The Greeks in the East | 1 material from Al Mina in the National Museum at Aleppo. Apart from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Institute of Archaeology in London there are Al Mina finds in the British Museum in London, in the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge, in Birmingham, in Eton College, in Exeter, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Aberdeen, Reading and Winchester. In Australia some finds are in the Nicholson Museum 8 and further material might have been brought to Canada. While this list is rather discouraging to the scholar who wants to restudy the finds, John Boardman assured me that it is not even complete. 9 Woolley published preliminary reports shortly after the completion of the excavations. 10 These publications were far from complete and in a number of additional publications further material was either published or discussed. 11 The large quantity of Greek pottery found at the site was interpreted as an indication of a Greek settlement here: a Port of Trade, an apoikia of Greek merchants living here and trading with the nearby Aramean kingdoms of Syria. As Boardman wrote, ‘it was also seen as a demonstration of the link which explained the strong infusion of oriental objects and ideas into the Greek world in the 8th century bc, heralding the orientalising period of Greek culture’. 12 Boardman’s views of the site eventually became the standard interpretation of Al Mina. 13 He was able to demonstrate that Greek pottery and Greek influence in the Ancient Near East was not confined to Al Mina alone. Excavations at Tarsus, Tall Sukas, Ras al-Bassit and Tyre have shown that Greek Geometric pottery reached the shores of Syria, Phoenicia and Palestine in considerable quantities. 14 While Boardman preferred the term emporion, it was assumed that the presence of Greek pottery implied a significant presence of Greek merchants as well. After the discovery and excavation of Greek sites like Naucratis in Egypt, a site long known from ancient Greek texts, this site, Al Mina, was the first emporion discovered solely by archaeologists, since there seems to be no reference to it in ancient Greek literature. Thus, the discovery of Al Mina and its eventual interpretation as an emporion was an important feather in the hat of archaeology. Archaeology had proved to be more than just a supplier of inscriptions and images illustrating ancient texts: it had actually added an entire new chapter to the early history of Greece. This achievement was threatened, however, after publications in the 1980s, which challenged the interpretation of a mainly Greek emporion at Al Mina. For a discussion and the literature on what was now called the ‘Al Mina effect’ I refer to other contributions. 15 Waldbaum assumes that there is no evidence for a fully Greek cultural context at any site in either Syria or Palestine. While the Phoenicians, Syrians and other peoples of the Levant might have enjoyed the quality of Greek imports, Greek presence seems to be limited to small groups of To John Boardman, il miglior fabbro Even 60 years after C.L. Woolley’s excavation at Al Mina, in what is today Turkey’s Hatay province, the debate over the significance of his finds continues. 1 Woolley conducted his excavations in 1936 and 1937 at a ‘small and insignificant mound’ 2 that bore many names, a fact that only serves to point up the very namelessness and anonymity of the spot at the mouth of the Orontes. In his first report Woolley called this site Tall Shaykh Yusuf al-Maghribi (‘Tal Sheikh Yusuf’ or ‘Sheikh Yusuf al Moghrabi’ in his transcription from the Arabic), ‘after an Alouite saint whose cenotaph crowns its highest point’. 3 On sheet ‘D IV Adana’ of Richard Kiepert’s map ‘Kleinasien’ (Berlin 1916) there are two place names in that area, ‘el-Eskele’ and ‘Makâm el Chidr’. The first is a hybrid form of the Turkish ‘eskele’, meaning ‘harbour’, with the Arab article ‘el-‘ (or ‘al-‘ in my transcription) in front. The second name is a ‘cenotaph’ (or maqam in Arabic) of an c Alawite saint, in our transcription from the Arabic ‘maqam al-Khadr’ with Khadr being the name of the saint. This is not the maqam at Al Mina itself, but a sanctuary at the beach near the mouth of the Orontes. A photograph of this sanctuary was published by Woolley, 4 who called it the ‘monument of the Lord of the Sea’. 5 The site of Al Mina is marked by the first sanctuary mentioned above, the maqam of Shaykh Yusuf al-Maghribi. The French land register map calls the village next to this maqam ‘Lawshiya’ (‘Lawchie’ in the French transcription and apparently not an Arab word, it may be a derivation from the Ottoman word ‘lawsh’, meaning the gloomy, the dark or the weak. Only in 1938 did Woolley for the first time use the name ‘Al Mina’, adding the name ‘Sueidia’ in order to localise the mound in the area of this modern town. ‘Al Mina’, or more correctly al- Mina, is Arabic and means nothing more than ‘the harbour’ (as does the already mentioned Turkish name ‘el-Eskele’). Woolley started field work at the site in order to ‘trace the connections, if such existed, between the civilization of Minoan Crete and that of the Asiatic mainland’. 6 While he did not find any Bronze Age remains at the site, he discovered one of the most important harbour sites of the Iron Age. Bronze Age remains did appear at another nearby site, apparently of outstanding importance, which, however, was never properly investigated: the mound of Sabuni, east of Al Mina, a few kilometers further upstream the Orontes. Woolley’s finds from Al Mina have since been distributed all over the world. The most important finds reached the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the collections of the Institute of Archaeology London. Another important part of the finds remained in Antakya, where it is kept in the local museum. 7 Further finds reached Damascus before the Hatay province was seized by Turkey from the then French Mandate government in Syria. In addition, I have seen and worked with Al Mina and the East A Report on Research in Progress Gunnar Lehmann