stranger in a strange land: the untold story of the 1909 bates expedition to cyrene

Stranger in a Strange Land: The Untold Story of the 1909 Bates Expedition to CyreneAuthor(s): Donald WhiteSource: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 35 (1998), pp. 163-178Published by: American Research Center in EgyptStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40000468 .

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Stranger in a Strange Land: The Untold Story of the 1909 Bates Expedition to Cyrene*

Donald White

It might come as a surprise to learn that when over a century ago R. Lambert Playfair set about compiling his bibliography of works written on Tripolitania and the Cyrenaica for the Royal Geographic Society,1 he was able to muster cita- tions for no fewer than 579 separate books and articles, not including the 63 odd MS volumes of government correspondence to and from the Consulate-General of Tripoli then housed in the Public Records Office in London. That much of this output could be fairly described as "of no scientific merit, but intended to make known the country in Italy, and to advocate its occupation by that nation"2 or in similarly derogatory terms, is not at issue. The element of surprise consists only in that so much had been written before

what is commonly taken to be the start of the first sustained investigations of the region coincid- ing with Libya's 1911 colonial annexation by the Italians. It seems fair to say that scholars familiar with Libya tend to think of the first travelers or early explorers in this politically, religiously, and geographically sequestered region as a fairly restricted lot. Depending on one's nationalistic bias, the inner circle of early visitors to Cyrenaica is usually thought to belong to Claude Lemaire (1706),3 Granger (a.k.a. Dr. Tourtachot) (1730),4 James Bruce (1765),5 Agostino Cervelli (1811- 12),6 Paolo Delia Cella (1816),7 Pere Pacifique de la Monte Cassiano (1819),8 Frederick and Henry

* This paper was in proof before I was able to read my good friend J. Uhlenbrock's "Cyrene Papers: The First Re- port" scheduled for imminent appearance in SLS 29 (1998). While not conflicting with my conclusions, Uhlenbrock's paper provides a much fuller background to the activities of the Archaeological Institute of America in Cyrene prior to 1910 as well as to Oric Bates's role and should be read in conjunction with my paper. I am grateful to be able to thank James and Natica Bates Satterthwaite for their help over the twelve past years in gathering information about Oric Bates, Mrs. Satterthwaite 's father. Their assistance has been invalu- able, as has been that of my son, Malcolm White, librarian, Center for International Affairs Library, Harvard Univer- sity, for tracking down details of Oric Bates' and Richard Norton's careers at Harvard. Lastly, I am happy to thank Dr. Joyce Reynolds for removing the the scales from my eyes to the full extent of Bates's achievement through her thoughtful preliminary reading of this text, the blame for whose errors, however, rests entirely with me.

1 R. Lambert Playfair, "The Bibliography of the Barbary States, Part I: Tripoli and the Cyrenaica," Royal Geo. Soci. SuppL Papers, Vol. 2 (1889), 562-614.

2 Lambert Playfair (supra n. 1), 604, entry 556. The tract he is specifically skewering is La Tripolitania, written by someone with, at least to American-attuned ears, the evocative name of 'Sig. Lupl.'

3 For C. Lemaire, see Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas, fait par or- dre du Roy, dans la Grece, I'Asie Mineure, la Macedoine, et VAfrique. Description de VAnatolie, la Caramanie, la Macedoine, Jerusalem, VEgypte, le Fioume, et un Memoire pour servir a Vhistoire de Tunis depuis 1684 (Paris, 1712). For discussion of Lemaire's contri- bution to the discovery of Cyrene as well as that of most of the remaining early explorers mentioned below, see R. Good- child, "A Hole in the Heavens," Libyan Studies. Select Papers of the Late R. G Goodchild (ed. J. Reynolds; London, 1976), 273- 97, hereafter Hole in the Heavens. See also A. Ghisleri, "Tripoli nella cartografia e nell'esplorazione," Tripolitania e Cirenaica (Milan: Bergamo, 1912), 51-62. S. Stucchi, Monografie di Ar- cheologia Libica VII: L Agora di Cirene I: / Lati Nord ed Est della Platea Inferiore, "Notizie e descrizioni dei viaggiatori e primi visitori" (Rome, 1965), 15-21. A. Laronde, Cyrene et la Libye Hellenistique. Libykai Historiai (Paris, 1987), 17-26

Relation du voyage fait en Egypte par Sieur Granger en 1 730 (Paris, 1745). See Laronde (supra n. 3), 19.

J. Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (2d ed., 1804), VII, 46-52. En. Brit, 4 (11th ed.; London, 1910), 676.

6 A. Cervelli in M. Delaporte, Recueille des Voyages et des Me- moires publiee par la Societe de Geographic de Paris (Paris, 1825), 20ff.

P. Della Cella, Viaggio da Tripoli di Barberia alle frontiere occidentali delVEgitto (Genoa, 1819).

8 Pacifique de la Mont Cassiano, Recueil de voyages et de me- moires, vol. 2 (1825), 28-31. See Laronde (supra n. 3), 24, n. 40.

163



THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE 1909 BATES EXPEDITION TO CYRENE 164

Beechey (1822),9 Jean-Raimond Pacho (1825), 10 H. G. Warrington (1827), n Willhelm Hunter (1844), 12 Heinrich Barth (1846), 13 M. Vattier deBourville (1848), 14 James Hamilton (1852), 15 R. Murdoch Smith and E. A. Porcher (1860- 61), 16 Giuseppe Haimann (1861), 17 George Dennis (1864),18 Gerhard Rohlfs (1868-69),19 Manfredo Camperio (1882), 20 Otsmane el-Hash- aishi (1882),21 Herbert Weld-Blundell (1895),22 H. M. Mathuisieulx (1902?),23 A. Pedretti (1904) ,24 David Hogarth, A. W. Van Buren and Richard Norton (1904),25 the various members

of the Jewish Territorial Organization Expedi- tion (1908), 26 S. Checchi (1909), 27 and Federico Halbherr (1910). 28 Immediately after the celebrated collapse of Norton's 1910-11 Cyrene expedition,29 the province falls under Italian governance and the days of free-lance exploration are over.

To the best of my knowledge the American Egyptologist, ethnologist and anthropologist Oric Bates (fig. 1) has never been allotted his right- ful place within this circle, despite the fact that the study for which he is best remembered30 established him as a major authority on the in- digenous tribal Libyans of Cyrenaica, the eastern region of what was then known as "Tripoli." The reasons behind this omission lie more with what was deliberately suppressed about his role in a major exploratory expedition across the Cyrenaican plateau in 1909 than they reflect the random consequence of an unnaturally short life. As I shall try to demonstrate, this heretofore unpublicized expedition not only set the stage for the Archaeological Institute of America's abortive season of excavation at Cyrene in the following year, but also led to Bates's carrying out certain modest but unauthorized excavations at Cyrene. Beyond that, it gave Bates the firsthand acquaintance with the upland homeland of the Libyans that eventually made its way into his classic study of the Libyans.

9 F. W. and H. W. Beechey, Proceedings of the Expedition to

Explore the Northern Coast of Africa (London, 1828). J.-R. Pacho, Relation d'un voyage dans la Marmarique et la

Cyrenaique et les oasis d'Audjelah et de Maradeh (Paris, 1827- 29), 191ff.

11 J. C. Thorn, "Warrington's 1827 Discoveries in the

Apollo Sanctuary at Cyrene," SLS24 (1993), 57-76. 2 W. Hunter, "Die Ruinen von Cyrene," Das Ausland,

No. 270 (Sept. 26, 1844), 106-7. See also S. Stucchi (supra n. 3), 16, n. 2.

13 H. Barth, Wanderlungen durch die Kiistenldnder des Mit- telsmeeres (Berlin, 1849).

14 See Latronne in Journal des Savants (1848), 370fL, RA v (1848), 150ff., and Jomard in MemAdnscrxvi (1851), 68ff.

15 J. Hamilton, Wanderings in North Africa (London, 1858).

16 R. M. Smith and E. A. Porcher, History of the Recent Dis- coveries at Cyrene (London, 1864). W. S. W. Vaux, Transactions

of the Royal Society of Literature, 2d Ser. vii (1863), 399ff. G. Haimann, "Cirenaica," Bollettino della Societd Geograph-

ica Italiana vii (1862), 6ff. See also L'Esploratore (1861), no

page ref. avail. 18 G. Dennis, Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature,

2dser. ix (1870), 135ff. 19 G. Rohlfs, Von Tripolis nach Alexandrien . . . in Jahren

1868 und 1869 (Bremen, 1871). 20 M. Camperio, "Una gita in Cirenaica," L'Esploratore

(1881-82), 16. A. Ghisleri, Tripolitania e Cirenaica dal Mediter- raneo al Sahara (Milan, 1912), 59.

21 O. el-Hashaishi, Voyage au Pays des Sanoussie (trans. V Serres and Lasram; Paris, 1903), 60-61. See also Stucchi

(supra n. 3), 20. 22 H. Weld-Blundell, "A Visit to Cyrene in 1895," ABSA

(1895-96), 113ff. 23 H. M. Mathuisieulx, Attraverso la Libia (trad, di L. Cu-

fino; Milan, 1903). Stucchi (supra n. 3), 21, n. 2. 24 A. Pedretti, "Una escursione in Cirenaica, Boll Soc.

Geogr. Ital (1903), 916. Stucchi (supra n. 3), 21. 25 I am grateful for Joyce Reynolds' reminding me that

Van Buren was a guest aboard Allison Armour's yacht, the Utomana, along with David Hogarth and Richard Norton, when all three visited Apollonia and Cyrene in the year 1904. See D. G. Hogarth, Accidents of an Antiquary's Life (Lon- don, 1910), 123-41. D. G. Hogarth, "Cyrenaica," Monthly Re- view, Jan. 1905. D. G. Hogarth, "Cyrene," En. Brit. VII (11th

ed., 1910), 705. A. W. Van Buren, "Inscriptions from Asia Minor, Cyprus, and the Cyrenaica," JHS XXVIII (1908), 180ff. For more on the Utowana see infra n. 53.

26 Report of the Commission of the Jewish Territorial Organiza-

tion for the Purpose of a Jewish Settlement in Cyrenaica (London, 1909).

27 S. Checchi, Attraverso la Cirenaica (Rome, 1912). Stuc- chi (supra n. 3), 21, n. 2.

28 S. Aurigemma, "Campagne libiche della Missione Ital- iana in Cirenaica," Af It in (1930), 237. G. Oliverio, "Federico Halbherr in Cirenaica," Afltiv (1931), 229ff.

29 R. Norton, "From Bengahzi to Cyrene," AIABull II

(1911), 57-70. R. Norton, "The Excavations at Cyrene: First

Campaign, 1910-11," AIABull II (1911), 141-67. R. Good- child, "Death of an Epigrapher: the Killing of Herbert de Cou," Michigan Quarterly Review VIII, No. 3 (1969), 149-54. Hole in the Heavens, 290-97. P. Sheftel, "The Archaeological Institute of America, 1879-1979: a Centennial Review," AJA 83 (1979), 12.

30 O. Bates, The Eastern Libyans (London, 1914), hereafter Eastern Libyans.




Fig. 1. Oric Bates. Photo courtesy ofNatica Bates Satterthwaite.

Oric Bates was born in Boston in 1883. He died 35 years later of pneumonia in October, 1918 at Camp Zachery Taylor, Louisville, Ken- tucky, following his return to the USA from Egypt to join the army.31 A member of Harvard's class of 1905 he left college for personal reasons during his junior year. He was readmitted in 1906 while serving at the same time as the temporary head of the Egyptian Department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for about a year. While still enrolled in Harvard he exca- vated over the next two years (1907-8) as a free agent for the Khedival government in Nubia as

well as for Harvard in Syria and for a joint Harvard-Boston Museum expedition in Egypt. His Harvard bachelor's degree was formally awarded in 1908. His Harvard Class of 1905 Second Report states that he next left for Egypt in "October, 1908 to organize expedition to Cy- rene (eastern Tripoli); 1909 Tripoli."32 Essentially the same terse notice appears in his Harvard obituary which says "In 1909 he was engaged in a Tripoli expedition."33 The two statements are the only direct published references among an exiguous number of indirect allusions to when Bates carried out the Cyrenaican portion of his field research eventually incorporated into his great study, The Eastern Libyans', he would have been 26 years old at the time.

Autumn of 1910 found him back in Egypt's Western Desert where he completed the eastern Marmarican part of his research for the same work. In its somewhat laconic preface and elsewhere Bates openly refers to his movements from the Egyptian coast as far south as Siwah and then back to the NE to the Gara Oasis on the edge of the Qattara Depression.34 A collection of forty-eight carefully labeled photos of this Egyp- tian part of his reconnaissance taken by him in the Libyan Desert during 1910 fortunately still exists (e.g., figs. 2-5). 35 On the other hand, until his death he remained effectively mute about his Boston MFA/AIA-sponsored trip to eastern Libya (or Cyrenaica as it is called today) during the previous year.

While Bates's activities between 1910 and the end of his life eight years later have no direct bearing on his Cyrenaican travels, they nevertheless help to round out the picture of a notable career. The winter of 1910/11 was taken up with writing The Eastern Libyans while in residence at the Harvard camp at Giza. He spent the following winter excavating in the Sudan at Gebel Moyah located in the plain between the Blue

31 This and much of my remaining biographical information comes from Archibald Coolidge's obituary notice bound into the opening HAS ii (1918). A shorter notice is to be found in HAS viii (1927) by Dows Dunham. A third important source is M. De W. Howe, Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany 4 (Cambridge, 1924), 547-66, which includes an appreciation of Bates's scholarly achievements by his mentor, Prof. George A. Reisner, ibid., 554-57.

32 Direct quote from Bates, Harvard University, Class of 1905. Secretary's 2nd. Report (Cambridge, 1911), 24-25.

33 A. Coolidge (supra n. 31). 3 Eastern Libyans, ix. For more on his 1910 expedition,

see his "Nomad Burials in the Marmarica," Man, nos. 87-88 (1913), 159-62.

35 The former property of Bates's daughter, Natica Satter- thwaite, who has generously given the collection to me to facilitate this study.




Fig. 2. "H.H.C.G. at drill: left-wheel at full trot." A detachment of camel-mounted militia information on the outskirts of Marsa Matruh in 1910. Unpublished photo and caption by O. Bates, courtesy ofNatica Bates Satterthwaite.

Fig. 3. "Getting into Gara. " Elements of Bates 's 1910 caravan entering the oasis of Gara on the NW edge of the Qattara Depression. Unpublished photo by O. Bates, courtesy ofNatica Bates Satterthwaite.




Fig. 4. "Garafrom the east. " Settlement atop rocky ground, part of the Garah Oasis on the NWedge of the Qattara Depression. 1910 unpublished photo by O. Bates, courtesy ofNatica Bates Satterthwaite.

Fig. 5. "The kalifa from the side. "Elements of Bates 's camel caravan that originally consisted of 51 animals, somewhere on the Duff ah or desert plateau of the Western Desert. 1910 unpublished photo by O. Bates, courtesy ofNatica Bates Satterthwaite.




and White Nile. In the fall of 1913 he returned to the Harvard camp at Naga-ed-Der to prepare for his and Harding-King's winter-long investigations of ancient Paraitonion (mod. Marsa Ma- truh) on Egypt's NW coast.36 Because officers of the Egyptian Coast Guard Service stationed at Marsa Matruh apparently helped Bates in getting ready for his 1910 Western Desert reconnaissance,37 it is likely that the idea for investigating Matruh three years later was hatched at that time. The Eastern Libyans was published in 1914. He then returned to Egypt in 1915 with the intention of working further at Matruh but was detoured by wartime conditions38 to excavate instead at Gammai at the Second Cataract.39 He had by then already been appointed Curator of African Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard's Peabody Museum in the previous year, a post he retained until his premature death four years later.40

It has already been noted how the preface to The Eastern Libyans is noticeably empty of direct reference to any fieldwork conducted on Libyan soil. And while its magisterial opening chapter on the "physiography of eastern Libya" is marked by an astonishing array of firsthand information about the coastal and upland region seen through the eyes of someone who has crossed its territory, it everywhere carefully avoids iden- tifying the author as its source.41 In retrospect it seems as if Bates was deliberately trying to cover his tracks when he wrote, "I am much to be blamed, however, if there do not appear in the following pages some traces of the opportunities of which, by being in the Levant (emphasis added), I have been able to avail myself. For I have had and used exceptional opportunities to collate the monumental and textual evidence found in Egypt, relating to the Libyans; I have traveled in the Libyan Desert and Marmarica" (emphasis added) . Neither the "Levant" nor "Libyan Desert" nor for that matter "Marmarica" are terms normally used to flag what is now Cyrena- ica, while "Marmarica" would probably be taken by all but the most learned readers to refer to Egypt.42

All this has contributed to the perception, at least among the few who might have bothered to think about it, that Bates never visited Libya but instead conducted all of his fieldwork and

36 O. Bates, "Excavations at Marsa Matruh, HAS VIII (1927), 125-200. It was over his work at Marsa Matruh that I first crossed paths with the subject of this paper, although my now deceased father (b. 1905) told me that as a child he remembered Oric Bates and his wife Natica visiting my grand- parents in their country house near Boston. See D. White, "1985 Excavations on Bates's Island, Marsa Matruh, JARCE 23 (1986), 51-84. D. White, "1987 Excavations on Bates's Is- land, Marsa Matruh: Second Preliminary Report," JARCE 26 (1989), 87-114. D. White, "Provisional Evidence for the Sea- sonal Occupation of the Marsa Matruh Area by late Bronze Age Libyans," Libya and Egypt cl300-750 BC (ed. A. Leahy; London, 1990), 3, 8-10. R. Goodchild, "A Byzantine Chapel at Marsa Matruh (Paraitonion)," JARCE 28 (1991), 201ff. D. White, "Before the Greeks Came: a Survey of the Current Archaeological Evidence for the Pre-Greek Libyans," SLS 25 (1994), 31-44. D. White, "Marsa Matruh: the Resurfacing of Ancient Paraetonium and its Ongoing Reburial," JRA Suppl. no. 19: Archaeological Research in Roman Egypt (Ann Arbor, 1996), 61, 71-74, hereafter Resurfacing of Paraetonium. D. White, "Coastal Sites of Northeast Africa. The Case against Bronze Age Ports," JARCE 33 (1996), 11, ns. 4, 6, hereafter Coastal Sites. In a letter to his father, Arlan Bates, date-lined Marsa Matruh 1/23/14, Bates makes clear that he regarded his discovery of the Bronze Age Libyan cemetery at Marsa Matruh as the most significant achievement of his career. See M. De W. Howe (supra n. 31), 559-60.

3 Eastern Libyans, ix. 38 For evaluations of the effects of British army activity on

the archaeological record of Marsa Matruh see R. Goodchild (supra n. 36), 202, n. 13, and D. White, Resurfacing of Paraeto- nium, 67-68.

39 O. Bates and D. Dunham, "Excavations at Gammai," HASYlll (1927), 1-122.

40 Quite remarkably, Bates point-blank asks the president of Harvard, Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856-1943) for an

instructorship in the university's Anthropology Department in a personal letter written 1/19/14 from Marsa Matruh. Was this what brought about his appointment as curator? Elsewhere in the same letter he speaks of hoping to com- plete his Corpus Inscriptionum Libycarum within the year. To the best of my knowledge the study never appeared in print, and the text has been lost. It is interesting to specu- late on what might have made up this work. See President Lowell's Papers, 1909-1914. "Letter of January 14, 1914, from Oric Bates in Marsa Matruh to the president." [USI.5.160] Harvard University Archives.

41 See preface 1-38 in which "the traveler" is everywhere made to substitute for the first personal singular.

42 To be precise, the eastern Marmarica extends from the present Libyan-Egyptian border to Marsa Matruh (anc. Par- aetonium) while the western Marmarica has technically been part of eastern Libya since the Hellenistic period. See White, Coastal Sites, 11, n. 1. My impression is that, if used at all, 'Marmarica' is much more apt to be thought of as refer- ring to NW Egypt than eastern Cyrenaica, which we have seen elsewhere Bates habitually referred to as 'Tripoli.' On the other hand, Joyce Reynolds feels less sure of this. Could there be a difference between British and American usage?




Fig. 6. Members (Turkish guard, Richard Norton and Oric Bates?) oj Bates 's 1909 expedition to Cyrenaica examining the

fort at Wadi Malah, Gulf of Bomba region (from O. Bates, The Eastern Libyans [London, 1914], 167). Photographed by R. C. Sturgis?

research on Egyptian soil. This in turn has lent itself to the vague impression that much of what constituted the heart of his pioneering study was in reality based on secondhand information derived from the work of others. Buried, however, within the text of The Eastern Libyans are a few muted clues that this was not the case. Its list of illustrations minutes 100 entries.43 The figures are all carefully credited to sources other than Bates except for figs. 70, 70a, 71, 72, 76, 76a, 77, 77a, 93 and 94. Seventy-one and 72 il- lustrate a small fort near Wadi Malah in the Gulf of Bomba region44 but otherwise carry no credit line. They are, however, identified in a footnote that reads, "The visit I made to this site (in 1909) was attended with circumstances which quite precluded the making of such accurate ob- servations as the ruins merited."45 Fig. 71 (here

fig. 6) shows three horses tied in front of the fort, a Turkish soldier, and two men in non-Arab dress. Figs. 70 and 70a are a plan and section of the same fort but here are both credited to "O. Bates, 1909." Figs. 76 and 76a are drawings of cis- terns on Seal Island in the Gulf of Bomba, while 77 and 77a are drawings of "a grain store near Marsa Suza" (i.e., Apollonia, the ancient port of Cyrene); all four are again credited to "O. Bates, 1909." Figs. 93a-c and 94 are drawings of a circu- lar stone burial or regem on Seal Island in the Gulf of Bomba, attributed to "O. Bates, 1909."

In addition, two brief passing references in David Robinson's 1913 study of the miscella- neous Inscriptions from Cyrenaica confirm that at some point Bates visited Ptolemais, the port of ancient Barca west of Cyrene, where he lin- gered long enough to copy a couple of short inscriptions later published by Robinson.46

43 Pp. xiv-xviii.

44 S. Stucchi, Monografie di archeologia libica ix: Architettura cirenaica (Rome, 1975), 517, n. 2.

45 The Eastern Libyans, 168, n. 1. Just what these circumstances were he never makes clear. The fort in question was one of a number of supposedly pre-Greek "Libyan" forts

that were later to draw down Goodchild's wrath. See R. Goodchild, "'Libyan' Forts in South-West Cyrenaica," An- tiquity xxv (1951), 131ff.

6 Bates is mentioned by name in both references. See D. M. Robinson, "Inscriptions from the Cyrenaica," AJA 17




Fig. 7. Sheet 8 of the 1905 1:1,000,000 scale map Africa, entitled Ben-Ghazi, annotated by Bates to show the four stages of his 1909 trip across the Gebel Ahkdar. Oric Bates Papers, Peabody Museum Archives.

To the best of my knowledge this constitutes virtually everything47 that has ever appeared in print about what can only have been a trip undertaken by Bates to Cyrenaica in 1909. For the rest of the story we are dependent on unpublished records deposited in Harvard's Peabody Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the archives of the Archaeological Institute of America. The first was discovered in the Pea- body during the summer of 1996 and consisted of a small bundle of Bates's personal effects.48 They included five maps: the 1862 British Admi-

ralty chart #374, surveyed by Capt. Spratt, of the coast from Ras Bulau to Alexandria, 2) Spratt's 1864 British Admiralty chart #244, mapping the coast from Derna to Ras Bulau on which Ras Allem el-Milhr and Derna are marked in yellow, 3) the 1905 1:1,000,000 scale map of Africa, Sheet 8, entitled Ben-Ghazi (fig. 7), 4) the finished 1861 site plan of Cyrene (fig. 8), cut from Smith and Porcher's 1864 publication,49 folded eight times, and then sealed into an oilskin packet for travel, and 5) the simplified version of S.-P. 's Cyrene site plan (figs. 9, 10) printed without contoured ground features and carrying the printed caption "to show the positions from which the plans and sketches were made," again folded and sealed into a packet.50 I shall return to these documents below.

(1913), 157 and 183. The actual stones copied by Bates are not identified by Robinson; discovery of most of the inscriptions is otherwise attributed to either Norton himself or Norton's epigrapher, H. F. De Cou. I owe the reference to Joyce Reynolds.

47 For one veiled reference see infra n. 70. 48 These came to light in the summer of 1996. I am once

again much indebted to the Peabody Museum authorities for their helpfulness in enabling me to track down what is left of Bates's personal records. I would particularly like to thank

Martha Labell of the Peabody's Photo Archives section and Sarah R. Demb, the museum's Archivist.

49 Smith and Porcher (supra n. 16), pl. 40. Smith and Porcher (supra n. 16), pl. 41.




Fig. 8. Smith and Porcher's 1861 site plan ofCyrene, hand-annotated by Bates in 1909 (from R. M. Smith andE. A. Porcher, History of the Recent Discoveries at Cyrene [London, 1864], pi 40). Oric Bates Papers, Peabody Museum Archives.

The second batch of material is presently in the process of being studied and evaluated by Dr. Jaimee Uhlenbrock, who has very generously informed me of several of her recent discover- ies51 that relate to the subject at hand; these have turned up among materials stored in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the ALA's central archives presently housed in Boston Univer- sity's Stone Science Library. The AIA material consists of a substantial file of written records, including letters to and from Francis Kelsey, then President of the AIA, and various other key

figures involved in the organization of the Cyrene mission, including David Hogarth, Arthur Fair- banks of the Boston MFA, Allison Armour, and Richard Norton. According to Uhlenbrock, while the bulk of the nearly five hundred sheets of records and correspondence in her possession do not impact directly on Bates's activities, they hold the prospect of some day yielding important fresh information on the 1910/11 Norton mission. The Boston Museum material comes from Richard Norton's own expedition box con- taining part of the records of his 1910/11 excavation long believed to be lost,52 an extensive and highly significant photo archive, and, in what is most central to this story, a nineteen page

51 J. Uhlenbrock's written "Cyrene Papers" text (referred to in the asterisked note, supra p. 163), which supplies a much fuller background to these events than appears here, reached my attention only after this article was in proof and revision no longer possible. Readers should refer to SLS 29 (1998).

52 When excavating in Cyrenaica between 1964 and 1981 I made a number of enquiries to the Museum of Fine Arts about what might have happened to Norton's records but was




Fig. 9. Detail of Smith and Porcher's site plan of Cyrene, showing Bates' s captions added by hand for the area of the Trajanic Baths: "Statuary pretty completely dug,

" and "Dug and found nothing hereabouts" (from R. M. Smith and E. A. Porcher, History of the Recent Discoveries at Cyrene [London, 1864], pi 41). Oric Bates Papers, Peabody Museum Archives.

typed report signed by Oric Bates, describing a preliminary reconnaissance trip to Cyrenaica undertaken by him for the AIA and the Boston MFA, in the spring and summer of 1909. This

latter report is accompanied by its own separate collection of forty-four photographs.

Bates's paper, entitled the "Museum of Fine Arts-Archaeological Institute Expedition to Cy- rene," was submitted to the members of the joint expedition committee on June 17, 1909. Its opening statement makes it clear that Bates regarded himself in charge of the expedition. It establishes that he was accompanied by the yacht's owner, Allison Armour, R. C. Sturgis, Jr., photog- rapher and draftsman, and, in what comes as the biggest surprise, Richard Norton, who is simply listed as mission 'advisor.' Subsequent events were

told that they had no record of their whereabouts. Dr. Uhlen- brock first learned of the box in 1989 and has since then been gradually working through its contents. Dr. Uhlenbrock's in- terests have been mainly focused on a series of monthly reports that she believes significantly add to what was eventually published by Norton. According to her, the box did not con- tain Norton's field notebooks and site plans.




Fig. 10. Detail of Smith and Porcher's site plan ofCyrene with Bates 's captions added by hand to the necropolis area along the lower reaches of Wadi Bel Gadir: "Opened some tombs here. Had apparently been rifled before the[y] became buried . . . Nothing" (from R. M. Smith andE. A. Porcher, History of the Recent Discoveries at Cyrene [London, 1864], pl. 41). Oric Bates Papers, Peabody Museum Archives.

to suggest that things may not have been quite as they appeared.

Bates reports that the party departed from Southhampton on April 6, 1909 aboard the Ar- mour yacht Utowana (fig. II).53 It reached Ben- ghazi on the 27th after touching at Algiers, Malta,

53 This is not the first time that the yacht Utowana had played a role in the archaeological goings-on in the pre- WW1 Near East. As already reported (supra n. 25), it first turns up in Mediterranean waters in 1904 when David Ho- garth, the celebrated orientalist and excavator of the Arte- misium at Ephesos, was invited by the ship's American owner, Allison V Armour of Chicago and later New York, to join

him and a small party of American friends including A. W. Van Buren (long familiar to readers of the AfA through the 1960s for his entertaining and informative "Newsletter from Rome") and the then 32 year old Richard Norton on a cruise of the Asia Minor coast, Cyprus, and finally the waters of eastern Libya. Here the archaeologists disembarked in order to conduct a day-long visit to Cyrene. See D. G. Hogarth, Accidents of an Antiquary's Life (London, 1910), preface and 123-41. D. Hogarth, "Cyrene," En. Brit., 7 (11th ed.; Lon- don, 1910), 705. R. Goodchild, Death ofDe Cou, 149-50. Hole in Heavens, 291-92. In the year following Bates's Cyrenaican trip, Norton again employed Armour's ship to transport his staff to Apollonia in order to stock his AIA-sponsored Cy- rene expedition. See Hole in Heavens, 292, 296.



174 JARCE XXXV (1998)

Fig. 11. Oric Bates ((L Allegro' on the left) and Richard Norton (11 Penseroso' on the right) aboard the Utowana. The remainder of the hand-written caption reads, "'On the fence in Af- rica. ' With the compliments of the original. "Photo courtesy of]. Uhlenbrock, from the collection

of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

and Tripoli. Their first scientific excursion was to explore a farm five miles SE of the town where they photographed three draped female statues (prints surviving) . These are the first of many an- tiquities mentioned by Bates in the region of Bengahzi and elsewhere. Since it lies outside my present purpose to analyze the archaeological specifics of Bates's report, discussion along such lines will have to wait for a properly annotated publication of the full text at some future date.

The party then departed by sea for Derna. After going ashore to explore a number of tombs, they steamed on to the Gulf of Bomba where a search was organized for the island of Platea of which the Greek colonists from Thera first landed in 631 B.C.54 Much of the land re-

connaissance carried out in this region was to receive a much more extended description in The Eastern Libyans^ than it does in the June report, which was clearly intended for an audi- ence of Classicists rather than Egyptologists and anthropologists.

After completing their exploration of the Bomba area, Bates and Norton proceeded by ship directly to Cyrene's port, Marsa Susa, the ancient Apollonia. Bates describes the difficulty of the ascent to Cyrene, saying that it took the party four hours to accomplish the twelve mile journey.

Once at Cyrene their time was spent in search- ing for potential sites. Areas earmarked for possible future work were the northeastern sec- tor of the city including the Zeus Temple and the extramural hippodrome, the intramural center church, and the Forum-Agora area, whose remains still lay partially exposed as they had been left by Smith and Porcher a half century earlier. The Sanctuary of Apollo and the garden terrace below its Trajanic retaining wall are next

54 The various standard discussions of this watershed event are too familiar for citation here, but see Stucchi (supra n. 44), 3-5. Add S. Applebaum, Jews and Greeks in An- cient Cyrene (Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity) 28 (Leiden, 1979). M. Vickers and D. Gill, "Archaic Greek Pottery from Euesperides, Cyrenaica," SLS 17 (1986), 106. For general bibliography, including references to historical studies, see L. Gasperini, "Bibliografia archeologica della Libia. 1967- 1973: Cirenaica," QAL 7 (1975), 189-96. J. Humphrey, "North-African Newsletter 2," AJA 84 (1980), 76-78.

55 See esp. Eastern Libyans, chap. VII: "Material Art and Culture," 156ff.




reviewed in some detail,56 leaving the Cyrene portions of the report to conclude with a discussion of the acropolis hill. Concerned by the practical difficulties that might arise in establish- ing a proper dump for the Forum-Agora Hill and in disturbing the Apollo Sanctuary where the local inhabitants were so dependent on the water, Bates recommended the selection of the acropolis hill and the extramural garden zone, which were precisely where the American mission under Norton was to work a year later. By way of conclusion he also advises investigating the intramural cemeteries.

It is important to note that the report makes no mention of excavating any of the grounds of the site or its cemeteries.

At this point the expedition moved back to Apollonia to await the return of the Utowana. The three days were expended in investigating its remains, and much of the remainder of the report is devoted to an explanation of why Bates believed that the AIA should begin with a clearance of the port (where, incidentally, a number of objects appear to have been 'promiscuously borrowed' by several group members57) rather than the mother-city.

As soon as the yacht returned, Bates says that the party embarked for Ptolemais. Here they copied the inscriptions later referred to by Rob- inson58 and departed thence directly for Ben- ghazi. After an unspecified interval they steamed back to Derna (ostensibly to pick up mail) and then, reversing direction, west again to Malta, Syracuse, and eventually to Naples where the party broke up.

Space does not permit a closer evaluation of this document, which, along with its accompa-

nying photos, deserves its own publication. But for purposes of this discussion it is important to note that it seems to diverge sharply in certain key respects from Bates's personal documents stored in the Peabody archives. There is first of all the matter of his actual itinerary, which appears to have been recorded on the above- mentioned map sheet 8, Ben-Ghazi (fig. 8). This covers the Cyrenaican coast and interior as far south as lat. 35 from Benghazi east to Tobruk. The map's bottom is hand-annotated to indicate four separate itineraries crossing back and forth across the Cyrenaica. Their captions read:

-+-+-+- 1. Return from Bomba to M. Sousa. "Utowana."

----- 2. M. Sousa to Derna. "Utowana." 3. Caravan, Derna to Benghazi. 4. Return Benghazi to Derna. By Nav.

Gen. M.

What the map would appear to indicate is that Bates used the Utowana to steam to the Gulf of Bomba; after disembarking at Bomba to explore the surrounding region, including the fort at Wadi Malah,59 he then continued west by sea to Apollonia (Marsa Susa). So far this conforms perfectly with the written report, and it would be at this point that the expedition's work at Cyrene began.

However, the third itinerary, "Caravan, Derna to Benghazi," plots an overland journey not even hinted at in the committee report. It shows the Utowana conducting Bates from Apollonia back for a second time to Derna, where he seems to have switched to either horseback or camel in order to travel up onto the gebel and eventually all the way back to Benghazi. His route took him west along an inland track skirting the steppe desert to Slonta60 and from there further south to Sira.61 He then seems to have doubled back to the NE to Ghegeb (anc. Agabis?)62 and Lam- luda (anc. Limnias?)63 to where he once more switched direction west, following essentially the

56 By way of contrast, the description of the Fountain of Apollo in Eastern Libyans, 173, citing only a passage in Calli- machus's "Hymn to Apollo," is extremely brief and imper- sonal, as if the writer had never set eyes on the fountain and its surrounding grounds. I would argue that this reflects another instance of the lengths to which Bates was prepared to go in order to bury any detailed mention of his stay at Cyrene. 57 "During our stay we collected a few inscriptions, the largest being a Christian one on marble . . . Mr. Norton se- cured some coins and a Mycenaean gem." According to Dr. Uhlenbrock, her records show that Norton later offered the coins for sale to the Boston MFA!

58 Supra n. 46.

59 The Eastern Libyans, 168, n. 1. See also supra n. 42. 60 Stucchi (supra n. 44), 335, 336, 511. 61 Hamilton (supra n. 15), 28. Stucchi (supra n. 44), 485. 62 Stucchi (supra n. 44), 358, n. 13, 339. 63 Stucchi (supra n. 44), 358, n. 13, 359, 377, 387, 395,

426, 432.




path of the modern highway along the top of the gebel through Labrag back to Cyrene (second visit?). From Cyrene he dropped down off the gebel to visit Apollonia once again before retrac- ing his steps yet again back to Cyrene and thence west past Kasr Benigdem64 across the Wadi el- Kuf on to Merg (anc. Barka)65 on the intermedi- ate plain. Here he tracked the wadi descent down to Ptolemais (his second visit?) and from there, sticking to the coastal plain and passing through Tocra on the way, traveled on to Benghazi. The fourth and apparently final itinerary sets him traveling back from Benghazi to Derna (third visit?), only this time on board what sounds like a commercial coastal packet.66

Did the third itinerary ever take place? And who accompanied him and why did he make it? Descriptions in The Eastern Libyans of certain monuments that have the ring of encounters at firsthand67 would suggest that the journey was in fact undertaken. The same conclusion appears borne out by the idiosyncratic twists and turns of the actual itinerary, which hardly seem in- dicative of a projected route for a prospective journey.

Such an itinerary would have theoretically brought Bates back to Cyrene for a second and third visit. This could explain several puzzling aspects of the last two maps from the Peabody archives, the pair of travel-stained Cyrene site plans neatly excised from somebody's copy of Smith and Porcher (figs. 9, 10).68 Both are marked with little notes in what appears to be Bates's spidery handwriting. The finished plan (S.-P pl. 40, here fig. 8) has been further doc- tored up with random cross-hatchings that seem to indicate places that caught the writer's interest. As examples of the notes jotted down on pl. 40, we read in the area of the extramural

zone east of the hippodrome, "much more R(uins?) than indicated here." In the vicinity of Cyrene 's Fourth Theater, "columns fallen . . . female torso . . . male statues."

It is, however, the scribblings on pl. 41 (figs. 9, 10) that really catch the eye. Two separate anno- tations are linked with the area of the Baths of Trajan. The first reads "Statuary pretty completely dug," and the second, "Dug and found nothing hereabouts." Then, in the lower right- hand corner of the plan, above and slightly left of the printed caption in what corresponds to the necropolis area along the lower reaches of Wadi Bel Gadir, "Opened some tombs here. Had apparently been rifled before the(y) became buried . . . Nothing."

The inference seems inescapable: according to the map during one or more of his several visits to Cyrene Bates conducted some form of exploratory ground clearance. If he did this on his own, detached from the remainder of the expedition, it might explain much of what was to happen.69 But there is first the matter of when could he have fitted in a trip of this length and scope? Rather surprisingly, the Boston committee report omits all reference to specific dates after the expedition first reaches Benghazi on April 27. Is this a sign of Bates's wanting to bury details of his trip? He could have left the main party on his own either when it was occupied in surveying Cyrene or otherwise he could have stayed behind while the main party left to recu- perate at Benghazi at the end of their season. In either case, his report deliberately sidesteps detailing anything about what must have been an extensive, arduous and potentially dangerous overland journey, assuming it took place.70

Here the sources lapse into silence only to reemerge just a month and a half later with the startling news that Bates has withdrawn from

64 Stucchi (supra n. 44), 422-24. 65 Stucchi (supra n. 4), 5, 117, n. 17, 195, 333, 362, n. 16,

549, 553, 554 n. 9, 558. 66 "Nav. Gen. Mat." perhaps standing for something like

Naviglio Generate Marittimo?

E.g., his discussion of the famous petroglyphs at Slonta. See Eastern Libyans, 158, fig. 65.

68 Presumably Bates's own copy, since his personal anno- tations refer to further notes added to other of the volume's plates, but perhaps a glance someday at the Widener Library copy might reveal some interesting marginalia as well as several missing pages.

69 Including perhaps explaining something of the myste- rious 'circumstances' alluded to above, supra n. 45.

That the report omits other side-excursions is strongly suggested by Norton himself, who writes in his published account of his third preliminary Cyrene reconnaissance in May and June, 1910, "Once before I had done a piece of it [the coastal road from Apollonia to Derna] on foot, and those of you who were with me on that hot day, when, after being marooned three days at Marsa Susa, we did the sixteen miles to Ras el Hil in four hours, will never forget it. And you,




the project.71 His abrupt departure seems to be total. To the best of my knowledge, his name never again appears in any subsequent AIA- sponsored publication dealing with Cyrene.72

What could have led to such a precipitous de- cision? A letter from Allison Armour to Arthur Fairbanks, date-lined Constantinople, March 19, 1909, reports that "Yesterday we received from the Museum Director a letter from the Minister of Public Information to the Governor of Ben Gazi, ordering him to assist us in every way in the

matter of the exploration of his province, with permission to take photographs, maps. etc. (but not to excavate [emphasis added]) . . ." If Bates in fact carried out his own private, unauthorized excavations in the course of a free-lance excursion to gather data for a personal study of the Libyans, this could not have escaped the notice of the mission's 'advisor,' Richard Norton, who, upon the mission's return to Boston, would cer- tainly have reported as much to the ALA-Boston MFA, committee.

It is conceivable that a closer sifting of the AIA records could someday shed further light on what happened between the submission of Bates's report and his resignation, events which time has thankfully stripped of most of their rele- vance and interest.73 Nevertheless it seems worth noting by way of conclusion that his successor, Richard Norton (1872-1918), was the well-connected son of an exceedingly powerful father. Norton was eleven years older than Bates (but his nearly exact calendar contemporary in early death), having graduated in three years from Harvard in 1892. Before his first short visit to Apollonia and Cyrene with Armour, Hogarth and Van Buren in 1904 when the seed for a Cyrene expedition must have first been planted, Norton had already established his credentials as a clas- sical archaeologist through his participation in the AIA-sponsored excavations of the Argive Her- aeum.74 His father, Charles Eliot Norton (1827- 1908), appointed chairman in 1875 of Harvard's freshly created Art History department and the AIA's first elected president from 1879 to 1890, cut a very wide swath in New England intellec- tual circles.75 It was he who supposedly first suggested the choice of Cyrene as a site for an AIA-sponsored excavation, presumably at the urging of his son. This made the choice of Rich- ard Norton over his Harvard junior colleague

O fellow- cook and cheery companion, will you ever forget that day last June when we rode from Ras el Hil to DernaV (emphasis added). R. Norton, "From Bengazi to Cyrene," AIABull II (1910), 57-67. The "cheery companion" must be 'L'Alle- gro'/Bates of our fig. 11, the Miltonian echoes of whose hand-scrawled caption take on an unintended poignancy.

This information comes at the conclusion of a letter from Armour to Kelsey dated August 18, 1909: "You already know that Bates has resigned entirely from this expedition ..." In the earlier portion of the letter, which was apparently intended to accompany Bates's statement of his expenses for the 1909 trip, Armour explains to Kelsey how Arthur Fairbanks and he propose paying Bates only half of his agreed-upon stipend of $2,000 on grounds that he had cut short the expedition! "Bates is hard up, but that is no reason forgiving him more than is fair." Whether Kelsey ac- quiesced to this, what appears in hindsight, wholly mean- spirited suggestion is unclear.

2 The first official word that the AIA had received a permit to excavate Cyrene appears in AIABull I (1909-1910), 250, where inspiration for the project is credited to Charles Eliot Norton and control of its organization placed in the hands of Allison Armour, Arthur Fairbanks, and David Ho- garth. The next notice appears in Norton (supra n. 66), 57, n. 1, where he is described as project director without any mention of Bates. The commencement of work on Oct. 29, 1910, is announced in a short note in the same issue, p. 68, by Arthur Fairbanks. Bates's name appears nowhere through- out the list of credits or elsewhere in the official publication of the project, for which see R. Norton, "The Excavations at Cyrene: First Campaign, 1910-11," AIABull II (1911), 141- 63. For all intents and purposes the blackout even extends to Archibald Coolidge's otherwise highly laudatory HAS obituary account of his young friend's life.

Bates himself wrote Kelsey from Cairo on Oct. 4, 1909: "My dear Doctor Kelsey, is it too much to ask that, in the event of any work being done in the Cyrenaica by the Insti- tute, I should be kept posted? I do not wish to bother you, and though I plan to make certain geographical studies there next year, I have no desire to be again connected with any American work in this country. But, as you know, I have for six years been keenly interested in the Pentapolis and I should be very grateful if it suited your views to let me know what was being done. I am, yours, etc." What, if any, response Kelsey made is not known.

73 Whatever it was that took place, it constituted no im- pediment to his continuing association with Harvard and his appointment as Curator of African Archaeology and Ethnol- ogy to the Peabody Museum five years later in 1914.

C. Waldstein et al., The Argive Heraeum, vols. 1 and 2

(Boston and New York, 1902-1905). Sheftel (supra n. 29), 10, n. 37.

75 The senior Norton's connection with the development with the Archaeological Institute of America is carefully set forth by Sheftel (supra n. 29), 3-9, 12.

76 Supra n. 72.




almost inevitable while doing little to explain the wall of silence erected around his own participation as well as Bates's in the 1909 trip.

Whatever occurred, the year that Norton made his third trip to Cyrene and later began his fatal expedition saw Bates in the Western Desert completing the field research for his great study on the Libyans. In the final analysis Bates's fame rests not on his work (as well as possible mis- takes) as a Classicist but as an Egyptologist, pioneer ethnologist and anthropologist. It would seem unfair in retrospect that, if by reverting to his Egyptian-Libyan research, he should have lost his just recognition as one of the last of the pre-Italian era explorers to succumb to the lure of "the scattered ruins of 'golden-throned' Cyrene."77 But what is truly tragic is that by pre-

maturely dying he was robbed of the credit for the originality of much of his field research on the Libyans which was and remains to this day so clearly his due.

Finally, it was death alone that prevented Oric Bates from following up on his pioneer study. Under more fortunate circumstances this could have only led to further research and publication of a unique body of archaeological material that is still waiting for its definitive investigator.78

University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

77 The choice of phrase is Weld-Blundell's (supra n. 22), 120, who is of course paraphrasing Pind. Pyth. IV, 261.

78 A fact that did not escape Reisner (supra n. 31) when he wrote three-quarters of a century ago, "The loss to creative scholarship is irreparable. No one has yet been found to take up Oric's special work, the unravelling of the history of the Libyan tribes of North Africa. . . . Up to the present we have sought in vain for a man able to take up the work where he left it."



stranger in a strange land: the untold story of the 1909 bates expedition to cyrene

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