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The Ashmolean Shell Plaque (AM 1938.537)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

Judith Shackleton ,
Sinclair Hood  and
Jonathan Musgrave
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Abstract

This shell applique in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford was acquired by Evans in Crete in 1894. He was told that it came from the Mesara, but there is no evidence to link it with the Ayios Onoufrios deposit. The material is Aegean Spondylus gaederopus L., not Tridacna from the Red Sea. The plaque is probably Cretan work of the period of the Early Palaces (Middle Minoan I–II), not Early Minoan or Archaic Greek as Evans at different times believed. It seems to represent, not a negro or ‘negroid’ as often claimed, but a physical type attested by other representations of Bronze Age date in Crete and elsewhere in the Aegean area.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 82 , November 1987 , pp. 283 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1987

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References

Acknowledgements. We are most grateful to Mrs Ann Brown for help in connection with our study of the plaque and search through the Evans archive. The Sir Arthur Evans Will Trust generously permitted us to quote from the 1894 diary. The excellent photographs of the plaque taken by the Photographic Department of the Ashmolean Museum are reproduced here by the courtesy of the Visitors. Mr D. Blackburn of the Department of Geography in the University of Cambridge kindly made the photographs of shells on PLATE 44. We are indebted to Mr Jeff Clarke for the tracing of the text-figure. We are also obliged to Dr Elizabeth Moignard for assistance in regard to the use of shell as a raw material in Archaic Greece, and to Dr Michael Vickers for stimulating discussion about the date of the plaque.

1 PM ii. 45 f. fig. 21 a, b.

2 Notably in a fine colour enlargement in Vercoutter, J.et al., The Image of the Black in Western Art (New York 1976) 134.Google Scholar Cf. Hood, S., The Minoans (1971) pl. 66Google Scholar; The Arts in Prehistoric Greece (1978) 116 fig. 102.

3 This shows very clearly in the colour enlargement in Vercoutter et al., op. cit. (see n. 2 above) 134.

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8 PM ii. 46 n. 3.

9 Evans's diary 1894.

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12 Ibid.

13 PM iv. 93.

14 PM iv. 530.

15 PM iv. 931.

16 PM ii. 46.

17 PM. 932.

18 PM iv. 933.

19 I am most grateful to Professor Peter Warren for drawing my attention to the existence of a Tridacna valve from his Knossos Stratigraphical Museum excavations.

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43 Vercoutter et al., op. cit. (see n. 32 above), 41, 46 f. Vercoutter claims that there are representations of blacks in Egypt from the beginning of the third millennium onwards. Figures with black skins indicating that they are negroes appear as soldiers in wooden models of the Middle Kingdom (Dynasties XI–XII). One can be seen on a model boat from a tomb at Beni Hasan in the Ashmolean Museum (E 2301. Garstang, J., The Burial Customs of Ancient Egypt (1907) 157 f. fig. 158.Google ScholarJ. H. Breasted, Egyptian Servant Statues (1948) 103 no. 3).Google Scholar The soldiers carrying bows, evidently Nubians and perhaps meant for negroes, in a model of this same general period in Cairo, are painted an unusually dark brown rather than black as shows in the colour plate published by Yoyotte, J., Treasures of the Pharaohs (Geneva: Skira 1968) 40.Google Scholar Cf. Borchardt, L., Catalogue Général des Antiquités Égyptiennes du Musée de Caire. Statuen and Statuetten von Königen und Privatleuten (Berlin 1911)Google Scholar pt. i 164 f. pl. 55, where the colour of the skin is described as dark brown. Breasted, op. cit. 102 no. 2, calls it ‘almost black’.

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45 Snowden, in Vercoutter et al., op. cit. (see n. 32 above) 136. PM i. 310 f. figs. 230a, b, c, and 228z; ii. ibid. ii. 756 f. fig. 489.

46 PM i. 312 fig. 231, 525 f. fig. 383.

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48 Aegean Faience of the Bronze Age (New Haven and London, 1979) 49.

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60 Ibid. Chart on p. 24.

61 Ibid. 121.

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68 Harper, Prudence O., ‘Dating a Group of Ivories from Anatolia’, The Connoisseur 28 (Nov. 1969) 156–62.Google Scholar

69 e.g. the lion plaque, ibid. 157 fig. 3 top left.

70 Ibid. 156 fig. I = Özgüç, T., Belleten 18 (1964) 373–90 fig. 20.Google Scholar

71 e.g. the male head, ibid. 161 fig. 10 top right.

72 e.g. the bull-man, ibid. 159 fig. 7.

73 Ibid. 157 fig. 3 bottom left. Cf. the kneeling male figure, ibid. 162 fig. 12.

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77 A craniometric study of some ancient northern African populations' (unpublished M.Sc. thesis submitted to the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term 1983).

78 Described in a short paper to Section H of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its meeting in Bristol on 2 Sept. 1986.

79 Who were the Greeks? (Berkeley, 1930) Chapter 2: Common Descent.