The Diggers

The patient diggers of the American School of Classical Studies last week finished their twelfth season of rooting into ancient Athens. They had concentrated on the Agora, or central public square, one of the oldest continually inhabitated spots on earth. Beneath the Agora, history and prehistory lie in deep-stacked layers. All the great trends in civilization have touched this enchanted area, as they are touching it now.

Beneath the remains of classical Athens, the diggers found two Mycenaean tombs hacked in the living rock. The tombs contained three skeletons, two long bronze swords, other weapons and delicately wrought ornaments of the Age of Bronze. Judging by these remains, the diggers believe that the tombs date from 1400 B.C. At that period, ancient Greece was not yet Greece, for the real Greeks had not swept down in numbers from Thessaly in the north. Athens was probably a small city subject to great Mycenae, itself an outpost of the strange, semi-Egyptian civilization which centered on the island of Crete.

On the site of the museum which the American School hopes to build, the diggers found a treasure which looked like a page from a history book. Thrown away and buried deep were several hundred ostraka--bits of broken pottery on which Athenian voters once wrote the names of public men they wished to elect or to exile. Among the names on exile ballots were three which still echo in history: Themistocles, Hippocrates, and Aristides.

In ancient, filled-up wells, the diggers' spades found stone heads from the great periods of Greek sculpture. One, of a 4th Century woman, had been completely gilded, probably by some tasteless Roman.

Out of the hallowed ground came humbler things, too. The ruins of an old Greek drugstore had urns marked "purgative" and "wine "wine sweetened sweetened with honey." A fragment of pottery (which the Greeks used as scratch paper) bore the curt instruction: "Leave the saw under the threshold." The diggers have already figured out how the Acropolis (citadel) of Athens looked at various periods of history, and have even built models (see cut}. But there is still much work to be done in and under the Agora. The diggers think that they have chores to keep them busy for the next 16 years. By then they hope to tell the whole story of how ancient Athens looked and lived throughout its long, important past.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.