gold oinochoe (National Archaeological Museum, Athens [hereafter NAM] inv. no. 74). Schliemann illustrates it as from Grave IV (1880, 232, fig. 341), but Karo attributed it to Grave III, as its NAM catalogue number, in sequence with those of other miniature gold vessels from Grave III, would suggest. Stamatakis confirms this, stating quite clearly that it was found in Grave III with the other miniature vessels, all in association with Burial M (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 160–1).

As Traill points out in relation to another vessel (Calder and Traill 1986, 226 n. 249; but in this case Schliemann was right to state that it was from Grave III, see further below), it is easy to see how Schliemann could have made such a mistake, since work finished in Grave III and began in Grave IV on the same day. But it does suggest that Schliemann was capable of making mistakes when under pressure, as he is likely to have been by this time. His remark in a letter of 24 November to Müller, ‘I write you this in the midst of a great turmoil’ (Meyer 1962, 93), is very relevant here. The mass of data to be absorbed was becoming enormous and he had many other things on his mind apart from continuing the excavation in worsening weather with workmen harder to find, such as making a record of the results, listing and organising the photography and storage of finds, conferring with Stamatakis about such matters, dealing with the Ministry of Public Instruction in Athens, the nomarch of the Argolid, and serious visitors, sending telegrams and writing letters to The Times and private correspondents like Max Müller, etc. etc.

At least one clear example of a lapse in memory can be identified, in the Tagebuch entry for 28 November concerning the resumption of excavation in Grave IV; there had been a two-day break while waiting for the arrival of assistants from Athens, as insisted upon by the nomarch (Meyer 1962, 93). Schliemann states that the bones of ‘4 more persons, thus in all 6’ were found, and thinks at least two must be women, even identifying one of the masks as that of an old woman (Calder and Traill 1986, 202). However, he had already corrected this by the time he wrote a letter to The Times describing the excavation of Grave IV, in which he reports five, thus agreeing with Stamatakis' plan, and now identifying all as men (Calder and Traill 1986, 249, cf. 131).

But several of the disagreements listed above are more fundamental, and they require more explanation than a simple confusion over the source of an item or a lapse in memory. One is in fact ready to hand, but to accept it requires a considerable reappraisal of Schliemann's role in the excavation of the graves. Briefly, Schliemann's account has led all who have written about him or the Shaft Graves, including his critics, to assume that he was personally involved throughout. The language that he uses in his letters to Max Müller and The Times and his book, which was closely based on the Times letters, contributes very largely to this impression. In particular, he constantly writes ‘I found’ or something similar, though he quite often speaks of objects or features that ‘was/were found’. This need not be taken absolutely literally, that he always excavated the item(s) referred to with his own hands, although he claimed exactly that of himself and his wife in a letter to The Times dated 25 November, so written in the enforced break in excavation. In this he stated that his method was to have the workmen dig down to within a foot of the layer of pebbles which covered the burials, and then ‘Mrs. Schliemann and I – we have to do the work ourselves’, used knives to uncover and remove the finds (Calder and Traill 1986, 249). In his book, however, as Traill has noted (Calder and Traill 1986, 131), he excises this reference to himself and his wife, and in the preceding sentence replaces ‘I have merely to direct my workmen’, the wording of the letter, with ‘we have merely to direct our labourers’ in the book. Either way, this is the only place where he gives any indication that he had any assistance in the excavation; the general impression given by his phraseology is that the excavation of each tomb was conducted under his close personal supervision, and that many items were retrieved by his own hand.

Certainly, his accounts in the Tagebuch of the excavation of Graves I and III, and the beginning of work on Grave IV, give a strong impression of personal involvement, with many circumstantial details (Calder and Traill 1986, 191, 193–4, 199–200), and must come the closest to a primary record of his impressions. Yet even here there are signs of later ‘editing’: he made two changes to his original comment on the burials in III (Calder and Traill 1986, 199, see 224, nn. 239–40), to fit what the excavation went on to reveal and his own change of mind about the sex of the burials. This gives the impression that its excavation was completed in one day, whereas in fact it took two, as is clear from his letter of 24 November to Max Müller (Meyer 1962, 92), where he speaks of the bodies of a man and a woman being found on the first day, as in his original text in the Tagebuch.

On the other hand, his extremely terse comments in the Tagebuch on Grave II (Calder and Traill 1986, 198–9), listing only a few major finds, present a remarkable contrast with these circumstantial accounts, and could easily be interpreted as notes from information given by someone else. Yet in his letter to The Times and his book (Calder and Traill 1986, 253, slightly altered and expanded in Schliemann 1880, 291–3) he gives a detailed and circumstantial account of the grave, which nevertheless speaks solely of a single burial, thus completely overlooking the second burial, unaccompanied by goods, that Stamatakis recorded. Similarly, his comments on the last finds from Grave I (Calder and Traill 1986, 195, ‘the 2nd tomb’), which included the Late Mycenaean figurines whose presence has always been a puzzle, are unconsciously revealing, for the figurines are reported by Stamatakis to have been found in association with the northernmost burial, Δ (I am grateful to Dr Papazoglou-Manioudaki for this information). That it was designated Δ indicates that it was the fourth, and so last, to be excavated in the grave, which Schliemann surely failed to mention because he did not observe the final clearing of the grave. In fact, his Tagebuch entry suggests that at this time he was paying much more attention to the clearing of the strata below the level on which the stelae were erected, on which he makes interesting comments that surely represent personal observation (Calder and Traill 1986, 194). His account of Grave I is clearly incomplete, therefore, while that of Grave II seems likely to be a fabrication intended to give the impression that he had been personally involved.

In each of these cases Stamatakis was clearly present throughout the excavation of the grave, effectively, and the degree of detail in his notes strongly supports the supposition that this was the case with all the graves. For Grave V we have independent confirmation in a report in the local newspaper Argolis, which speaks of Schliemann, Stamatakis and Phintiklis, the vice-president of the Archaeological Society, one of those who had come to assist Schliemann, all excavating in the grave at the same time, using knives (Calder and Traill 1986, 233). Phintiklis could well have played a role in the excavation of Grave IV also, since it was on his arrival that excavation was resumed. In his sole reference to him in his book, Schliemann speaks of his having come simply to assist him in ‘guarding the treasures’ (1880, 214), but one cannot help suspecting that, given Schliemann's notorious smuggling of ‘Priam's Treasure’ out of Turkey and the 1874 trial in Athens that ensued, in the eyes of the nomarch Schliemann was one of those against whom the treasures, the property of the Greek state, were to be guarded.

In any case, the principal point is that Schliemann makes no reference at all to Stamatakis' involvement in the excavation of Grave V, any more than of the graves previously cleared. He had ceased to write in the Tagebuch by this point, and for his account of Grave V we are entirely dependent on his letters to The Times, whose text is repeated almost word for word in ch. IX of his book. Again, he gives the impression of close personal involvement with the excavation of both the northern and southern burials in the grave. His concern with recording the appearance of the northern burial, which had survived in an unusually well-preserved state, and with conserving the remains does suggest that he played a major personal role in this, but one may well wonder how much of the detail that he records of the finds with and near this and the other burials comes from his own notes, and how much from the observations of Phintiklis and Stamatakis.

It is evident that Schliemann was determined to write Stamatakis out of the story and keep himself at centre stage the whole time. This would have been entirely in keeping with his previous behaviour over the excavations at Troy, in which he made no attempt to acknowledge the major role played by Frank Calvert, whom he barely mentions, although Calvert was the one who had demonstrated to him that Hisarlık was the most likely site for Troy and gave him valuable advice during the excavation, derived from his own considerable experience of excavating at Hisarlık and other sites in the Troad (Allen 1999, chs. 7–9). But there is more to it than Schliemann's determination to hog the limelight. He does not name Stamatakis anywhere in his account of his Mycenae excavation, though he makes a veiled and hostile reference to him as the ‘delegate of the Greek government’ (1880, 139). He does not even mention that he was the excavator of the Spata tomb whose dating he wrongly criticised in a section at the front of his book, as we have seen. He names him once only, dismissively, as the ‘government clerk’ who excavated the ‘Golden Treasure’ after Schliemann had left Mycenae (1880, 352).

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that a strong mutual antagonism developed between the two men from the start of the excavation (Dickinson 1976, 161–2, cf. Meyer 1962, 90). Stamatakis was an ephor in the Archaeological Service, seconded to the Archaeological Society for work on their behalf (not, as I erroneously stated in Dickinson 2005, 305, Director of Antiquities), and it was his duty to protect the archaeological remains and supervise Schliemann. He might well have considered Schliemann untrustworthy, following his wholly illegal test excavations at Mycenae in 1874, conducted under false pretences (as Schliemann admitted in a letter to Müller: Meyer 1962, 86). An interesting view of Stamatakis is given by Dr A. Milchhoeffer, a member of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut at Athens, who visited Mycenae on 16 November, and noted the open distrust and near-contempt that Stamatakis showed for Schliemann (Calder and Traill 1986, 222–3, n. 214). He later got to know Stamatakis and described him as somewhat rigid, but honourable and honest, and he clearly felt that the reasons Stamatakis gave for his behaviour towards Schliemann, not specified by Milchhoeffer, were justified.

I have no doubt that these related to Schliemann's continual attempts to exceed the conditions laid down in the permit and violent displays of rage when Stamatakis tried to insist on his adhering to these conditions and to protect remains of later antiquity (Dickinson 1976, 161–2; relevant documents are cited extensively in Ludwig 1931, 201–7). One feels that in Stamatakis Schliemann may have met his match. Calvert had no authority to control Schliemann's activities at Troy, and was conciliatory; Stamatakis did have some authority, and had no reason to be conciliatory. He evidently expressed himself forcibly on matters on which the permit imposed limits, such as the size of workforce and the number of excavation areas, considering that one should be appropriate for the work of a ‘serious scientist’ (I am grateful to Dr Papazoglou-Manioudaki for informing me of this comment, written in his unpublished diary). This would no doubt have particularly infuriated Schliemann, who had already shown at Troy a determination to do things his own way and an unwillingness to take advice, let alone instruction, even from persons who had much greater experience of ancient sites than Schliemann himself. While he seems to have remained rather in awe of university-based professors and scholars like Max Müller, trained in the study of the classical sources, and he did show some respect for Calvert's knowledge and experience, he does not seem to have felt an equivalent respect for holders of official posts in an archaeological service like Stamatakis. In general, his approach to government officials seems to have been to ignore or circumvent any controls that they attempted to impose, although evidently he did not dare to defy the ‘governor’ (nomarch) of the Argolid, who was acting on the orders of the Greek government.

In the circumstances, while Schliemann clearly felt himself in no position to prevent Stamatakis participating in the excavation of the graves, he was certainly not going to give him any credit for it, and it seems very unlikely that he would have discussed the excavation with him or consulted him more than occasionally for information that he did not have. Stamatakis, for his part, is very unlikely to have gone out of his way to inform Schliemann of his own observations if he did not ask for them. He may not have known that Schliemann's letters to The Times included erroneous statements and passed over his involvement in the excavation of the graves completely, though he will surely have discovered this when various editions of Schliemann's books began to appear from 1878 onwards. As a further insight into Schliemann's shamelessly unethical behaviour, it may be noted that later, when it suited his purpose, he would refer to Stamatakis (now dead) as a ‘distinguished archaeologist’ and claim his support for Schliemann's theory that the burials were simultaneous (1885, liv), asserting that all his statements were corroborated by Stamatakis' diary. Of course, this was to ignore Stamatakis' excavation of a sixth shaft grave which had clearly been used on two occasions.

It may be speculated that the greater amount of detail that Schliemann presents in his published accounts of Graves IV and V, particularly Grave V, could be due to the influence of Phintiklis, who could have seen the point of producing a detailed account, as the graves' contents became so strikingly rich and impressive, and have ensured that for Grave V, in which they all excavated together, information was shared. Schliemann could have been ready to accept this, seeing that it would enhance his account, once he began to develop the theory that Grave V was the burial place of Agamemnon. Earlier, he had believed this to be Grave IV, as indicated by his letter to Müller dated 27 November (Meyer 1962, 93, quoted by Müller in a letter to The Times published on 13 December). As this letter makes clear, Schliemann was at that point ready to believe that not only Agamemnon but his charioteer Eurymedon and Cassandra, whose graves Pausanias was shown at Mycenae (2.16.5), were buried in Grave IV. But his account of the finds in this grave remains largely unspecific, where it does not actually clash with Stamatakis', and he abandoned his original idea that it contained the burials of both men and women. Probably this was because he had decided that Cassandra was buried in Grave III, though he was not explicit about this; but it is implied by his linking of evidence that a child was buried in that grave with the implausible tradition cited by Pausanias, that Cassandra bore Agamemnon twin children, who were murdered by Aegisthus and whose grave Pausanias was also shown at Mycenae, though apparently this was not the same grave as Cassandra's, as Schliemann seems to have assumed (1880, 198–9).

As I have commented elsewhere (Dickinson 1976, 164), Schliemann left Mycenae in an evident state of angry frustration, impulsively telling Müller that he would never excavate in Greece again and vilifying Stamatakis to him (Meyer 1962, 94–5). His publication of the Mycenae excavation was admirably swift, but consisted largely of somewhat revised and expanded versions of his letters to The Times. Its principal virtues are the gathering together of these, so giving a fairly detailed account of the excavation as a whole, and the provision of a considerable amount of information about individual finds, a very generous quantity of illustrations, and some appendices on analyses of metal and (appearing first in the New York edition of Schliemann 1880) the spectacular decoration of the Lion Hunt Dagger, revealed by cleaning. But it did not include a fully developed version of his theory that reconciled his discoveries with the text of Pausanias, nor even identify which of the burials he thought to be Agamemnon (Dickinson 2005, 306); it made no reference to Stamatakis' discovery of a sixth shaft grave, barely a year later; and its account of the arrangements in the graves, it is now clear, was not simply vague and unspecific in general, but incorrect in important details.

It can never be known for certain why Schliemann gave an erroneous account. That he did so deliberately seems unlikely, for he had no motive to alter information that he had or was given, since his theory that he had found the burials of Agamemnon and his retinue did not depend on details like the numbers of burials in the graves or their orientation. It seems more likely that he got his information piecemeal, only partly from personal observation, did not always remember it correctly, and when he came to write an account simply put down what seemed most likely to him, because it fitted his theory better or seemed a neater arrangement. Thus, he could have stated that the three burials in Grave V were laid out side by side because this made it easier to believe that they were simultaneous, and he may have made both the north–south burials in Grave IV mask-wearers because it seemed a neater arrangement; also his account of the disposition of the large copper vessels in IV (Schliemann 1880, 273–4) seems to make their distribution much neater than it was, to judge from Stamatakis' plan, which groups them in the northeast and southwest corners of the grave (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 162, fig. 6; I am grateful to Dr Papazoglou-Manioudaki for further information on this). The general impression given by his account, as well as his comments in letters to Müller, is that he was far more interested in the items themselves, especially if they were of gold, than in their exact position within the graves, about which he is rarely specific except in his account of Grave V.

Reading (rather belatedly, to my regret) Allen's account of Schliemann's activities at Troy in the early 1870s and his dealings with Calvert is an enlightening if depressing experience. From the start, in his obsessive drive for fame and scholarly recognition, and also eagerness to possess spectacular antiquities, he was perfectly prepared to lie and even cheat on occasion. Any form of opposition, including challenges to his account of events and reasoned criticisms of his theories, was likely to send him into a rage. Hence, none of his behaviour at Mycenae should come as a surprise. But I do not think he was guilty of fraud, as Calder and Traill have suggested, by inserting among the contents of the graves either finds made elsewhere at Mycenae and held back (as we know that he held back an item found earlier at least once at Troy: Allen 1999, 146–7, 151) or objects which he had purchased, or even had had forged to his order, as argued specifically in the case of the ‘face of Agamemnon’ mask. Quite apart from the general implausibilities involved in these theories (see Dickinson 2005), what we now know about the degree of supervision that Stamatakis exercised and the care that he took in keeping records must make it extraordinarily unlikely that, even if he had wanted to – and there is no clear indication that he did – Schliemann could have got away with anything like this unnoticed.

SUMMARY OF THE INFORMATION NOW AVAILABLE ON THE BURIALS IN GRAVES I–VI (BY O.T.P.K. DICKINSON, LENA PAPAZOGLOU-MANIOUDAKI AND A. NAFPLIOTI)

Until now no one has found much reason to dispute Schliemann's account of the number of burials in the graves, although it has been generally agreed that the burials in Graves I and III, and two of those in IV, were women, and the ‘factoid’ that skeletal remains of two children were found in III has become widely current. Kilian-Dirlmeier has come closest to expressing doubt, in suggesting that in Graves IV and V the remains of older burials, moved aside, had decayed so much that they went unnoticed (Kilian-Dirlmeier 1986, 176–7). Whether any significant skeletal remains would have escaped Stamatakis' notice may be considered questionable, since he did observe the poorly preserved remains of several of the Grave IV burials, but it is possible that what he interpreted as single, very poorly preserved burials, O and P, actually included parts of more than one skeleton. However, as will be seen below, the largest quantity of remains that might represent ‘extra’ burials comes from Grave V.

The point has some significance, for reconstructions of the sequence of burials and their distribution between phases by Kilian-Dirlmeier, Dietz and Graziadio, and discussions of the development of social hierarchy at Mycenae and the relationship between Grave Circles B and A, have essentially taken Schliemann's reports of the number of burials to be accurate. For this reason alone, as well as in belated justice to his contribution to the excavation and preservation of the finds, the full publication of Stamatakis' reports is much to be desired.

Combining the information from his reports that we have received so far with the new evidence from the study of the skeletal material presents some problems, because no boxes of bones explicitly attributed to Graves I and II have been discovered. Since it is clear that the material from different graves has become mixed in the boxes (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 168), it seems quite possible that the I and II bones, noted by Schliemann as poorly preserved (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 159), or some of them, are among those catalogued as from other graves, especially V, and there is the further possibility that the remains of the burials found above Graves II and III may have got into the boxes. But these, and the bones from Graves I and II, may simply be missing, as the so-called ‘mummy’ from Grave V must be, since what has been recovered bears no resemblance to what Schliemann describes (Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 165–6, 212–13). It is also worth noting that many of Nafplioti and Musgrave's identifications of skulls and skeletal remains with the burials numbered by Stamatakis must be considered plausible inferences rather than certainties, although there is useful supplementary evidence for Burials M, Π, Σ, Τ, ϒ, Χ and Ψ in Stamatakis' reports.

Below, we present a summary that combines data from the reports of Stamatakis and Schliemann with the information derived from Nafplioti and Musgrave's study, and offer comments on some salient features. It is unlikely that this will be improved on significantly in the future, but it needs to be stressed again how far from certain many statements are. In the discussion of the human skeletal remains, particularly, the inherent limitations deriving from early excavation practice need to be borne in mind, as well as the uncertainties referred to in the previous paragraph: the paucity of detailed contextual information, the lack of technical drawings and excavation photographs, the primitive standards of recovery, and the skeletal incompleteness and poor bone condition (see further Papazoglou-Manioudaki et al. 2010, 166–8). The bracketed comments at the beginning of the account of each grave represent Dr Nafplioti's final views on the evidence.