PUBLISHED 2000. Please visit the publication's webpage.
Claude F.-A. Schaeffer brought to France more than four hundred Mycenaean vases and sherds uncovered during his excavations at the Late Bronze Age sites of Ras Shamra and Minet el Beida. Only about one-tenth of this collection has ever been published. A collaborative effort undertaken by Dr. Marguerite Yon, current director of excavations at Ugarit, Dr. Annie Caubet, curator of the Department des Antiquites Orientales of the Louvre museum, Dr. Vassos Karageorghis and Nicolle Hirschfeld, experts in Mycenaean pictorial decoration and Mycenaean ceramics, respectively, aims finally to publish this entire assemblage of material.
It is important that as complete an understanding as possible of the quantities and kinds of Mycenaean pottery found at Ugarit be reached. First, Mycenaean pottery is, of course, an important indicator of chronological correlations. A general chronological framework for Ugarit's Late Bronze Age occupation has been established, but study of the sherds in the Louvre's collection has added to the numbers attributable to the lower and higher ends of the spectrum and this may be significant in (re-)interpreting the history of the site. Second, recent scholarship and current research has focused on other, non-chronological, implications of the presence of Mycenaean pottery outside the Aegean. For example, Vronwy Hankey and, more recently, Albert Leonard, Jr. exallline the implications of the kinds of shapes exported from one region to another, and the functional relationships among local wares and various imported types. Gert Wijngaarden studies the functional contexts of Mycenaean exports at their point of destination and what that might indicate about the factors motivating exchange. Penelope Mountjoy is exploring regional production centers of Mycenaean pottery and the distribution of their exports. This is an exciting time in the history of Mycenaean ceramic scholarship because both the nature of the evidence itself and its analysis are changing drastically. The number of Mycenaean vases uncovered outside the Aegean continues to grow, and the increasing sample gives us opportunity to rethink the pioneering hypotheses and at the same time begin to ask a new array of questions.
New interpretative directions still rely on the foundation of old evidence. And the thousands of Mycenaean sherds excavated by Schaeffer at Ugarit - the largest assemblage of Mycenaean pottery discovered outside the Aegean - remain a fundamental testing ground for any hypothesis concerning Mycenaean ceramics outside their homeland(s). Unfortunately, Schaeffer's excavation records were too often scanty, subsequent stewardship of the objects erratic, and publication piecemeal. As a consequence, the material is now dispersed, both physically and in the written record. No complete record of the Mycenaica found by Schaeffer at Ugarit exists or can exist. But while there is no hope of going back and detailing his discoveries in full, there does exist a substantial collection of his finds which can be reexamined. Even though they are only a partial sample of Schaeffer's finds, the five hundred Mycenaean sherds currently in the Louvre are, nevertheless, a significant sample of the total number of known Mycenaean vases in the Near East, and they should be made known and, thereby available, to scholars.
The publication project is directed by Dr. Vassos Karageorghis.