£92a ■ Al ■ O — c ^H = '^^*" — ( ^1 -■ ID ^1 m 5 H 7 = = O ^H 1 —. H 1 ^= ■^^ -C ^1 ;■{ = H "1 ^"^T 3> THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ADDRESS OF SIH ARTHUR EVANS D.LiTT., F.R.S. PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF LONDON DELIVERED AT THE ANNIVERSARY MEETING IsT May J 9 19 OXFORD PRINTED BY FREDERICK HALL FOR THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES BURLINGTON HOUSE, LONDON 1919 ADDRESS OF SIR ARTHUll EVANS D.I.ii I.. F.R.S. PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUAIUES OF LONDON DELIVERED A'l' THE ANNIVT.RSARY MEETING Wt May J 9 19 '^^^^ OXFORD PRINTED BY FREDERICK MAM. FOR THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES BURLIXGTOxN HOUSE, LONDON 1919 ANNIVERSARY MEETING 1st May 1919. Gkxi'i-kmen, The term of my Presidency has coincided with the Great AVar. It has been for all of us a period of stress and preoccu- pation and has imposed on many of us duties very foreign to our own researches. In addition to this Ave have many of us had to encounter material difficulties as to our meetings — especially those at a distance — from reduced facilities of locomotion, want of accommodation and by reason of the encircling darkness. It has been no time for initiating new enterprises and all systematic work has been continually interru])ted. But the Society may at least be congratulated on having been able to carry on, to hold its regular meetings, to hear and discuss many interesting com- munications, to continue its publications, and to maintain its financial position. To-day we see the beginning of a new era. The Peace of which we have to wait the formal proclamation will in fact do something more, we may reasonably hope, than restore the former opportunities of antiquarian research. The success of onr arms has been instrumental in opening out throughout the Near and Middle East new fields of archaeological investigation, and it is clearly the pre-eminent duty of our Society to make use of its influence and prestige in securing the advantages that lie within our grasp. It has in fact, as you are aware, associated itself with the British Academy i)i the formation of a Committee specially devised to promote the interests of archaeological research in those regions. In this work both your retiring President and your President-elect have been able already to take an active part and to assist in drawing up recommendations which it is understood the British authorities will do their best to promote. Principles have in this way been suggested for the regulation and conservation of antiquities in Constantinople and the adjoining regions still technically under Turkish dominion 994737 is but which are Hkely to be placed under the control of a Man- datory Power. The same applies to western Asia Minor and the future Armenian State. These matters have been taken up by a Commission entrusted with the task by the Paris Confer- ence and at the same time our own Committee has been in more direct communication with the British authorities rea-arding: the antiquities of Mesopotamia and Palestine. It has indeed drawn up for the latter country a law on Antiquities more liberal in its provisions regarding scientific excavation than any of its predecessors, in Egypt or elsewhere. As your President, I thought it moreover incumbent on me to take the lead in a public appeal to our Government, which I am glad to say was strongly backed by Field Marshal Lord Gren- fell, to make an adequate grant towards the establishment of an Imperial British Institute in Egypt and to make an end of the scandalous indifference which our Administration has displayed towards the unique interests that might have been thought to have been especially in its charge. Both France and Germany have their Archaeological Institutes at Cairo. The United States, though from the nature of the case it has no centralized foundation of the kind, has a series of permanent Missions, with an inexhaustible financial backing. But we, the moral trustee of Egypt's inheritance, in spite of our dominant position, refuse all official aid. The existing British bodies for the furtherance of Egyptian researches — ' The Egyptian Exploration Fund' and Professor Petrie's ' British School in Egypt \ nmch as they have independently accomplished, are hampered at every turn by the want of means, and are at a great disadvantage as compared with the representatives of other nations. Even as it is, they largely subsist by means of American subscriptions, in return for which the principal discoveries that might have enriched our own museums to a great extent migrate across the Atlantic. As I observed in my appeal, there is a general consensus of opinion to-day that whatever economies the Treasury may be bound to exercise in various directions, we cannot afford any longer to be parsimonious in what concerns education and learn- ing. It is impossible to imagine any subject more intimately bound up with those great interests than the investigation of that ancient culture which stands at the very roots of our own civilization. But I regret to be obliged to state that the strong memorial on this subject presented to the Lords of the Treasury on behalf of the Joint Committee of which I have already spoken, representing besides the British Academy, our own, and all the other learned Societies, has shared the fate of all similar appeals and has been met by a blank refusal. The British Government continues on its old path, Philistine and material, and apparently devoid of a touch of the imagination needful to awaken it to the higher and more spiritual aspects of the trust that we hold in Egypt. We have witnessed the same spirit in the treatment of national museums and galleries during the period of the Great War. The cutting off' of its annual grant from the British Museum — to save three minutes, as it was calculated, of war-time expen- diture ! — and the consequent closing of the galleries deprived thousands of our kinsmen from overseas of profiting by the unique opportunity of inspecting our national treasures. But this w^as followed, early in last year, by a more direct and utterly reckless attack on what we may rightly call the citadel of learn- ing in this country. The War Cabinet had in fact actually decided to assign the premises of the British Museum to the Air Board and to place it in the occupation of a combatant Department, with the result of making it a legitimate object for German bombs ! Both as a Trustee of the British Museum and as President of your Society — which loyally backed my efforts — I did my best to protest against this decision, and the public outcry ultimately became so great that the Government felt themselves constrained to withdraw their decision. But grave injury was nevertheless inflicted in other ways. Though it was found impossible, in the face of the general condemnation of the proposal, to make the British Museum the head-quarters of a combatant Department, other Departments of a civilian character were installed within its walls and whole galleries dismantled and broken up — to the undoing of the work of generations — for their reception. A promise was given to the Trustees that two months after the conclusion of the War these intrusive bodies should be removed. But those solemn assin-- ances have been treated as so many ' scraps of paper ' ! Not in the British Museum itself alone but in other public galleries, after six months' interval of peace we see whole sections still in bureaucratic occupation. Protests in Parliament, insistently put forward by our recently elected Fellow Lord Harcourt, haxe elicited no satisfactory assurance of a term being set on this usurpation. As to the present condition of affairs I may relate an experience of mv own, made only a few days since. Having urgent need for the ])urpose of Cretan researches to refer to certain objects in two different sections of the museum — some in the Early Greek and others in the Egyptian Department, I found the Galleries in an almost unrecognizable condition, their cases empty and concealed by shelves laden with piles of business documents, while on each side of the central gangway were rows of impro- vised shanties, run up with match-boarding and resembling 6 nothini^ so much as a street of some mushroom settlement in the Wild West ! I turn to a move agreeable subject. The recent presenta- tion of Stonehenge to the nation is a subject of hearty con- gratulation. As your representative, in company with Sir Hercules Read, I took part in the official ceremony in the inner circle of Stonehenge itself and had the satisfaction of personally conveying your high sense of the liberal and patriotic action of the donor, Mr. C. H. E. Chubb. It is a further subject of con- gratulation that, thanks to the good offices of our Secretary, Mr. Peers, His Majesty's Office of Works have accepted the supervision and collaboration of our Society in the operations rendered necessary by the perilous position of some of the stones. I understand that Professor Gowland, who has already done such good work in this field, and Colonel Hawley, our veteran excavator at Old Sarum, have kindly undertaken to superintend the work. In this connexion, I may perhaps be allowed to repeat a caveat that I have entered more than once against received theories as to the purpose of Stonehenge. At the presentation ceremony, as usual, the speakers were full of the solar relations of the monument and even of its astronomical bearing. More than once I heard it described as a ' Temple of the Sun \ It is an undoubted fact that, Avhatever we may think of the original purpose of the ' Friar's Heel \ the deliberate and approximately accurate orientation of tlie monument strikes the eye. But, if, as I believe, the evolution of the great Stone Circles may be traced back, through the smaller examples surrounding a central mound — which often reduplicates the ring stones that actually support the outline of the mound itself— and if again the central mounded chamber, afterwards reserved for the dead, is in its earlier stage but the circular habitation of primitive man, the orientation itself, however afterwards adapted to more celestial and religious ideas, must be regarded as an original feature of all such structures. Any one acquainted with such mound dwellings, with their supporting stones, as they exist to-day in various Northern countries — I need only instance the Lapj:) ' Gamme ' and Siberian 'Yurt' — will be well aware that the short entrance passage, which afterwards, by the same process of ceremonial reduplica- tion as that affectino; the ring stones, becomes the Avenue, is placed on the side where during the part of the year when the sun is visible, its first appearance is most easily perceived. For my own part, I shall continue to believe that the whole class of stone monuments to which Stonehenge belongs, grows out of a sepulchral cult. It seems to me, moreover, to be of primary significance that Stonehenge stands in relation to an extensive burial area, marked by barrows of more than one type, containing interments going back to an early period of the British Bronze Age. Stonehenge itself moreover pi-esents a real analogy on a larger scale to the disk-shaped barrows, and it is a highly significant fact that Aubrey records the exhumation by Inigo Jones, near one of the Triliths, of a ' thuribulum ' or in- cense vessel, typical of the surrounding Bronze Age interments. The discovery of coarse British pottery six feet down by the so- called 'Altar' also points to actual interment within the circle. The orientation of Stonehenge is a fact. Its grand scale puts it out of the category of ordinary funereal monuments, and there is every reason to believe that it was associated with a higher cult. The bones of deer and oxen moreover dug up in the interior certainly point to sacrifice in such a connexion. But that cult, I maintain, should be rather sought in the direction of the Gods of the Underworld than of any solar divinity. The indications of interment within the sacred limits are certainly best reconcilable with that hypothesis as well as the funda- mental relation in which Stonehenge and other great monu- ments of the kind uncjuestionably stand. In this chthonic connexion, moreover, the legendary invocation of Merlin's magical agency by wiiich the stones were transported to Salisbury Plain is not to be neglected. For Merlin, as has been shown by Professor Rhys, is only the later impersonation of the Celtic God Cernunnus, identified by the Romans with Dis Pater, the God of the Underworld. We have here to deal not with an individual funereal monu- ment but a monument of many, enshrining the worship of a tribe or people. It seems to have been set up gradually and may be taken also to include the commemoration of many indi- vidual chiefs of that bygone race. The stones themselves, according to the almost universal conception of those v.ho set up the great circles and alignments — beliefs so vividly preserved by the more primitive races of India at the present day — are the actual abode of the spirits of the departed and, in a sense which it is difficult for us to realize, their visible impersonation. At a time when so many of us are preoccupied with the memorials of our own dead on so many foreign fields this aspect of Stonehenge may be felt to have a solemn significance and the re-entrust- ment at such a moment to the guardianship of the nation of this great monument of remote predecessors nuist be recognized as singularly opportune. The Gi'eat War has been a fiery ordeal and no monument that we can raise will ever repay our indebtedness to our own dead. But the best memorial that we can offer is not one that can be raised with hands. It is not of material kind. It has 8 many aspects. But for a Society like ourselves which must necessarily regard the new era on which we are now entering from the intellectual point of view, it largely involves a new attitude towards the scientific side of our pursuits. Let me say it frankly, we have much to learn from our principal foe, from the discipline and methodical study, the admirable and wide- embracing organization of research, really cosmopolitan in its nature, w-hich had been carried out by him to a degree such as the world has never seen before. I have no illusions. I am well aware that all efforts in this direction have been clogged and impeded by the average mean of ignorance in this country. But the new Education Act contains at least the promise that the level of instruction with our own people may eventually be raised to that of other civilized nations, and that, pari passu with the growth of fresh centres of knowledge, that supreme incuriousness in intellectual matters, which it seems the special function of our existing Schools and leading Universities to breed, may be submerged by the rising tide. The War has given no opportunity during the term of my own Presidency even to offer suggestions in matters of reform. Various improvements in procedure are indeed under serious consideration. But, as a parting exhortation, I can at least urge on all our members, as an earnest of a new and more scientific spirit, constantly to bear in mind the great scope which our own national history and traditions offer for an outlook which stretches far beyond the cliffs of Dover. I am w^ell aware tliat the division of labour necessary for modern archaeological research, the mapping out of separate provinces, and the concentration necessary for the proper treat- ment of special subjects, has done much to shear the Society of Antiquaries of many of its older functions. Egyptology, Assyriology, Classical Archaeology, Numismatics and certain Anthropological departments, have largely been withdrawn from our own sphere. A\' e still claim, indeed, — and rightly claim — to have no fixed boundaries in any of these directions, and are grateful to those who afford us occasional enlightenment on subjects of which other Societies and Institutes have now become the more regular exponents. But, by the force of circumstances, the Society of Antiquaries has been more and more led to devote special attention to subjects like the earlier Pre-historic Archaeo- logy and the Late Celtic Age in these islands, to Anglo-Saxon and Mediaeval lore, to records and topography. As a result of this there has been certainly at times a tendency to treat these subjects from the pui-ely insular, or even the 'parochial' point of view. 9 I think we should all fully realize that such treatinent by no means does justice to the questions involved and sinks below the standard which we, as a Society, true to its older cosmopolitan traditions, should seek to uphold. For Britain in truth is historically less of an island than some countries at least that form part of the Continent of Europe. Cast your eyes backwards for a moment. I hardly need ask you to recall the time when Britain itself formed part of the European mainland and the Thames flowed into the Rhine. But we have to remember that throughout not only historic but late prehistoric times wave after wave of invaders from oversea has, temporarily at least, practically annexed part of our island to the Continent of Europe. To begin even with the Early Bronze Age, no one can adequately gauge discoveries in Britain without a fair knowledge of the similar finds between the Channel and the Alps. The earliest Iron Age remains show intimate points of contact with the Italo-Hallstatt province. Celtic invaders in ftxct carried the sword and shield of Central Europe over a large part of our island and even across St. George's Channel. When we come to what is still known here as the Late Celtic Age— a name more comprehensive than La Tene — we have irrefragable e\idence — in this case supplied by the earliest coinage— that South Eastern England was for the time actually annexed to Belgic Gaul and its supreme Court in every sense was for a while rather at Soissons and Arras than at Verulam or Colchester. But these intimate connexions stretch much further afield. As I once demonstrated to this Society, the Late Celtic urns such as we see them at Aylesford and elsewhere may almost be said to have been transferred bodily from the Venetian lands about the head of the Adriatic. The union begun by the Belgic Gauls was itself enlarged and consolidated bv the Romans. The remains of Roman Britain have to be studied — and I am glad to see that this fact is appreciated by our explorers — with constant reference to the Roman provincial organization elsewhere and to the cultural monuments of the whole Roman world. The Saxon Conquest that follows, though it hardly established any political supremacy from overseas, annexed this country from the point of view of language, arts, and institutions to the North German lands. At one moment, under Knut, we were actually forming a part of the Danish monarchy. In another direction, paii passu with this, the triumph of Roman Christianity had restored to a great extent the intellectual dominion of Rome. Next came the Norman Conquest, reimposing to a great extent a Continental civilization, which was supplemented in turn by the Angevin connexion. 10 111 our archaeological studies we have in short to recognize the necessity of taking count at every turn of antecedent conditions extending far beyond our insular limits. It is that which makes the really adequate treatment of the remains of this country in many ways a more complicated matter than are those of France, let us say, to a Frenchman, or of Germany to a German. It has been said that Russians are such good linguists because their own language is so exceptionally difficult. In view of that analogy we may entertain great hopes for English archaeology ! UCLA LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 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