Excavations near Antioch in 1936

Extract

In the spring of 1935 I was sent by the Trustees of the British Museum to North Syria to look for a site for excavation. The object which I had in view was to trace the connexions, if such existed, between the civilization of Minoan Crete and that of the Asiatic mainland, and the conditions required by such theoretical intercourse limited my investigations to a relatively small area. Mycenaean and sub-Mycenaean remains are, of course, not uncommon in South Syria and Palestine, but no excavations there have produced anything of Minoan date. If commerce brought the Cretans to this coast, the influence resulting from it must have been largely one-sided, for Palestine was always a poor country culturally speaking, and South Syria offered no more than a local market; its civilization was confined to the coastal belt, and the hinterland of the Syrian desert cut off all direct intercourse with the great centres of the East. North Syria was clearly indicated: it was the part of the coast most easily reached by coasting-vessels (Mount Casius is visible from Cyprus), and it was the meeting-place of the Hittite and Mesopotamian civilizations, either or both of which might have had Aegean contacts. Here again the choice was limited. Commerce demands a sheltered anchorage for shipping and good trade-routes to the inland markets. In North Syria the coast is formed by a range of mountains whose flanks drop for the most part precipitously to the sea; harbours are small and few, and passes across the mountain ranges are extraordinarily difficult; in fact, only two are at all practicable. In the extreme north the Gulf of Alexandretta affords good shelter in most weathers, as an open roadstead, and at its southern end at Arsus there is a little rocky harbour which has been artificially enlarged and improved. Arsus is certainly an ancient site, though so deeply overlaid by Roman remains as to give little encouragement to the excavator; but from it the only road inland was by the steep and none too easy pass of Beilan, and to reach that one had to skirt the foothills for a distance of some twenty-five miles, for the flat land bordering the gulf is of recent formation and contains no remains earlier than the Roman. South of the gulf is the forbidding headland of Ras al Khanzir and the cliffs of Gebel Musa, and then comes the shallow arc of the gulf of Sueidia, with the ruins of Seleucia at its northern end, the Orontes mouth towards its southern end, and beyond that the rock-bound coast at the foot of Mount Casius. The only other harbour between this and Latakia, or rather between this and Mina-t-al-Beda, the Leukos Hormos of the Greeks, is Basit, and from Basit, whose remains seem to be exclusively Roman, a break-neck track alone leads up into the wild fastnesses of the hills.